Bolivia summit to seek global climate change referendum.
(AFP) LA PAZ — An alternative “people’s conference” on climate change in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba in April will seek to advance an international global warming referendum, organizers said Tuesday.

“The only thing that can save mankind from a [climate] tragedy is the exercise of global democracy,” said Bolivia’s United Nations Ambassador Pablo Solon, a key organizer of the summit.

A priority of the meeting would be discussing the possibility of a global referendum “with the goal of reaching two billion people,” he told reporters.

Thousands of people, mostly members of social movements and indigenous groups, are expected to attend the People’s World Conference on Climate Change and Mother Earth Rights on April 20-22.

Organizers say it is intended to “give a voice to the people” on climate change after the perceived failure of the U.N.-sponsored Copenhagen summit on the same issue.

Solon said he expected participants from 94 countries and representatives from 70 governments to attend, without giving further details.

Bolivian President Evo Morales, who in January issued an open invitation to the conference to governments, scientists, and social movements, has said a number of South American presidents would also attend.

But the outlines of the conference remain vague, and it is so far shaping up to be something between an environmental forum and a political rally. It is expected to tackle many of the themes Morales raised at the Copenhagen summit last year, including creating a “climate court of justice” and the need to “change the system of capitalist consumerism” — proposals that could be included in the suggested global vote.

Solon said the summit’s conclusions would be delivered to the next U.N.-sponsored meeting on climate change, currently scheduled for December in Mexico.

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• Article history

Bolivia’s UN ambassador Pablo Solon-Romero during a press conference. Photograph: Paulo Filgueiras/UN Photo

In the aftermath of the Copenhagen climate conference, those who defended the widely condemned outcome tended to talk about it as a “step in the right direction”. This was always a tendentious argument, given that tackling climate change can not be addressed by half measures. We can’t make compromises with nature.

Bolivia, however, believed that Copenhagen marked a backwards step, undoing the work built on since the climate talks in Kyoto. That is why, against strong pressure from industrialised countries, we and other developing nations refused to sign the Copenhagen accord and why we are hosting an international meeting on climate change next month. In the words of the Tuvalu negotiator, we were not prepared to “betray our people for 30 pieces of silver”.

Our position was strongly criticised by several industrialised countries, who did their brazen best to blame the victims of climate change for their own unwillingness to act. However, recent communications by the European Commission have confirmed why we were right to oppose the Copenhagen accord.

In a report called International climate policy post-Copenhagen (pdf), the commission confirmed that the pledges by developed countries are equal to between 13.2% and 17.8% in emissions reductions by 2020 – far below the required 40%-plus reductions needed to keep global temperature rise to less than 2C degrees.

The situation is even worse once you take into account what are called “banking of surplus emission budgets” and “accounting rules for land use, land use change and forestry”. The Copenhagen accord would actually allow for an increase in developed country emissions of 2.6% above 1990 levels. This is hardly a forward step.

This is not just about gravely inadequate commitments, it is also about process. Whereas before, under the Kyoto protocol, developed countries were legally bound to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by a certain percentage, now countries can submit whatever targets they want without a binding commitment.

This dangerous approach to climate negotiations is like building a dam where everyone contributes as many bricks as they want regardless of whether it stops the river.

The Copenhagen accord opens the dam and condemns millions. Various estimates suggest that the commitments made under the accord would lead to increases of between three to four degrees celsius – a level that many scientists consider disastrous for human life and our ecosystems.

For Bolivia, the disastrous outcome of Copenhagen was further proof that climate change is not the central issue in negotiations. For rich countries, the key issues in negotiations were finance, carbon markets, competitiveness of countries and corporations, business opportunities along with discussions about the political makeup of the US Senate. There was surprisingly little focus on effective solutions for reducing carbon emissions.

President Evo Morales of Bolivia observed that the best way to put climate change solutions at the heart of the talks was to involve the people. In contrast to much of the official talks, the hundreds of civil society organisations, communities, scientists and faith leaders present in Copenhagen clearly prioritised the search for effective, just solutions to climate change against narrow economic interests.

To advance an agenda based on effective just solutions, Bolivia is therefore hosting a Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth on 19-22 April, and inviting everyone to participate. Unlike Copenhagen, there will be no secret discussions behind closed doors. Moreover the debate and proposals will be led by communities on the frontlines of climate change and by organisations and individuals dedicated to tackling the climate crisis. All 192 governments in the UN have also been invited to attend and encouraged to listen to the voices of civil society and together develop common proposals.

We hope that this unique format will help shift power back to the people, which is where it needs to be on this critical issue for all humanity. We don’t expect agreement on everything, but at least we can start to discuss openly and sincerely in a way that didn’t happen in Copenhagen.

• Pablo Solón is Ambassador to the UN for the Plurinational State of Bolivia. He is a sociologist and economist, was active in Bolivia’s social movements before entering government, and is an expert on issues of trade, integration, natural resources and water.

Economics of Adaptation to Climate Change Study:
The Global Report
 hpage at worldbank.org by Friday January 8, 2010

Japan looks to Latin America to aid growth.
Kyodo News, January 7, 2010
The government plans to reinforce relations with Latin American countries in a bid to capitalize on the abundance of natural resources and rapid economic development in the region, officials said.

Latin American nations are major suppliers of natural resources for Japan. For example, a quarter of the country’s iron ore imports comes from Brazil, while Bolivia and Chile are rich in lithium used in batteries for electric vehicles and other products.

Access to natural resources is indispensable for Japanese companies to compete with foreign rivals in the field of environmental protection, an official at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said.

The government will increase its official development assistance for environment-related projects, including improving water and sewerage systems in Brazil and Bolivia, to help Japanese companies gain better access to natural resources there.

It will also support a consortium linking Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd., Mitsui & Co. and other companies that will bid this spring to develop a high-speed railway system in Brazil, a Foreign Ministry official said.

“Full-body scanners on display at Reagan National Airport: Many experts say the full-body scanners would have detected the explosives carried aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day, but the
machines have also raised privacy concerns over the detailed body image that is displayed as part of the screening.”

TSA – Transportation and Security Administration – tries to assuage privacy concerns about full-body scans.

By Philip Rucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 4, 2010
It has come to this.

Already shoeless, beltless and waterless, more beleaguered air passengers will be holding their legs apart, raising their arms and effectively baring it all as they pass through U.S. airport security
checkpoints.

Add the “full-body scan” to the list of indignities that some travelers are confronting in the post-Sept. 11, 2001, era of vigilance.

Federal authorities, working to close security gaps exposed by the thwarted Christmas Day terrorist attack on a Detroit-bound airliner, are multiplying the number of imaging machines at the nation’s biggest
airports. The devices scan passengers’ bodies and produce X-ray-like images that can reveal objects concealed beneath clothes…….

- – - – - -

now add the “me-au” from the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, ADC Legal Director   nshora at adc.org

Washington, D.C. | January 5, 2010 | www.adc.org |

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) is deeply concerned by the new Transportation and Security Administration (TSA) directives, which went into effect on January 4th at midnight.  According to news sources, these directives will require citizens from 14 countries, all Arab or Muslim countries, with the exception of Cuba, to go through enhanced security screening. Such screening can include full pat-downs, scans, delays, and anything associated with secondary screening – an extra search of the passenger’s carry-on luggage may also be required.  News sources also stated that the directives are applicable to any travelers, including US CITIZENS, who have passed through one of these 14 countries, or who have taken flights that have originated from these 14 countries.

ADC is very troubled as such directives will have negative ramifications on Arab-Americans, citizens of the 14 countries, and all Americans who visit these countries. A disparate segment of the Arab-American community will be scrutinized because of these new guidelines. The blanket labeling of hundreds of millions of civilians based solely on their country of citizenship or travel is not only unfairly discriminatory based on national origin, but also improperly labels millions of innocent people as somehow suspect or possible terrorists.

The new directives came following the Christmas Day attempted airline attack that threatened our national security, and which ADC has strongly condemned. Implementing an effective and productive counterterrorism tool is paramount. However, casting a wide net against individuals based on their country of origin, race or religion is not an effective counterterrorism tool. During the past decade, similar racial, ethnic and religious profiling tactics and practices have time and again misdirected precious counterterrorism resources, damaged foreign relations with key allies, fueled the fires of extremists by giving them an excuse, stigmatized communities, and most importantly did not have any discernible impact on security. Based on precedent, these new directives will be no different than these past practices and their adverse consequences; and while such directives may appear to make us feel safer, the reality is that they discriminate against innocent persons and divert attention from real threats.

Resources must instead be focused on high-risk individuals based on proper intelligence, better coordination and communication between different governmental agencies. In addition, continued engagement with the Arab, Muslim, Sikh, and South Asian community groups must be strengthened, and must not be discouraged by ethnic profiling tactics.

ADC has been in contact with TSA and the Department Homeland Security (DHS) and is planning to file a complaint and request for additional information with the Department.  ADC urges all travelers affected by these new guidelines to always comply with the Transportation Security Officer’s (TSO’s) request.  In the event of any abuse or misuse of authority, please request the TSO’s name and badge number, and file a complaint with ADC’s Legal Department at  legal at adc.org.

==============

Honestly, I feel the pain of decent members of the ADC, but am appalled at the chutzpah to announce the complaints of that organization without a single word attached saying that as loyal citizens to this country they are ready to organize themselves in units of informers when it comes to transgressions by people from their country of birth, that are endangering the security of the country that gave to the ADC members the privilege of life under a secular democracy.

Yes, I know that the ADC has members that are Muslim, Christian or atheists. I know they have no Jews in ADC, but that is not the issue. The Arab countries, other Asian countries, and the African Arabized countries, on the list of 13, are all Islamic countries – in all of them Christians and Jews face very serious difficulties. Further, I know of good Muslims in the US and overseas, that participate with enlightened Jews in order to build bridges between communities. in Copenhagen I actually participated during the Climate conference at a pilgrimage that took us to places of worship that were Jewish, Buddhist, Christian, and Muslim (that last meeting was held in the rooms of a Danish humanist society) – in this time sequence. Yes – good relationships are possible, but that will happen only when, and if, there is a clear understanding, and voiced recognition, that Islamic terrorism originates with Muslim individuals, and that in order to safeguard ourselves, profiling in search of instruments of terror is not a dirty word, but a means of self defense.

Also, in order to avoid needless friction, I suggest that the ADC moves front and center in the global effort to disengage from the addiction to oil.

And one more item – this website does speak up for Cuba as they surely are not part of the group of countries responsible for Islamicists performing acts of terror. So, they do not belong on that list of 14.

As we wrote about Copenhagen, ALBA crystallized there as the clearest US opposing group of countries in the international arena. ALBA is led by four Latin American and two Caribbean Islands Heads of State. As expressed by Presidents Morales of Bolivia and Chavez of Venezuela, the Obama intervention on that final Friday the 18th was clearly not a UN consensus building move. Obama did not play democracy to non-Democratic States, but then there was something in his behavior that could also be likened to the battleship diplomacy of old empire building colonialism – you find your allies and you set the rules of the game for others to follow. We said it many times that we agreed with Obama’s moves, but we also had an ear to the Morales and Chavez statements, and we believe that the ALBA attack will continue until the day the US is ready to sit down with the individual countries of that group and effectively co-opt them into a new Western Hemisphere alliance that pays respect also to countries like Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. In effect we believe that these countries do have also helpful ideas and not just the rhetoric for which they are famous. Further, Nicaragua and Honduras used to belong to this group and Brazil is also close to its leaders.

OK, so how is this related to our 2009/2010 New Year’s Eve celebration in New York City?

This story starts with my having picked up a Financial Times on the flight back from Copenhagen and in the Guide – Arts around the World section I saw mentioned – “New York – Noche Flamenca” and it said that from Christmas Eve until January 16, Noche Flamenca will be performed at the Lucille Lortel Theater in Greenwich Village and that judging by the reviews the company, with its stars dancers Ms. Soledad Barrio and Juan Ogalla, the star singer Manuel Gago and guitarist Eugenio Iglesias are the most authentic flamenco touring company.

Further, already with the above in mind, I saw the December 26th Alaistair Macaulay Dance Review in the New York Times “Drama Whose Subject Is Both Nothing and Everything.” He writes – “Ms. Barrio’s intensity is striking, even when she’s standing still or walking slowly around the stage… she seemed to be brooding on the darkest spiritual concerns … the attention of her face and upper body riveted on the floor. She might have been mourning the death of a child or contemplating the augury that announced the overthrow of her nation… Her face tends to be wonderfully bleak.”

I decided that I want to experience this Latin intensity, but then the clincher came when I read that the program includes a piece called “ALBA” choreographed by Ms. Marrio’s husband and partner in Noche Flamenca, Mr Martin Santangelo. Alba is about “some extremely unspecific aspect of the Spanish Civil War.” I sensed that I may find here some explanation to the Hugo Chavez anger and his ALBA.

Every other year me and my wife, we use to travel somewhere for the Christmas – New Year time span, as in her work she alternates with another person in her office, who will take of during those days. This year was actually her time to go away, but she chose to spend her vacation in New York and the difficulties with transport and flights were an important part of this decision. So I had to decide where we will be part of a community when slipping into twenty-ten. Going to see Soledad Barrio and Noche Flamenca was thus our decision – I had the further goal also to get some understanding about ALBA.

Having decided on the show, I went down to the Theater at 121 Christopher Street in the Village, and looked at the neighborhood restaurants and settled fortunately for HAVANA – ALMA DE CUBA at 94 Christopher Street, that promised excellent mojitos, great food, a bottle of CAVA Champagne, New Year eve paraphernalia, Cuban music and cigars. And that is important – Cuba is the first ALBA!

Looking now more closely at Noche Flamenca, which obviously has its home in Spain, I found that they see flamenco as a form of art that is based on song (cante), music (toque), and dance born of “ancestral cultural repression and racial expulsion.” and that 2009-2010 they launch an arts education program in New York City public schools that embodies the three flamenco disciplines: dance, guitar, and song. Their target are the culturally diverse communities of New York City, and they have already lined up a very impressive list of backers to this experiment.

Andalucia in southern Spain absorbed throughout the centuries Romans, Jews and Moors. As far as flamenco is concerned, the most significant arrival was in the 15th century when tribes of nomadic Gypsies settled her. Their arrival coincided with Ferdinand and Isabella’s conquest of Granada, the last bastion of the Moors, and the subsequent expulsion of Jews and Arabs, from Spain – the Jews were massacred, the Gypsies humiliated and persecuted, the Arabs exterminated, the Moriscos (converted Arabs) expelled, and the Andalucians generally exploited – if we do not relate the music to brutality, repression, hunger, fear, menace, inferiority, resistance, and secrecy, then we shall not find the reality of cante flamenco – it is a storm of exasperation and grief. This is the background of the evolution of flamenco as per historian Felix Grande’s review of the 15th-17th centuries.

In the 19th century there were two types of singing in Andalucia – the cante gitano and the cante andaluz, then an Andaluz of Italian orifin, Silverio Franconetti, at first a singer of cante gitano, proceeded in combining the two shaping what became the cante flamenco.

The “deep song” or the cante jondo, resembles the mournful wail of the chant of the exiled Sephardic Jews and its poetry is that of existential angst and philosophical questioning common in Arabic poetry. The dance that evolved and fully blossomed by 1840s combines the repetitive key symbol prevalent in Islam, the trance-inducing rhythms of Africa and the stubborn search of Jewish music as mentioned above.

With the above in mind, let us see now what the Noche Flamenca say about their creation called ALBA:

Choreographer Martin Santangelo says that the piece was inspired by the archives of The Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Now let us remember that the Spanish Civil War 1936 – 1939 was the training ground for what became WWII.

45,000 people from over 50 different countries, ignoring their own governments’ failure to respond to the threats of fascism, volunteered to support democratic Spain. The US volunteers came to be known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, but Franco, backed by Hitler and Mussolini defeated the democrats – eventually fascism was defeated by 1945 but Franco was left to rule over Spain.

The program notes that many of the Abraham Lincoln Brigaders that survived remained lifelong activists and have continued to support progressive causes, including the Civil Rights Movement in the US and protests against the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Spain of today feels a profound gratitude for these heroic individuals.

The song used by the choreographer in setting ALBA is a poem by Miguel Hernandez To the International Soldier Fallen in Spain:

If there are men who contain a soul without frontiers
a brow scattered with universal hair
covered with horizons, ships, and mountain chains,
with sand and snow, then you are one of those.

Fatherlands called to you with all their banners,
so that your breath filled with beautiful movements.
You wanted to quench the thirst of panthers
and fluttered full against their abuses.

With a taste of suns and seas,
Spain beckons you because in her you realize
your majesty like a tree that embraces a continent.

Around your bones, the olive groves will grow,
unfolding their iron roots in the ground,
embracing men universally, faithfully.

What the choreographer Martin Santangelo tried to convey with the members of his troupe – all male – singers, guitarists and dancers, and a bunch of walking sticks as props, was sort of a Greek corus telling about the travel of those that came from afar and the fact that their spirits were not broken. They did not give up even when beaten and continued a life of walking and fighting.

That is what I saw in that piece and I wonder how dance reviewer Alastair Macaulay saw nothing of this with his own eyes. All what he says is that it “is about some extremely unspecific aspect of the Spanish Civil War. Flamenco isn’t enriched by tackling any one particular drama; it’s diminished.” Then he adds later – “No. ‘Alba’ is not a disaster; it’s just nebulous, unclear, earnest. Obviously, though, it’s small fry compared with the greater meat of the evening.”

Sorry Mr. Macaulay, you did not understand the sonnet or you did not read it. You also did not notice those walking sticks or just did not ask yourself why walking sticks? You may think that art is only technique, but some of your readers are also capable of relating to content and to this readership the Spanish Civil War has meaning beyond plain dance. Granted that you are a dance critic and not a political pages reporter, nevertheless, you just saw an honest attempt, as you say yourself, of tackling content, so you should have given the credit these artists deserve for trying to use their art form in order to inspire the public of their theater in ways that are no different from what they will be attempting to do in our public schools with children that can be helped by art to become better citizens. In the ALBA case, I feel that understanding the Lincoln brigade volunteers could actually help in formulating opinions about issues of these days when we continue to see injustice in the world and dictators encroaching upon democracy and human rights. Yes, I am aware that there was also a Stalin involvement in Spain, and I read “The God That Failed” but all of that is secondary to my disagreement with this part of your review – the issue is really the meaning and purpose of art – I believe that there can be a purpose and you clearly disagree.

Further, in the second half of the program there was a second topical choreography by Martin Santongelo titled “Refugiados” that included the whole company. It was inspired by literature and poetry of refugee children from Somalia and Zimbabwe identified by UN agencies and receiving emergency assistance. You did not mention this piece and I wonder if your choice for criticism was rather dependent on content as this latter piece may be dealing with a subject that is less open for criticism – you do not kick children but politics are made for kicking. Sorry, and please forgive if I am here on the wrong track.

But then back to our declared real interest in Noche Flamenca as said was the title ALBA of that particular dance about the Spanish Civil War – why was it called ALBA?

Aha – I found!

Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives
A non-profit organization devoted to the preservation and dissemination of the history of the North American role in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).
 

The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (Spanish: Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América, or ALBA) is an international cooperation organization based on the idea of social, political, and economic integration between the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. It is associated with socialist andsocial democratic governments and is an attempt at regional economic integration based on a vision of social welfare, bartering and mutual economic aid, rather than trade liberalization as with free trade agreements. ALBA nations are in the process of introducing a new regional currency, the SUCRE. It is intended to be the common virtual currency by 2010 and eventually a hard currency.

The name initially contained “Alternative” instead of “Alliance”, but was changed on June 24, 2009. ALBA also means “dawn” in Spanish.

Member states

Common name	Official name	Date joined	Population	Area (km²)	GDP PPP (US$ bn)	Capital
Antigua and Barbuda	Antigua and Barbuda	24 June 2009	85,632	442	1.546	St. John’s
Bolivia	Plurinational State of Bolivia	29 April 2006	9,119,152	1,098,581	43.424	Sucre
Cuba	Republic of Cuba	14 December 2004	11,451,652	110,861	108.2	Havana
Dominica	Commonwealth of Dominica	20 January 2008	72,660	754	.72	Roseau
Ecuador	Republic of Ecuador	24 June 2009	14,573,101	256,370	106.993	Quito
Honduras	Republic of Honduras	9 October 2008	7,483,763	112,492	32.725	Tegucigalpa
Nicaragua	Republic of Nicaragua	23 February 2007	5,891,199	129,495	15.89	Managua
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines	Saint Vincent and the Grenadines	24 June 2009	120,000	389	1.085	Kingstown
Venezuela	Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela	14 December 2004	28,199,825	916,445	358.623
ALBA Totals	9 Countries	–	73,453,238	2,625,829	669.206

Observer states of the organisation include Haiti, Iran and Uruguay

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November 27, 2008 08:30

NEWS

CARACAS.Dmitry Medvedev took part in a meeting of the leaders of the Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America.

The organisation was set up at the end of 2004 on the initiative of Cuba and Venezuela. This association also includes Bolivia, Honduras, Dominica and Nicaragua; Haiti, Iran, Uruguay and Ecuador are among its observers.

During the meeting Mr Medvedev raised the question of developing cooperation between Russia and Latin American countries.

President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, President Evo Morales of Bolivia, President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras, President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, President Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Prime Minister of the Commonwealth of Dominica Roosevelt Skerrit, and Vice President of the Council of Ministers of Cuba Ricardo Cabrisas took part in the meeting.

This amazing article was penned by Fidel Castro himself, then later we watched how Presidents Morales of Bolivia and Chavez of Venezuela spoke in the Copenhagen plenary similar words to these, in the name of the ALBA group of Latin and Caribbean States, on that very important Friday-the eighteenth.

Today, when finally writing about this, I also wonder if besides Simon Bolivar and Jose Marti, Chavez is not ready to accept also Abraham Lincoln as a third member of a historic triumvirate intended to set the Western Hemisphere apart from global machinations, provided President Obama does indeed stretch out a friendly hand to Cuba? I believe that this is within the realm of possibilities, and perhaps the easiest way for the US to free itself of the tyranny of oil and the influence of the oil lobby of Washington. I believe that our times start looking more and more like the pre-WWII days. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade that went to Spain had among its people some of the best the US had to offer. They were not stupid and recognized the Stalinist stealth-riders, as well as the fascist opponents, and remained true to democracy ideals that brought them there. Climate change provides the world the same opportunity as fighting for democracy did in those years. If Obama is ready to rein in the US extremists when it comes to economic relations with the countries of the Southern part of the Western Hemisphere, new line-ups are possible based on new agreed common goals of helping in the sustainable development of these countries, rather then continuing to regard them only as source of raw materials. Had the US done so earlier the world might have been a friendlier place to America – at least in that part that fell into the geopolitical Western Hemisphere Monrovian design.

Clearly, Castro and Chavez will criticize the US when being held at bay by the stick of US corporations, but when approached as partners for change they might actually be ready for political compromise. The reality is that even though they do not apply democracy to their States, the did eradicate analphabetism, hunger, and established health care systems, ahead of the US. Venezuela can help fund such positive activities thanks to its income from oil, but they seem ready to help fund also other positive activities if offered a place at the American table. The way they show pride in their baseball culture that derived from the US via Cuba, shows to me that I am not dreaming about pie in the sky.

———–
 http://monthlyreview.org/castro/2009/10/…

Reflections of Fidel: The ALBA and Copenhagen.

The festivities associated with the 7th ALBA Summit, held in the historic Bolivian region of Cochabamba, showed the rich culture of the Latin American peoples and the joy elicited in children, young people and adults in general by the singing, the dancing, the costumes and rich expressions of the human beings of all ethnic groups, colors and shades: aborigine, black, white and mixed people. We could see there thousands of years of human history and precious culture that explain the determination with which the leaders of various Caribbean, Central and South American peoples convened that summit.

The meeting was a great success. Bolivia was the venue. I recently wrote on the excellent prospects of that country, an heir to the Aymara-Quechua culture. A small group of peoples from that area are bent on proving that a better world is possible. The ALBA – created by the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and Cuba, inspired by Bolivar’s and Marti’s ideas, as an unprecedented example of revolutionary solidarity- has showed how much could be done in barely five years of peaceful cooperation. This started shortly after Hugo Chavez’s political and democratic victory. Imperialism underestimated him, and deliberately tried to oust him and remove him. The fact that for a good part of the 20th century Venezuela had been the world’s largest oil-producer, practically owned by the Yankee transnationals, made the chosen path particularly rough to pursue.

The powerful adversary had neoliberalism and the FTAA [Free Trade Area of the Americas]; two instruments of domination always used after the Cuban Revolution to crush resistance in the hemisphere.

It is irritating to think of the shameless and disrespectful way in which the US administration imposed the government of millionaire Pedro Carmona and tried to have elected President Hugo Chavez removed, at a time when the USSR had disappeared and the People’s Republic of China was a few years away from becoming the economic and commercial power it is today, after two decades of over 10 percent growth. The Venezuelan people, like that of Cuba, resisted the brutal thrust. The Sandinistas recovered, and the struggle for sovereignty, independence and socialism gained ground in Bolivia and Ecuador. Honduras, which had joined the ALBA, was the target of a brutal coup d’etat inspired by the Yankee ambassador and propelled from the US military base in Palmerola.

Today, there are four Latin American countries that have completely eradicated illiteracy: Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua. A fifth country, Ecuador, is quickly advancing towards that goal. The comprehensive healthcare programs are underway in the five countries at an unprecedented pace in the Third World. The programs of economic development with social justice have become projects of these five states, which already enjoy great prestige in the world for their brave position in the face of the empire’s economic, military and media power. Three English speaking Caribbean countries of black ancestry, determined to fight for their development, have also joined the ALBA.

This alone would be a great political merit if in today’s world that were the only big problem of man’s history.

The economic and political system that in a short historical period has led to the existence of more than one billion hungry people, and many more hundreds of millions whose lives are hardly longer than half the average of those in the wealthy and privileged countries, was until now the main problem for mankind. But, a new and extremely serious problem was strongly discussed at the ALBA Summit: climate change. A danger of such magnitude had never been known in human history.

As Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales and Daniel Ortega waved the people goodbye in the streets of Cochabamba yesterday, Sunday, that same day, according to news spread by BBC World, Gordon Brown was chairing in London a session of the Major Economies Forum mostly made up by the highest developed capitalist countries, the main culprits for the carbon dioxide emissions, that is, the gas causing the greenhouse effect.

The significance of Brown’s remarks is that they have not been made by a representative of ALBA or one of the 150 emerging or underdeveloped countries on the planet but of Great Britain, the country where industrial development started and one of those which have released most carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The British Prime Minister warned that if an agreement is not reached at the UN Summit in Copenhagen, the consequences will be ‘devastating.’

Some of the ‘catastrophic’ consequences would be floods, droughts and lethal heat waves claimed the environmental group Nature World Fund referring to Brown’s assertion. “The climate change will be out of control within the next five to ten years if the CO2 emissions are not drastically cut down. There will not be a plan B if Copenhagen fails.”

The same news source claims that: “BBC specialist James Landale has explained that not everything is happening as expected.”

Newsweek reported that “it seems more unlikely every day that the states will commit to something in Copenhagen.”

According to reports from the major American press outlet, the chairman of the session, Gordon Brown, said that “if no agreement is reached, there is no doubt that the damage of the uncontrolled emissions will not be repaired with a future agreement.” He then went on to mention such conflicts as “unchecked migration and 1.8 billion people afflicted by water shortage.”

Actually, as the Cuban delegation claimed in Bangkok, the United States led the highest industrialized countries most opposed to the necessary reduction of emissions.

At the Cochabamba meeting, a new ALBA Summit was convened. The timetable will be: December 6, elections in Bolivia; December 13, ALBA summit in Havana; December 16, participation in the UN Copenhagen Summit. The small group of ALBA nations will be there. The issue is no longer “Homeland or Death”; it is truly and without exaggeration a matter of “Life or Death” for the human race.

The capitalist system is not only oppressing and plundering our countries; the wealthiest industrial nations wish to impose to the rest of the world the bulk of the burden in the struggle on climate change. Who are they trying to fool with that? In Copenhagen, the ALBA and the Third World countries will be struggling for the survival of the species.

Fidel Castro Ruz
October 19, 2009
6:05 PM

A Grey Goldmine: Recent Developments in Lithium Extraction in Bolivia and Alternative Energy Projects.
by COHA (Council on Hemispheric Affairs) Research Associate Megan McAdams.

According to Bolivian President Evo Morales, lithium is not only important to his country’s economic future but is “the hope of humanity,” as the lightweight metal efficiently stores energy capable of powering the eco-friendly cars of the future. Bolivia’s lithium reserves have made headlines in the past and once again currently. The country holds a total of 5.4 million tons of lithium, which is nearly half of the world’s known supply. The Bolivian government now appears to be moving ahead with increasingly concrete plans for extraction and production of the metal. Experts from around the globe who recently gathered in Bolivia discussed new scientific findings and the possibilities herein contained. Meanwhile, the U.S. and many other nations are preparing to meet in Copenhagen this December to discuss climate change and alternative energy policies. In order to understand recent developments in Bolivia’s lithium policy, it is necessary to examine new advancements in lithium technology, Morales’ overall policy of nationalization, alternative energy plans in the U.S. and Spain, and some of the concerns that have been raised.

New Lithium Technologies:
According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), one quarter of the lithium mined last year was used solely for lithium batteries, which operate portable electronic devices. The already rapidly increasing demand for lithium, the world’s lightest metal, which has a prodigious capacity for storing energy, is expected to rise dramatically as demand for electric cars, an alternative to gas-powered vehicles, are mass-produced and take to the roads. Currently, lithium-ion batteries have become the industry’s standard as they boast a high weight-to-energy ratio, lack of memory effect (batteries’ decreasing ability to hold charge over time) and a slow-self discharge. Engineers, however, have been working to improve battery technology and thus increase the range of electric cars. Such advancements would enhance the marketability of these vehicles and allow electric car producers to attract more customers, thus establishing a more substantial consumer base for lithium products. An article in the New York Times this September suggested that lithium-air batteries may hold the key to the future of electric cars.
IBM recently announced an ambitious project to develop lithium-air batteries, which hold considerably more charge than their lithium-ion cohorts, both for transportation and for powering the national energy grid. The company claims that compared with the 585 watt-hours output of the standard lithium-ion batteries, lithium-air batteries could produce a considerable 5,000 watt-hours. IBM has invested in the development of this lithium-air technology, believing that these batteries, with their ability to hold 10 times more energy than other models, could revolutionize the transportation industry. These scientists, however, are guardedly optimistic due to the fact that lithium metal is highly volatile and explodes when exposed to water. Experts must create a mechanism that excludes moisture from the air and ensures that other effective security measures are in place to protect electric car owners. While IBM is banking on tomorrow’s battery technology, the majority of companies are focusing on producing the less volatile, but also less efficient, lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles for immediate sale. It remains to be seen whether or not IBM will successfully develop this new lithium technology; however, improvements in lithium technology will undoubtedly increase the demand for electric vehicles which will require a large amount of lithium in the next few years. Bolivia, a country with vast lithium resources, is currently working to assess, produce, and manufacture lithium products that correspond with the rising global demand for clean energy vehicles.
Tapping into Bolivia’s Vast Reserves:
Bolivia’s rich lands once yielded immense amounts of silver, tin and other mineral wealth, and now boast a vast supply of lithium, known as the “grey gold.” According to the USGS, Bolivia’s countryside holds nearly half of the world’s known lithium deposits, or a total of 5.4 million tons of the valuable metal. However, unlike neighboring Chile and Argentina, two countries that also have significant deposits of the metal, Bolivia has yet to contribute to the supply of the global market. In 2008, Chile led the world in lithium production with an output of 12,000 tons while Argentina presently supplies 3,200 tons annually. Between 2004 and 2007, the United States imported 61 percent of its lithium from Chile and 36 percent from Argentina. With a limited domestic reserve of only 760,000 tons of identified lithium reserves, the U.S. must turn to these South American countries for its supply. In an effort to capitalize on what is and will continue to be a rising demand for the lightweight metal, the Bolivian government has implemented a series of prospecting initiatives and has entertained potential investors in recent months.
Recent Developments:
At the end of October, scientists and academics from around the world gathered in La Paz for the “Inaugural International Science and Technology Forum for the Industrialization of Lithium and Evaporative Resources.” Experts from Canada, China, South Korea, France, Russia, Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Spain met with Bolivian scientists and policy makers to discuss findings and applications for Bolivian lithium. Earlier in the month, Bolivian officials reported that the construction of a pilot lithium extraction plant, which began in April 2008, is 75 percent complete and on schedule to be finished by the end of the year. Bolivian Minister of Mining Luis Alberto Echazu believes the facility will be able to produce 480 tons of lithium carbonate annually. Producing lithium carbonate, even on a relatively small scale, would lend more credibility to the government’s grand plans for Bolivia to become a global supplier of lithium. The forum provided an international stage where the Bolivian government could voice its intention to develop and implement significant projects in the next few years.
President Morales used the lithium summit as a venue to present his three-step plan for developing the facilities necessary to extract a significant amount of the resource, produce lithium carbonate, and manufacture lithium batteries. Morales’ first step, which has already begun, involves the expert assessment of the quality of Uyuni’s lithium deposit. While Bolivia has a vast amount of lithium, some experts are concerned about the quality of the resource. Foreign companies, including Bollore (France), Kores (South Korea), and Mitsubishi and Sumitomo (Japan) have provided their assessment services free of charge in the hopes that the government will consider these companies first when drafting specifications for dispensing lithium carbonate.
The second phase of the government’s plan implements facilities to produce lithium carbonate, the refined lithium compound that stores energy in batteries, using the raw lithium extracted from the Uyuni salt flats. Officials recently announced that Bolivia would invest between $400 and $500 million in a lithium refining facility, the first of its kind in the country. The projected date of completion for the project is 2014. Upon completion, Echazu estimates that the plant would be able to produce 30,000 tons of lithium carbonate, roughly one-third of the current world supply. An official representing the national mining corporation (COMIBOL) also announced that Bolivian scientists had discovered their own formula for producing high-quality lithium carbonate. This finding would allow Bolivia to proceed with lithium production without relying on the expertise of outside companies for the second stage. If all goes according to the government’s plan, this lithium refining plant would make Bolivia an attractive prospect for trade partnerships with foreign countries anxious to decrease reliance on gas-powered vehicles.
The final goal of the Morales administration would be the production of lithium batteries on Bolivian soil. The government hopes that Bolivia, rather than becoming an exporter of raw lithium or lithium carbonate, can also install the integrated facilities necessary to produce lithium batteries. If successful, the government would maintain control over the entire process from extraction to lithium carbonate production and, finally, the fabrication of lithium batteries. Robert Carvajal, Bolivia’s Vice Minister of Science and Technology, projected that the facilities and infrastructure for producing lithium batteries will be installed and operational by 2018. While Bolivia plans to execute the first two phases of lithium production without foreign participation, the government admits that the final stage will require some outside investment. Reports from local newspapers in La Paz and Potosí also report that an automobile manufacturer has verbally expressed interest in building an electric car factory in Bolivia, but has yet to submit a written proposal. Morales’ plan, despite relying on foreign investors for the final stage, reiterates the policy that Bolivia’s natural resources should be state-owned and controlled.

Morales Intends to Avoid Plundering of Bolivian Riches:
President Evo Morales’ stated mission continues to be that lithium in Bolivia should be controlled by the state and used to benefit Bolivians, not foreign companies. In response to outside interest in exploiting Bolivia’s lithium reserves, Morales firmly declares that Bolivia will not export the metal as a raw material and has required that all companies interested in mining lithium must also install battery plants on Bolivian soil. When these companies failed to make offers in line with this policy, La Paz decided to develop the country’s capacity to utilize lithium without outside investment. In this manner, Morales hopes that lithium extraction and production will generate job opportunities so that Bolivians, rather than foreign companies and investors, would ultimately be the prime beneficiaries of this natural resource. Morales’ nationalization policies stem from his desire to protect the nation from yet another pillaging of the natural resources, as that perpetrated by Europeans beginning in the sixteenth century, who ravaged the landscape and stole the lives of millions of Bolivians.
Morales’ determination to preclude rapacious forms of foreign investment is bolstered by recent news from the Potosí region. After 500 years of foreign mining in Bolivia, Cerro Rico, the famous World Heritage site in Potosí, is on the verge of collapse. On October 20, the Mining Corporation of Bolivia (COMIBOL), deeply concerned about the drastically weakened physical structure of the mountain, issued a 6-month ban on silver mining in the upper tier of Cerro Rico. Acknowledging the damage caused by silver extraction, Morales has stated that the extraction of lithium “cannot be another Cerro Rico.” Throughout the colonial and post-colonial mining era in Potosí, wealthy Europeans and local hidalgos stuffed their pockets while employment in the mines only brought heartbreak and loss of life for millions of impoverished Bolivians over the centuries. In the 1800s, foreign companies had all but depleted Cerro Rico’s rich endowment before turning from silver to the extraction of tin. Nevertheless, the mining of both tin and silver has continued to this day, with miners effectively signing away at least their health, if not their lives, as they enter the mines for income they desperately need.
Just as thousands of Europeans poured into the country throughout the 15th and 16th centuries to make their fortunes in silver, Bolivia’s rich lithium resources have again inspired international interest. While Potosí represented immense wealth and power for Europeans, Cerro Rico only meant misery and pain for humble Bolivians. Some reports indicate that the mines have cost millions of miners’ their lives over the years, devastating the existences of the women and children who are left behind. Only ten years after entering mines, these workers die of asphyxiation resulting from their inhalation of poisonous dust on a daily basis. The exacting toll of this work on the miners and their families can make one understand the president’s intention to prevent a new separation of foreign companies from plundering the countryside yet again. While Bolivia outlines plans for the future of its people, and hopes to avert the mistakes that have happened throughout the nation’s history, the U.S. and other developed countries outline alternative energy plans in an attempt to combat climate change which inevitably will rely on an increased utilization of lithium.
Bold Alternative Energy Plans:
Alternative energy plans being surveyed in the U.S. will drive demand for electric vehicles and the lithium batteries to power these gas-independent cars. Obama and his Democratic supporters are racing to pass environmentally progressive legislation before U.S. leaders join representatives from 170 countries for next month’s Copenhagen Climate Conference. Currently, discussions regarding the Obama administration’s climate change bill are heating up. According to the bill’s summary, The Clean Energy Jobs and Power Act “reduces our oil consumption and increases our energy independence through bold new energy efficiency standards, increases incentives for electric and other clean vehicles, and is an investment in public transportation .” During his campaign and in the early days of his presidency, President Obama declared that the U.S. could have 1 million electric cars on the road by 2015. The Obama administration looks to combat the recession through the creation of “green jobs” such as the manufacturing of alternative energy products, like electric vehicles.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 allots $61.3 billion for improvements in the energy sector. Among the concessions are a $2 billion grant to fund the development of lithium battery technology, $400 million for electric vehicle technologies, and $300 million to purchase electric cars for the government fleet. These government investments demonstrate the Obama administration’s commitment to electric vehicle use and the hope that economic recovery can be partially accomplished by generating “green” jobs. According to President Obama, the Recovery Act is the “largest investment in clean energy in history, not just to help end this recession, but to lay a new foundation for lasting prosperity.”
The President recently addressed students at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT) where he stressed the importance of clean energy for America saying that the U.S. is now engaged in “peaceful competition to determine the technologies that will power the 21st century .” He continued on to say that “the nation that wins this competition will be the nation that leads the global economy.” The U.S. must import lithium carbonate and the batteries to power these green fleets. For this reason, Bolivia must move quickly and purposefully to accomplish the goals set at the Lithium Forum; however, unease about Bolivia’s ability to carry out the necessary steps based on its technical capacity to do so, and its concerns regarding the quality of its lithium, and recent news regarding a massive lithium discovery in Mexico could quickly thwart the momentum Bolivia has generated up to this point.
Is Bolivia Ready?
While many in Bolivia are optimistic about the country’s ability to fulfill the president’s goals for lithium production, reservations remain about the country’s infrastructure, ability to execute facility construction, and the quality of its lithium deposit. Beltran responded to concerns about infrastructure preparedness by outlining the government’s program to spend $500 million to build roads, install a natural gas pipeline, and create a water and power system. Another issue is the timely construction of facilities. While the government pledges to have these plants finished on time, any number of disruptions could derail the construction timeline. Of particular concern could be work stoppages arising from Morales’ opposition or dissatisfied workers. Finally, experts have also questioned the quality of the lithium deposit in Uyuni and feasibility of success. Scientists are concerned that the high amounts of magnesium found in the deposit could make extraction efforts costly . In addition, seasonal flooding of the salt flats could delay the necessary evaporative process. While the Bolivian government addresses these concerns, news from Mexico indicates that Bolivia must move quickly if it is to take advantage of its lithium wealth.
The Mexican Threat
Mexico’s recent finds place an enormous amount of pressure on the Bolivian government to collaborate with foreign investors for fear that these companies will move to hospitable countries with more relaxed terms of development. On October 9, the mining company Pierro Sutti reported that a massive lithium deposit covering over 40,000 hectares of land had been discovered in the San Luis Potosí and Zacatecas states of Northern Mexico . Prior to the announcement, Mexico appeared to be totally unaware of any lithium deposits, making it dependent on imports from Chile and Argentina. U.S. and Canadian officials in Mexico estimate that the deposit could yield over 800,000 tons of lithium. The company’s president, Martin Sutti plans to build a pilot plant that he claims has the potential to produce 10,000 to 12,000 tons of lithium a year. This figure far exceeds the production prediction envisaged by Bolivia’s pilot plan and, while this information is preliminary, the discovery could position Mexico, to join the ranks of Chile and Argentina, as well as Bolivia, in the production of lithium.
Improved Relations
In recent months, Bolivia has notably improved relations with Spain and the United States. Both countries have developed alternative energy goals which, given Bolivia’s successful implementation of its production strategy for lithium, will potentially rely on lithium products from Uyuni. Spain’s Proyecto Movele, even more aggressive than the U.S.’s plan, intends to put one million electric cars on Spanish streets by the end of 2012. After a much-publicized inaugural visit to Spain in September, Morales signed an important agreement with Spanish President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero that ultimately canceled $77.4 million or 60 percent, of Bolivia’s debt to Spain . Spain will invest the remaining 40 percent in education and development programs for Bolivia. The visit also secured a $1.6 billion investment from REPSOL, Spain’s state oil company, aimed at boosting Bolivia’s natural gas production. Morales nationalized this sector of the energy department, taking a page from Hugo Chávez’s book, and subsequently raised taxes on foreign companies.
Bolivia and the U.S. are also moving to restore relations that disintegrated in 2008, with President Morales expelling the American Ambassador for allegedly supporting the opposition party. Representatives from both governments must address their contending issues such as the coca trade, much of which Morales only recently admitted is being grown illegally processed into cocaine, as well as Bolivia’s relationship with hot-button countries like Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba. The rekindling of ties between these two countries comes conveniently at a time when the U.S. is set to become a huge consumer base for electric vehicles charged by lithium batteries.

Looking Forward:
While Morales stands behind his nationalization policy, there is no guarantee that Bolivia can install lithium facilities or much-needed infrastructure in a timely manner without outside assistance such as foreign investment. In terms of lithium extraction, neighboring Chile and Argentina already have the capacity to produce and export the raw material. And, as Mexico has discovered an immense lithium deposit, Bolivia is in a race to industrialize as quickly as possible in order to take advantage of what will soon be a booming market. In addition, Bolivia is also competing with Asian companies in Japan and China, which easily have the capital necessary to make large investments in battery technology and manufacture. While Bolivia looks to capitalize on its natural resources without the aid of foreign partners, it remains to be seen whether the country can implement the necessary reforms to do so.
Bolivians go to the polls for the upcoming presidential elections on December 6. Currently, Morales commands a 52 percent majority while his nearest competitor rallied only 18 percent in a November 15th poll . These statistics have been unreliable in the past but it appears almost certain that Morales will return to lead the Bolivian government for the next 5 years. The President has received a lot of attention lately as discussions about lithium production have placed Bolivia into the international spotlight. Morales remains popular among the rural poor as this segment of the population has been especially devastated by past injustices fostered by foreign companies. They therefore show great enthusiasm for the president’s effort to further state control over natural resources. Opposition from the media luna, the four eastern provinces of Bolivia, continues with many expressing their dissatisfaction with the president. Results of the aforementioned poll cited above, however, show that Morales has gained support in two media luna provinces, Tarija and Beni; Pando and Santa Cruz, however, remain determinedly opposed to the President. Once re-elected, Morales must work on his domestic agenda as well as continue to evaluate the success of his nationalization policy and to diversify the country’s still struggling economy.

This analysis was prepared by COHA Research Associate Megan McAdams
Posted 17 Nov 2009

Bolivian hillside village in Los Yungas, in the tropical Andes. Credit:Diana Cariboni/IPS

ENVIRONMENT-SOUTH AMERICA: Mapping the Riches of the Tropical Andes
By Humberto Márquez*

 
CARACAS, Aug 8 (Tierramérica) – The Ecosystems Map of the Northern and Central Andes could serve as a guide for environmental conservation of this South American area covering 1.5 million square kilometres and holding the world’s highest concentration of biodiversity.

The tropical Andes, the stretch of the mountain range that includes the Central Andes (Bolivia and Peru) and Northern Andes (Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela), were dubbed the “global epicentre of biodiversity” by British ecologist Norman Myers. 

The zone holds 45,000 types of plants (20,000 of which are endemic) and 3,400 vertebrate animal species (more than 1,500 of which are endemic) on just one percent of the planet’s land surface, according to figures from Conservation International. 

These riches “are distributed among 133 specific ecosystems that we have inventoried for our map of areas at more than 500 metres of altitude, of which 77 are in Peru, 69 in Bolivia, 31 in Ecuador, 22 in Colombia and 21 in Venezuela,” environmentalist Eulogio Chacón-Moreno, head of the project in Venezuela, told Tierramérica. 

The map, initially presented in April, was conceived as a tool to “identify gaps and priorities for conservation in the national agencies for protected areas, and to develop a set of indicators that allows us to assess the state of conservation of the Andean ecosystems,” said Chacón-Moreno. 

Such is the case of the “páramos”, treeless high plateaus “with a high percentage of endemic species, unique diversity for the way the species interrelate, and a highly important source of freshwater,” Vanessa Cartaya, of the regional Andean Páramo Project, sponsored by the Global Environment Facility, told Tierramérica. 

Cartaya underscored that the intensification of land use, expansion of the agricultural frontier, growing urbanisation and increased demand for potable water, as well as climate change, “affect the páramos to a great extent, making it essential to determine which areas are the priority for action.” 

The páramos are situated between 3,000 and 4,500 metres above sea level in the Northern and Central Andes, with temperature, humidity, sunshine, rain and wind factors that make them quite different from the lower altitude tropics that surround them. 

The high altitude flower known in Spanish as “frailejón” (Espeletia neriifolia) is emblematic of this ecosystem. 

“The páramo functions like a sponge, absorbing rainwater before filtering and releasing it” into other ecosystems, states the text that accompanies the map. The mountaintops hold remnants of glaciers and lakes that feed streams and springs. 

The project was based on studies and maps available from national institutes, standardising their data. Some of the maps used are: the Vegetation Map of Bolivia, Map of Ecosystems of the Colombian Andes, Map of Ecuador’s Continental Ecological Systems, Forest Map of Peru, and the Map of Ecological Units of Mérida, Venezuela. 

Plans are in the works to publish an atlas in 2010, with a preliminary version already available on the Internet. 

The mapping effort is a contribution to the Environmental Agenda of the Andean Community trade bloc (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru) as a guide to design and coordinate policies among the national environmental agencies, focusing on three themes: biodiversity, climate change and water resources. 

Backing the project are the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation, Spain’s Ministry of the Environment, and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. The work has been coordinated by NatureServe, a non-profit conservation organisation, and the Consortium for Sustainable Development of the Andean Eco-Region. 

Chacón-Moreno said the mapping will pave the way for studies “to identify ecosystems with more intense dynamics and patterns of fragmentation, which will serve as input to guide conservation policies.” 

Furthermore, experts will be able to “assess the vulnerability of Andean ecosystems through vegetation distribution models in scenarios of climate change and land-use change,” he added. 

For example, the Institute of Environmental and Ecological Sciences at the Venezuelan University of the Andes, led by Chacón-Moreno, has studied the spread of the mountainous cloud forest to the heights of the páramos in the highest sierras of southwest Venezuela, with records from 1952 to 1999 “showing how the páramo area has been reduced with the passing of the decades.” 

“The changes in vegetation cover demonstrate the effects of climate anomalies. In this respect, the map and the studies that support it allow the study across an entire region using a single standardised system of classification,” said the expert. 

A database will be a “planning tool that contains information about biodiversity,” communities and ecosystems, according to Chacón-Moreno. 

Of the 133 ecosystems identified, the most extensive is the High Andean Wet Scrubland (Puna Húmeda), covering nearly 10 million hectares in Peru and Bolivia, just 6.8 percent of which is officially protected. 

“Human use has greatly influenced the structure of these landscapes, subjected over the centuries to tree cutting and cyclical burns, so criteria need to be developed to better evaluate the natural landscapes,” which would lead to better understanding of the conservation of the Central Andes ecosystems, says the report that accompanies the map. 

The Tropical Andes run 4,000 km north-south. Few mountaintops are lower than 2,000 metres in altitude, and most of the landscape is steep inclines, deep gullies, vast valley floors, and sharp peaks. 

In the Central Andes, a vast “altiplano” or high plain is formed at more than 3,500 metres above sea level in southern Peru and western Bolivia. 

The altiplano’s towns and villages are home to more than 40 million people who rely heavily on the natural goods and services of the Andean ecosystems, including grains, fruit and vegetables produced in the area. 

“The map has also been proposed as an information and education tool for communities about the potential of their surroundings and the importance of preserving it, in order to obtain clean water and sustenance, as well as enjoying the beauty of the landscape,” said Cartaya. 

(*This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.) 

Why the Amazon is important

Page last updated: 14 May 2008

By BBC’s Latin America Analyst James Painter

The Amazon Paradox

The rainforests are essential for removing carbon dioxide from the air.

As concerns grow about global warming and the future of the planet, much more international attention is being paid to the Amazon region.

There are three fundamental reasons why the region is important to the rest of the world.

The Amazon and the world’s climate

It is not surprising that the Amazon region is often called the “lungs of the world,” as it plays a critical role in the global carbon cycle that helps to shape the world’s climate.

About 200 billion tonnes of carbon are locked up in tropical vegetation around the world, of which about 70 billion tonnes are estimated to be in Amazon trees.

Rapid rates of deforestation cause more carbon to be converted into carbon dioxide, either when the trees are burnt down or more slowly by the decomposition of unburned wood.

And once the forests are gone, they cannot soak up the carbon from cars, power plants and factories. At the moment the Amazon is thought to absorb about 10 per cent of global fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions.

Burning is leading to a vicious circle of carbon release

The build-up of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere is one of the key causes of global warming. About 20 per cent of annual global greenhouse emissions is estimated to come from the clearing of tropical forests around the world.

According to the Stern Report on the economics of climate change, the loss of natural forests around the world contributes more to global emissions each year than the transport sector.

Brazil, for example, is ranked in the top five of the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases, not because of its high emissions from fossil fuels but because of deforestation.

Tipping Point

A study released in February 2008 by a team of international scientists from Oxford University, the Potsdam Institute and others concluded that the Amazon rainforest was the second most vulnerable area in the world after the Arctic.

The loss of the Amazon is leading to the loss of the Arctic

The essential idea is that the drying of the Amazon and/or increased deforestation could cause what is called “dieback” of the rain forest and a vicious cycle – a large reduction in the area of Amazon rainforest could cause a significant rise in CO2 emissions, which in turn would raise global temperatures – which in turn would cause more drying of the Amazon.

Scientists and climate change modellers disagree how soon a tipping point might happen or how likely it is. But however low the probability, changes to the Amazon are likely to be a “high impact” event on the world’s climate.

Biodiversity

The Amazon is the world’s largest tract of tropical rainforest, containing the Earth’s greatest biological reservoir – around 30 percent of all terrestrial species are found there.

The region is the main reason why Brazil is the most bio-diverse country in the world, with more than 50,000 described species of plants, 1,700 species of birds and between 500 and 700 different types each of amphibians, mammals and reptiles.

All this rich biodiversity is now being threatened by the destructive combination of stress from climate change and deforestation. Even though there are many unknowns about the Amazon’s future and its effect on the world’s climate, scientists agree that because of its biodiversity and the crucial role the region plays in shaping the climate, it is a matter of great urgency to find the right policy mix to conserve enough of the forest.

Brazil is also the biggest exporter of soya beans in the world

Who should decide the fate of the Amazon rainforest? The people who live there? The Brazilian government? The international community? Or individuals all over the world?

A remote tribe in the Brazilian Amazon says illegal loggers have already cleared around 40 per cent of their land, while the government has ignored their pleas for help.

The Tembe indians say that as the authorities failed to act, some of their community also became involved in selling wood illegally, but for now this has stopped.

Now they say the authorities should recognise they too have the right to make some money from the wood that surrounds their reserve by providing a plan for sustainable development.

The BBC’s Gary Duffy has been to the state of Para in northern Brazil to meet one of the leaders of the small Tembe indian community: Listen to Gary Duffy’s report (4 mins 13 secs)

The Amazon rainforest is the largest in the world, covering approximately seven million km² (40% of South America). Much of the global carbon cycle that is crucial to the world’s ecology and climate goes through the Amazon, earning it the label “the lungs of the Earth”.

The Amazon is a rich store of biodiversity, containing around a quarter of all terrestrial species. At 6,400km, the Amazon river is the second longest in the world, and accounts for one fifth of all fresh water drained into the world’s oceans.

The Amazon basin is also home to more than 30 million people of nine nations; Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela. Two-thirds of the Amazonian population are Brazilian, and more than half live in urban centres.

The Amazon by country
Explore BBC country briefings, reports, audio, and video using the interactive map.

The Brazil part of the Amazonas is a follows:

Brazilian Amazon surface area: 4,776,980 km²
Estimated deforestation: 700,000 km² since 1970
Brazil Population: 191.8 million (UN, 2007)
Forest cover: 56%

Brazil is South America’s most influential country, an economic giant and one of the world’s biggest democracies.

Brazil also contains 65% of the Amazon, yet it is estimated that 700,000km² has been lost through deforestation since 1970. This is an area larger than Afghanistan, and accounts for 80% of recent deforestation in the whole of the Amazon basin.

Despite the destruction, the Brazilian Amazon remains the largest continuous area of tropical forest in the world.

Cattle ranching accounts for around 70% of all forest loss. Soya production and illegal logging are the other main culprits. The construction of new hydroelectric dams and the building of roads across the region are also blamed for deforestation as they open access to low-cost land and attract new migrants.

Brazil is now the world’s largest exporter of soya and beef, much of it driven by growing demand from the rapidly-expanding Asian economies, particularly China.

=========================================================================================

Then please the following to the bottom of the piece

——————

One Planet: best of the Amazon Paradox

February saw 200 troops go into Para to crack down on logging

The Amazon Paradox

BBC World Service’s One Planet programme presents a special edition bringing you the very best of the Amazon Paradox.

Listen
Listen (27 mins 04 secs)

Download (mp3)
The programme includes:
An in-depth report from the heart of Para, following Operation Arc Of Fire – the major police effort to stop deforestation across three major Amazon states.
A look at how the government of Amazonas State is trying to save its forests by building up other economic institutions, including a free trade zone, industrial capacity, and thriving cultural institutions – with everything from Roger Waters to operettas about chocolate cake.
The factors putting a sustainable Amazon under sustained pressure – the people who say they do not want to log, but cannot survive if they do not; the lobbying of the agriculture ministry and land reform agency; and the sceptics calling for “broader discussion” and more food production.
An exclusive interview with the British Prince Of Wales, calling for a better integrated rural development programme which “makes forests more valuable alive than dead.”
And a look at one beef farmer successfully avoiding impacting on the forest – while at the same time still making a profit.

——————

BBC correspondents’ Amazon reports  The Amazon Paradox

The rainforests are essential for removing carbon dioxide from the air.

As concerns grow about global warming and the future of the planet, much more international attention is being paid to the Amazon region.

There are three fundamental reasons why the region is important to the rest of the world.

The Amazon and the world’s climate

It is not surprising that the Amazon region is often called the “lungs of the world,” as it plays a critical role in the global carbon cycle that helps to shape the world’s climate.

About 200 billion tonnes of carbon are locked up in tropical vegetation around the world, of which about 70 billion tonnes are estimated to be in Amazon trees.

Rapid rates of deforestation cause more carbon to be converted into carbon dioxide, either when the trees are burnt down or more slowly by the decomposition of unburned wood.

And once the forests are gone, they cannot soak up the carbon from cars, power plants and factories. At the moment the Amazon is thought to absorb about 10 per cent of global fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions.

Burning is leading to a vicious circle of carbon release

The build-up of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere is one of the key causes of global warming. About 20 per cent of annual global greenhouse emissions is estimated to come from the clearing of tropical forests around the world.

According to the Stern Report on the economics of climate change, the loss of natural forests around the world contributes more to global emissions each year than the transport sector.

Brazil, for example, is ranked in the top five of the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases, not because of its high emissions from fossil fuels but because of deforestation.

Tipping Point

A study released in February 2008 by a team of international scientists from Oxford University, the Potsdam Institute and others concluded that the Amazon rainforest was the second most vulnerable area in the world after the Arctic.

The loss of the Amazon is leading to the loss of the Arctic

The essential idea is that the drying of the Amazon and/or increased deforestation could cause what is called “dieback” of the rain forest and a vicious cycle – a large reduction in the area of Amazon rainforest could cause a significant rise in CO2 emissions, which in turn would raise global temperatures – which in turn would cause more drying of the Amazon.

Scientists and climate change modellers disagree how soon a tipping point might happen or how likely it is. But however low the probability, changes to the Amazon are likely to be a “high impact” event on the world’s climate.

Biodiversity

The Amazon is the world’s largest tract of tropical rainforest, containing the Earth’s greatest biological reservoir – around 30 percent of all terrestrial species are found there.

The region is the main reason why Brazil is the most bio-diverse country in the world, with more than 50,000 described species of plants, 1,700 species of birds and between 500 and 700 different types each of amphibians, mammals and reptiles.

All this rich biodiversity is now being threatened by the destructive combination of stress from climate change and deforestation. Even though there are many unknowns about the Amazon’s future and its effect on the world’s climate, scientists agree that because of its biodiversity and the crucial role the region plays in shaping the climate, it is a matter of great urgency to find the right policy mix to conserve enough of the forest.

Brazil is also the biggest exporter of soya beans in the world

Who should decide the fate of the Amazon rainforest? The people who live there? The Brazilian government? The international community? Or individuals all over the world?

A remote tribe in the Brazilian Amazon says illegal loggers have already cleared around 40 per cent of their land, while the government has ignored their pleas for help.

The Tembe indians say that as the authorities failed to act, some of their community also became involved in selling wood illegally, but for now this has stopped.

Now they say the authorities should recognise they too have the right to make some money from the wood that surrounds their reserve by providing a plan for sustainable development.

The BBC’s Gary Duffy has been to the state of Para in northern Brazil to meet one of the leaders of the small Tembe indian community: Listen to Gary Duffy’s report (4 mins 13 secs)

The Amazon rainforest is the largest in the world, covering approximately seven million km² (40% of South America). Much of the global carbon cycle that is crucial to the world’s ecology and climate goes through the Amazon, earning it the label “the lungs of the Earth”.

The Amazon is a rich store of biodiversity, containing around a quarter of all terrestrial species. At 6,400km, the Amazon river is the second longest in the world, and accounts for one fifth of all fresh water drained into the world’s oceans.

The Amazon basin is also home to more than 30 million people of nine nations; Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela. Two-thirds of the Amazonian population are Brazilian, and more than half live in urban centres.

The Amazon by country
Explore BBC country briefings, reports, audio, and video using the interactive map.

The Brazil part of the Amazonas is a follows:

Brazilian Amazon surface area: 4,776,980 km²
Estimated deforestation: 700,000 km² since 1970
Brazil Population: 191.8 million (UN, 2007)
Forest cover: 56%

Brazil is South America’s most influential country, an economic giant and one of the world’s biggest democracies.

Brazil also contains 65% of the Amazon, yet it is estimated that 700,000km² has been lost through deforestation since 1970. This is an area larger than Afghanistan, and accounts for 80% of recent deforestation in the whole of the Amazon basin.

Despite the destruction, the Brazilian Amazon remains the largest continuous area of tropical forest in the world.

Cattle ranching accounts for around 70% of all forest loss. Soya production and illegal logging are the other main culprits. The construction of new hydroelectric dams and the building of roads across the region are also blamed for deforestation as they open access to low-cost land and attract new migrants.

Brazil is now the world’s largest exporter of soya and beef, much of it driven by growing demand from the rapidly-expanding Asian economies, particularly China.

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Then please the following to the bottom of the piece

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One Planet: best of the Amazon Paradox

February saw 200 troops go into Para to crack down on logging

The Amazon Paradox

BBC World Service’s One Planet programme presents a special edition bringing you the very best of the Amazon Paradox.

Listen
Listen (27 mins 04 secs)

Download (mp3)
The programme includes:
An in-depth report from the heart of Para, following Operation Arc Of Fire – the major police effort to stop deforestation across three major Amazon states.
A look at how the government of Amazonas State is trying to save its forests by building up other economic institutions, including a free trade zone, industrial capacity, and thriving cultural institutions – with everything from Roger Waters to operettas about chocolate cake.
The factors putting a sustainable Amazon under sustained pressure – the people who say they do not want to log, but cannot survive if they do not; the lobbying of the agriculture ministry and land reform agency; and the sceptics calling for “broader discussion” and more food production.
An exclusive interview with the British Prince Of Wales, calling for a better integrated rural development programme which “makes forests more valuable alive than dead.”
And a look at one beef farmer successfully avoiding impacting on the forest – while at the same time still making a profit.

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BBC correspondents’ Amazon reports  http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/news/2…

From THE AMERICAS SOCIETY/Council of the Americas, New York City Headquarters – A discussion on – The Risks of Deforestation in the Amazon with Bruce Babbitt, former U.S. Secretary of the Interior and Andrew Revkin of The New York Times. Thursday, July 23, 2009. The moderator was Christopher Sabatini, Editor-in-Chief of the Americas Quarterly and Senior Director of Policy, of AS/COA.

The IIRSA initiative was created in the year 2000, during a summit of South American presidents in Brazil. Its official goal is South American regional integration through infrastructure related to transportation, energy and telecommunications. This initiative is coordinated by 12 South American governments with the technical and financial support of the Inter American Development Bank (IDB), the Andean Development Corporation (CAF) and the Del Plata Basin Development Fund (FONPLATA), as well as other development banks, likely including the European Investment Bank (EIB).

Environmental groups saw from the IIRSA inception that the proposed megaprojects will endanger the environment.

The Friends of the Earth, International) (FOEI) wrote about IIRSA:

Why is IIRSA a risk for communities and the environment?

1. Because its transport, waterways and agribusiness network projects crossing ecologically fragile areas, will have a negative effect on biodiversity. For example, the impact in the Andes, the Amazon Basin, the Mato Grosso, the Pantanal, and the Paraguay and Paraná rivers, will be significant, and in many cases irreversible.

2. Because these projects are likely to put the products of peasant communities at a great disadvantage. IIRSA roads and waterways aim to facilitate the transport of export products like soy, while doing little to strengthen food security and sustainable livelihoods for local citizens.

3. Because the mega- infrastructure projects have been drawn up with excessive focus on the needs of the private sector compared to the needs of the local economy and nearby communities.

4. Because of the failure to incorporate appropriate environmental, social and cultural considerations in IIRSA’s large infrastructure projects.

5. Because IIRSA projects are now set up to follow previous large infrastructure projects financed by international financial institutions. These projects continue to cause harm to indigenous communities (for example the Camisea gas pipeline) and the environment (Bolivia-Brazil gas pipeline), and can rack up devastating national debts (Yacyreta hydroelectric plant).

6. Because the role played by European transnational corporations in Latin America has already generated conflicts between consumers of public services, putting access to basic services (such as water, electricity, telecommunications) at risk, and promoting the privatization of public services. Giving these companies a greater role, as envisaged by IIRSA, is potentially very harmful.

7. Because IIRSA offers little public access to information about their projects and related policy reforms.

8. Because IIRSA does not have monitoring and evaluation programs in place to demonstrate that poverty will be reduced or that sustainable economies are being promoted.

9. Because IIRSA does not make concrete connections between its projects and the reduction of poverty or improvement of the environment.

10. Finally, and in summary, because IIRSA has a logic that is purely economic instead of a logic that is about sustainable integration and healthy local economies.
 http://www.foei.org/en/what-we-do/global…

 http://www.iirsa.org/index.asp?CodIdioma…

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Andrew Revkin, besides being the Science Editor of the New York Times, has also written: “The Burning Season: “The Murder of Chico Mendes and the Fight for the Amazon Rain Forest” (Paperback – Sep 30, 2004) that allowed him an added insight into the social and economic drivers that destroy the Amazonas.

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The base material for the presentation by Bruce Babbitt – was published in: The Americas Quarterly SUMMER 2009.       AMERICASQUARTERLY.ORG

BY BRUCE BABBITT who has served as Governor of Arizona and as U.S.secretary of the interior. He is currently researching IIRSA (?Iniciativa para la Integracion de la Infraestructura Regional Suramericana). as a fellow of the Blue Moon Fund.

IN THE AMAZON BASIN THE PLANNED TRANS-SOUTH AMERICAN HIGHWAY WILL WREAK MASSIVE DAMAGE ON THE FRAGILE ECOSYSTEMS OF THE AMAZON AND THE ANDES. WORSE YET, IT DOESN’T EVEN MAKE ECONOMIC SENSE. SO WHY IS IT BEING BUILT?

Brazil is an Atlantic nation in search of its Pacific destiny. Although it has long nurtured the dream of becoming a two-ocean, continental power, much as a young and expanding America was drawn across the continent to the Pacific by the call of Manifest Destiny, South America’s largest country has for most of its history faced eastward to European and North American markets. But as global markets shift toward China and the emerging economies of Asia, the dream of westward expansion has been revived by one of the world’s biggest and most improbable construction projects.

The Interoceanica, a highway stretching a thousand kilometers across the Amazon Basin, up the 15,000-foot-high face of the Andes and down to the Pacifi c in Peru, is as worrying as it is ambitious. With additional branches already planned, it has emerged as a serious threat to the human and natural ecology of the greatest expanse of rainforest on the planet. What makes it especially worrying is that construction of the highway, estimated to cost $4 billion, has received almost no attention and little debate. Its origins trace back to September 2000, when a meeting of South American presidents convened by Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso endorsed a plan called the Initiative of the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America, known as IIRSA. At the time, the topic of the day was regional economic integration. In the minds of many of its leaders South America was falling behind in the global economy as regional trade blocs, such as NAFTA and the expanding European Union (EU), seemed to grab the economic initiative. The U.S. proposal for a Free Trade Area of the Americas was perceived by Brazil as a threat to its claims of leadership.

The presidents endorsed a sprawling plan, the centerpiece of which was the Interoceanica highway, reviving an earlier idea for a transborder corridor that would facilitate Brazilian trade with China. Then called Transoceanica, but quickly dubbed the “Road to China,” the idea languished for more than a decade until it was reconceived as part of the sprawling IIRSA project, which pulled together national wish lists of no less than 350 infrastructure projects, including highways, bridges, railways, ports, airports, and transmission corridors. Should the full plan be realized, the greatest remaining expanse of tropical forests on the planet will be transformed into the industrial heartland of South America. Highway corridors converging inward from the Atlantic coast and from the Andean countries will meet and cross in the Amazon, drawing and concentrating settlement and development into the green heart of the continent. Yet in the nine years since the South American presidents met, the IIRSA blueprints for transforming the Amazon have attracted surprisingly little attention. That may have been because the presidential directives setting the plan in motion bypassed normal procedures of public hearings and legislative debate in each of the affected countries. It may also be that IIRSA was dismissed by many as yet another dreamy Bolivarian scheme for continental unity, destined to fade away like so many other continental visions extending back in time to the Great Liberator himself.

For better or worse, the dream is coming to life. Construction of the main road is expected to be completed as early as 2010, ensuring that the Interoceanica will play a key role in the ultimate goal of regional economic integration.

The architects of the project are proud of their achievement, which may be one reason I was invited by Constructora Norberto Odebrecht, the Brazilian construction company, to see how far they have come. That’s how I came to find myself last fall in Puerto Maldonado, a once-languid Peruvian frontier town on the Amazon, the jumping-off point for a trip deep into the heart of the continent to witness the final phase of construction. The trip proved a jarring contrast with a visit I made to the area in 1991, when I first became acquainted with the trans-Amazon corridor project. Puerto Maldonado itself was an introduction to the conflicting images of the future embodied by the new highway. Roadside billboards advertise the town as a gateway to an ecotourism paradise. One boasts:

“Puerto Maldonado, Capital of Biodiversity;” another, more grandly, claims the town as the “Biological Capital of the World and Ecological Patrimony of Humanity.”

But signs of another, darker vision are everywhere as the surrounding forests come under siege from forest clearing and burning, illegal logging and land speculation. On the first morning, accompanied by the two guides assigned to me by the company, Gabriel and Devey, we left Puerto Maldonado heading west. A passing logging truck made clear that commerce was already flourishing. The pavement soon gave way to a narrow red-dirt track baked hard by the intense tropical sun. African Zebu cattle grazed among blackened stumps in pastures where the forest has been cleared and burned back from the roadway.

The tension between the vision of an ecological paradise and reality has already triggered violence.

In Februar y2008, a local municipal official, Julio García Agapito, spotted a truckload of illegally harvested mahoganylogs. In the process of reporting the sighting to federal officials, he was accosted by gunmen and shot dead. Several months after García’s death, demonstrators converged in Puerto Maldonado to protest a presidential decree authorizing the sale of communal lands. In the ensuing violence the town hall was burned to the ground. Such violence has been an all-too familiar characteristic of Amazon commercial development in the recentpast. But the contrast between ecological aims and commerce is all the more intense here, because the headwaters region represents the last possibility for preserving the wild pre-settlement Amazon.

The centerof this extraordinary ecological patrimony is nearby Manu National Park, world-renowned for its profusion of Amazon wildlife—a region where visitors encounter nearly 1,000 species of birds (10 percent of the world’s species), troops of monkeys clambering through the tree canopies, huge mixed flocks of green parrots and red and green macaws swarming to nearby salt licks, tapirs crashing through the forest toward mud wallows, giant otters surfacing in the oxbow lakes, and, if one is lucky, a jaguar or anaconda.Elsewhere in the Amazon, such scenes are a rarity. Wildlife has been heavily hunted or disrupted by generations of rubber tappers, gold miners and forest settlers in much of the rainforest. The exception is the western headwaters region, where long stretches of rapids and waterfalls pouring off the mountains have blocked access.

The pristine qualityof the western Amazon, in effect, has been cradled and protected by the ramparts of the Andes. But for how much longer? Just beyond the ceja de montaña (the brow of the mountain), we reached the Peruvian village of Santa Rosa. Above this village, the construction zone looms into sight. Work crews here are widening and grading the road and laying a base course with gravel.The sheer scale of the construction effort becomes vividly clear. According to Gabriel, about 6,500 men and women are on the job during the dry season, mobilizing 1,500 trucks, bulldozers, earth movers, and other pieces of heavy machinery. As we pass through Masuko, a wildcat gold-mining camp set in a moonscape of rock and gravel, we encounter some older Amazon realities. Gold buyers occupy most of the storefronts. Masuko may be remote, but gold travels well from all locationsin all seasons. Looking across the wasteland, Gabriel shrugs and states the obvious: “the government does not have the capacity to control this gold mining.”The construction zone resumes beyond Masuko, where a narrow bridge takes us to a precarious track cut from near-vertical slopes that rise upward into the mist. On our left, far below, a river cascades downward, continuous whitewater thundering through the boulder-filled channel.Roadwork here has created a traffic jam, as local drivers jockey with heavy equipment and trucks for their turn to thread the maze. A Peruvian policeman stands by passively as workers unscramble the traffic. Gabriel explains that the policeman, who is on the Odebrecht payroll, is on duty simply to lend the color of authority to traffic management. Toward nightfall we are again heldup by workers and heavy machinerycontending with an ancient landslideof giant boulders and rock slabs thatseem about ready to resume their downward descent. Workmen are jackhammering boulders, preparing to blast a way through. Several yards up the track, a vehicle emblazoned with a red cross is parked alongside the road. Our driver radios the supervisor: the machines move, a grader pushes away a pile of rock and we weave our way through.Night descends quickly in the tropics. As the sky darkens, lights up the canyon to the left signal that we have reached the main construction camp. Checking in through a security gate, we pass a large maintenance yard,rows of prefab dormitories and the administrative center. At a meeting hall large enough for 100 participants, Sergio, the project manager, gives us a sophisticated PowerPoint presentation of the project, complete with a map showing IIRSA projects throughout the South American continent, statistics about the Interoceanica, a description of hiring and personnel policies and training programs, and even information on the medical clinic staffed by a physician, along with a summary of economic benefits accruing to local communities. Listening to this talk, I am beginning to realize that this is not just another construction company that managed to be the low bidder. Odebrecht is a powerful agent of Brazilian expansion. As long ago as 1991, when I first encountered the project, Odebrecht depicted its “Road to China” as a boost for trade: by eliminating the need to ship goods through the Panama Canal, the highway would speed the process of transforming Brazilian soybeans into Asian tofu.

THE ECONOMICS OF TOFU TRANSPORT the road to China, however compelling as a vision of national destiny, has never been supported by economic reality. Trucking bulk commodities over land, never mind up and down the Andes, is expensive. Shipping by sea costs less than onetenthof land transport.

Cutting out a few thousand kilometers of ocean distance would be nothing against the costs of trucking over the Andes. That’s not just my conclusion. Mato Grosso’s governor, Blairo Maggi , who is also Brazil’s largest soy farmer and a fervent advocate of Amazon development, observed that a road over the Andes would be “too expensive,” declaring that he would continue to ship through Atlantic ports. But the advocates of IIRSA make another claim for the project’s economic viability. They argue that the Interoceanica is needed to access the oil and gas fields now being developed in headwater regions of thewestern Amazon.

Indeed, an oil and gas boom is underway along the easternface of the Andes, reaching from Bolivia into Peru and northward into Ecuador and Colombia, with profound consequences for the future of the Amazon. In Peru, a huge gasstrike at Camisea, close to Cuzco, is under development. Camisea, however, is not an argument for road building. In fact, it makes exactly the opposite case, that roads are not necessary for modern oil and gas development. After international outcry over the Camisea project’s potential impact on indigenous forest, the company has sought to use helicopters instead to lay the pipeline down to the coast. The airborne delivery was an alternative to building roads and opening the forests up to destruction. If neither soybeans nor oil and gas are likely to repay the huge investment in the Interoceanica, there is one export commodity that assuredly will. The export of timber products, mahogany, cedar, and other high-value tropical hardwoods will benefit from new roads. Even now, without roads, mahogany is being illegally harvested, with logs cut to dimension timber and flown outfrom small airstrips to Lima. The road to China, it turns out, will be a fine all-weather logging road, opening access to still more of the Amazon forest.

Neither Odebrecht nor IIRSA any longer advances the “Road to China”argument for the Interoceanica. The billboards in Puerto Maldonado, inaddition to their biodiversity boasts,now proclaim simply “Progress and Development—Brazil and Peru.”

Even the new name, Interoceanica, suggests a more limited use: travel and development across the Brazil-Peru region.

The winding mountain road takes our group into the cloud forests, the tall canopy giving way to tangles of low trees and shrubs. Clouds drift down to the ground, leaving the land perpetually misty and wet. Far above us, earthmoving machines are perched on the slopes, so high up they look like tinker toys, as workers struggle to dig diversion channels to drain the incessant rains away from the exposed cuts. I wonder aloud how long it will be before this road goes the way of many Amazon roads that are pushed through the forests, then left to melt away in the rain, becoming nearly as impassable as the pioneer routes they were meant to improve. “That won’thappen here,” Gabriel insists. “We have a long-term concession contract that obligates Odebrecht to maintain the road for the next 25 years.” It is a public-private concession, he adds,what in the U.S. is called B.O.T.: build, operate, transfer. The Interoceanica will be operated by Odebrecht as aprivate toll road, with revenues going to repay construction costs and to finance ongoing maintenance. How much will the tolls be, and how does the construction financing work? Gabriel and Devey are vague. Highway finance is for the experts in Brasília and Lima, they say. Maintenance costs and profitability aside, the Interoceanica is an impressive example of Brazilian engineering, creative financing and international cooperation. Only time will tell whether the road is an optimal investment of public resources, for there was little economic analysis put forward by IIRSA, Odebrecht or the governments of Brazil and Peru. The financing scheme calls for construction costs to be paid through bonds sold into international markets. In theory, the bonds are to be paid down over time from tolls collected by Odebrecht as the concession operator. In fact, all parties concede there will not be sufficient traffic for tolls to repay the construction outlays. So to achieve a bondrating sufficient for the markets, the bonds are guaranteed by the Peruvian government. This means that, in the end, the road is being paid for by the Peruvian government.

MORE TO COME?  Why such an elaborate financing mechanism, when it is understood by all participants that the bonds are essentially drawing on the public purse of Peru? The likely answer is that by structuring the financing through an intermediary, IIRSA and its private sector partners have been able to circumvent the Peruvian planning process and the constraints of that country’s national budget.However lacking in transparency and national accountability, and whatever the human and environmental costs and lack of economic logic, the Interoceanica was probably inevitable. The Andes could not serve forever as a Great Wall holding back Brazilian expansion.

What’s more surprising is that IIRSA plans on building more roads. According to public documents, IIRSA believes that one road is not nearly enough. The Interoceanica is just the beginning. IIRSA plans call for at least two more transportation corridors across the western Amazon: IIRSACentral and IIRSA Norte.

IIRSA’s bold ambition raises a number of questions about the costs: economic and environmental. Is one highway corridor, whose economic rationale is still to be proven, across the western Amazon and over the Andes sufficient? Is there any reason for additional road corridors that put forests at risk and threaten the existenceof native forest communities? Rather than build new roads, what is sorely needed is an international plan to conserve and protect the remaining western Amazon headwaters.         But that doesn’t seem to be in IIRSA’s plan.

- The IIRSA Central will roughly parallelthe Interoceanica, much as the east-west interstate highways run inparallel corridors across the United States. It will branch off from the Interoceanica in Rio Branco, the capital of the Brazilian state of Acre. From RioBranco the road corridor will run west across the international border to thePeruvian city of Pucallpa, connecting from there to existing road corridors down to the Pacific. On the Brazilian side, the IIRSACentral corridor will cut a swath through the forests of Serra do Divisor National Park, renowned for its diversity of local species that have evolved along divergent paths in the isolated foothill elevations of the Andean region.The area is so isolated and so little known that bird species new to science are still being discovered and described. Ironically, even as IIRSA planners, with Brazilian leadership, are readying to invade the park, the Brazilian government has nominated Serra do Divisor Park for the UNESCO register of World Heritage Sites. Across the border in Peru, IIRSA Central will slice through and open up a reserve established to protect the largest remaining sanctuary of uncontacted indigenous groups on theplanet, who live in voluntary isolation from contemporary society. How such a redundant and destructive plan for a second transportationcorridor across the Amazon headwatersand over the Andes can take form with a minimum of discussion reveals much about the IIRSA process, or rather, lack of process. IIRSA projects have been designed and imposed from the top down, given aircover by presidential endorsementsand validation by the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB) and other international agencies. The cross-border section of IIRSA Central, through the Serra do Divisor, has not yet gone out to bid, and there may yet be significant opposition within Brazil to the destruction of agreat national park, as well as protest from increasingly vocal indigenous rights groups within Peru.

- The third transportation corridorin this Amazon-Pacifi c integrationplan, IIRSA Norte, embodies a novel concept, possibly refl ecting some latent IIRSA capacity for enlightened planning. It is a bimodal land-water transportation corridor extending up Amazon River tributaries from Iquitos to the Peruvian city of Yurimaguas where vessels would disembark passengers and payloads to continue via a modern highway over the Andes and down to the Pacific coast.

Iquitos needs a transportation solution.It is by many measures the most remote city on the planet. There is no road access from the outside world. A visitor reaches Iquitos only by air or by ocean vessels coming nearly 4,000 kilometers upriver from the Atlantic. Iquitos has benefited from its isolation. It has become the ecotourism center of Peru and increasingly of the entire Amazon, by virtue of its close integration with natural surroundings, wildlife and native forest inhabitants. A bimodal river corridor would preserve the ambience of a city connected to the natural forest and riverine world. Employing the Amazon river system for the greater length of the transportation corridor would eliminate, or at least slow, the unnecessary road-building and deforestation, displacementof indigenous peoples and land-invasions that always follow. The highway anchor of IIRSA Nortefrom the Pacific over the Andean crest to the frontier city of  Yurimaguas is now under construction. The cast of players is familiar: 25-year toll road concession; financing from the Andean Development Corporation (CAF); guarantees from the Peruvian government; and a construction consortium led by Odebrecht. As this highway portion of IIRSA Norte nears completion, however, there is no sign of planning, much less actual work, along the river-corridor from Yurimaguas down to Iquitos. There are no improvements to the rudimentary port facilities, no upgrades to the primitive boats that operate on irregular schedules. The stark reality suggests that the “bimodal” concept is not a serious proposal, but rather a façade to justify the road to Yurimaguas with the hope of extending the highway down to Iquitos and beyond, through Brazil across to the Atlantic. Should the highway corridor proceed to Iquitos, and eventually into Brazil, the intended beneficiary, the city of Iquitos, will not be the only loser. Other threatened areas include the Pacaya Samiria NationalReserve, Peru’s largest national park, and the expanses of undisturbed forest stretching north and west toward Ecuador’s Yasuni National Park.

A NOT-SO-MODESTPROPOSAL

IIRSA has initiated a new era of infrastructure development inSouth America. It has built a political and economic structure that bypasses local and national governments, transcending them with a virtual organization shaped by the dark energy of Brazilian dynamism and held together with informal networks of public-private collaboration. The momentum of IIRSA projects wil lundoubtedly slow in the headwinds of a global recession. But, having demonstrated its capacity to deliver, IIRSA is not likely to disappear. Going forward, the issue is how best to bring transparency, accountability and a sense of geospatial integrity into a deeply flawed process. In past decades, human rights organizations, environmentalists, scientists, and sustainable development advocates, have typically taken their concerns to, and found a hearing at, the World Bank and the IDB. Recently, however, a new generation of regional development banks such as the CAF and the Brazilian National Development Bank (BNDES) has taken the lead in financing the Interoceanica and other IIRSA projects. And these institutions have proven impervious to environmental and human rights concerns. If IIRSA is to be reformed, environmental, native rights and economicreform groups within theSouth American continent, will need to bulk up with technical expertise, funding and broader public support from within the national boundaries of their member countries, and from abroad.

At the international level, pressure for IIRSA reform must be generated from a broader base of governmental, private-sector, and multilateral institutions, including aid and finance agencies within the U.S. government and the European Union. The World Trade34 Americas Quarterly SUMMER 2009 AMERICASQUARTERLY.ORG Organization must be drawn into an expanded role that supports trade insustainable goods and services and penalizes products that do not meet such standards.

Consumers and corporations must be induced to adopt truly sustainable purchasing and procurement practices. The financial sector should raise its standards for project financing and underwriting, Even as IIRSA continues on a path likely to transform the Amazon into an ecological desert, a new economic  alternative is emerging with the potential to change direction. Global warming is now the most urgent international threat of our time.

Thedestruction of tropical forests contributes an astonishing 20 percentof the CO2 emissions causing globalwarming. And the emergence of an international carbon trading systemcould give economic value to tropical forests, compensating communities for the global ecosystem services provided by standing forests.

Brazil is the world’s number-one source of atmospheric carbon dioxide emitted from forest clearing and burning. Recently, Carlos Minc, the newly appointed environmental minister, pledged that Brazil will reduce its rate of deforestation by 50 percentby the year 2017, widely seen as the first step toward qualifying Brazil to participate in world carbon markets, thereby providing an economic incentive for forest protection. But a better way to preserve the fragile natural treasures that would be affected by the three transcontinental highways would be the creation of an internationally protected area, straddling both sides of the borderbetween Brazil and Peru. If transborder road-projects such as the Interoceanica can be brought into being by international agreement, then it is time for international parks to be established by the same process. If highways can be fi nanced through the IDB and other international financial institutions, then it is past time for those institutions to negotiate provisions for transborder protected areas in their planning and financing. Andthe national presidents who have so casually given credibility to the IIRSA process should be called to account by their own people for the protection of their national patrimony.Brazil’s emerging national policy,which envisions an eventual end to deforestation, cannot exist alongside IIRSA plans for an Amazon Basin carved up by an internationa lnetwork of road corridors. Now thatBrazil has at last reached the Pacific, it is time for this great nation to lead, domestically and internationally, by creating a coalition of presidents and governments to confront these contradictions of regional development policies and to establish an international plan that can protect the unique natural resources that lie across its borders. It would be an effort that would match the economically questionable and environmentally disastrous ambitions of IIRSA but promises far greater long-term returns.

Bruce Babbitt has served as Governor of Arizona and as U.S. Secretary of the Interior under President Clinton. He is currently researching IIRSA as a fellow of the Blue Moon Fund.

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The above terrific article leads us to the point were we see clearly that trees standing will be much more of value to their host country then choped up and sold for timber – this in particular for the Amazonas that does not have land quality that will lend itself easiliy to agriculture once the trees are gone.

It thus boggles my mind how National governments do not realize that being paid for leaving resources in place, is actually a much better guarantee for future income. Obviously – this requires also that outside governments understand that at meetings like the upcoming climate conference in Copenhagen,  they must make adequate offers to countries like Brazil and the Anden Countries, to make it possible for them to become part of the solution to the Global Warming requirements, rather then propelling themselves, and the rest of the world, on this down-hill treck they started with the construction of the trans-Andean highways, whose main purpose could only be the export of native hard-woods.

 http://democracyctr.org/blog/2009/06/amb…

 http://www.as-coa.org/article.php?id=173…

SATURDAY, JUNE 27, 2009
Ambassadorial Moves

Last September, in the midst of violence by opposition groups in the Bolivian departments of Santa Cruz and Pando, President Evo Morales accused U.S. Ambassador Phillip Goldberg of having a clandestine hand in that violence and ordered him out of the country.

That set off a chain reaction of diplomatic tit-for-tats. The Bush administration kicked out Bolivia’s ambassador to Washington, Gustavo Guzman, then “decertified” the Morales government’s anti-coca program and based on that cut Bolivia from the ATPDEA trade preference program. Unable to resist a good diplomatic mud-wrestling match with Washington, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez pushed himself into the game and kicked out the U.S. ambassador to his country as well, leading to the Bush administration’s ouster of Venezuela’s ambassador to the U.S.

By the time it was over. this diplomatic version of “screw you, no screw you“, left behind four embassies operating on auto-pilot, a path or torched diplomatic relations, and with the elimination of the trade preferences, thousands of Bolivian workers with their jobs on the line.

Well, this week, as part of the ongoing game of making nice between the Obama administration and the Chavez government, the two countries announced that they are returning their respective ambassadors to Caracas and Washington. U.S. Ambassador Patrick Duddy and Venezuelan Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez are dusting off their suitcases and getting ready to return to their former diplomatic outposts. This follows Obama’s and Chavez’s “all smiles” visit in April at the Summit of the Americas in Tobago.

So what about the diplomatic rift that started it all, between the Washington and La Paz?

Interestingly, even as Chavez, the supposed “bad boy” among the South American left presidents is rebuilding bridges, Morales’ moves with the U.S. are still sour. At Tobago, while Chavez was handing Obama a book to read, Morales was demanding that the U.S. President declare that his fingerprints weren’t on the alleged assassination conspiracy linked to four men killed by government troops in Santa Cruz.

So, will U.S. and Bolivian ambassadors be returning to their posts anytime soon? Certainly, the same ambassadors won’t be, as in the case of Venezuela.

Former Ambassador Goldberg probably wouldn’t choose to return to La Paz for all the saltenas in Cochabamba, given the constant state of combat between he and Morales. This week Mr. Goldberg was handed his new U.S. diplomatic assignment, leading the U.S. team in charge of implementing sanctions against the government of North Korea over its recent atomic tests. That probably fits Mr. Goldberg better anyway, who in Bolivia seemed much more at ease chastising foreign leaders than forming good relations with them, a task that Morales never made especially easy.

Former Ambassador Guzman, who I visited with a couple of months after his return to La Paz, probably wouldn’t head back to Washington for all the Starbucks coffee in Dupont Circle. He and his family, including a new baby, seemed quite happy to be back home in Bolivia once more.

This past week Secretary of State Clinton sent an emissary to talk with Morales, following up on a high level U.S. diplomatic mission here not long before. Clearly the Obama administration would like to get its Bolivian relations in order. Where Morales is on this is anyone’s guess.

But if an announcement between La Paz and Washington is forthcoming, akin to the one this week between Washington and Caracas, both countries will have to go through the process of nominating and approving a new pair of ambassadors.

In Washington that process will likely go smoothly, with few in the Senate likely to challenge whomever President Obama selects (I am betting on a Latino or Latina). In La Paz the case may be different. The opposition in the Senate already denied, last year, President Morales’ appointment of Pablo Solon as Ambassador to the UN (he now essentially serves in that post, but under a different title). That was pure politics, given the fact that Solon is probably the most able representative Bolivia could have in the U.S.

So watch in the next week or two for signs that Bolivia and the U.S. are ready to follow suit with Venezuela and refill the ambassador positions in their respective capitals. And then watch for it to get weird, as U.S./Bolivia relations just seem to have a tendency to do.

Oil and Indians Don’t Mix.
Friday 12 June 2009
by: Greg Palast   |   Visit article original @ GregPalast.com
 http://www.truthout.org/061209A

{actually oil and all indigenous people that love their land and live on their land – this is no match up}

There’s an easy way to find oil. Go to some remote and gorgeous natural sanctuary, say Alaska or the Amazon, find some Indians, then drill down under them.

If the indigenous folk complain, well, just shoo them away. Shooing methods include: bulldozers, bullets, crooked politicians and fake land sales.

But be aware. Lately, the natives are shooing back. Last week, indigenous Peruvians seized an oil pumping station, grabbed the nine policemen guarding it and, say reports, executed them. This followed the government’s murder of more than a dozen rain forest residents, who had protested the seizure of their property for oil drilling.

So – Indians in Yurimaguas, Peru, have blocked the road in an anti-government protest – power to them. But can they win?

Again and again, I see it in my line of work of investigating fraud writes Greg Plast. Here are a few pit stops on the oily trail of tears:

In the 1980s, Charles Koch was found to have pilfered about $3 worth of crude from Stanlee Ann Mattingly’s oil tank in Oklahoma. Here’s the weird part. Koch was (and remains) the 14th richest man on the planet, worth about $14 billion. Stanlee Ann was a dirt-poor Osage Indian.

Stanlee Ann wasn’t Koch’s only victim. According to secret tape recordings of a former top executive of his company, Koch Industries, the billionaire demanded that oil tanker drivers secretly siphon a few bucks worth of oil from every tank attached to a stripper well on the Osage Reservation where Koch had a contract to retrieve crude.

Koch, according to the tape, would “giggle” with joy over the records of the theft. Koch’s own younger brother Bill ratted him out, complaining that, in effect, brothers Charles and David cheated him out of his fair share of the looting, which totaled over three-quarters of a billion dollars from the native lands.

The FBI filmed the siphoning with hidden cameras, but criminal charges were quashed after quiet objections from Republican senators.

Then there are the Chugach natives of Alaska. The Port of Valdez, Alaska, is arguably one of the most valuable pieces of real estate on earth, the only earthquake-safe, ice-free port in Alaska that could load oil from the giant North Slope field. In 1969, Exxon and British Petroleum companies took the land from the Chugach and paid them one dollar. I kid you not.

Wally Hickel, the former governor of Alaska, dismissed my suggestion that the Chugach deserved a bit more respect (and cash) for their property. “Land ownership comes in two ways, Mr. Palast.” explained the governor and pipeline magnate, “Purchase or conquest. The fact that your granddaddy chased a caribou across the land doesn’t make it yours.” The Chugach had lived there for 3,000 years.

No oil company would dream of digging on the Bush family properties in Midland, Texas, without paying a royalty. Or drilling near Malibu without the latest in environmental protections. But when natives are on top of Exxon’s or BP’s glory hole, suddenly, the great defenders of private property rights turn quite Bolshevik: Lands can be seized for The Public’s Need for Oil.

Some natives are “re-located” through legal flim-flam, some at gunpoint. The less lucky are left to wallow, literally, in the gunk left by the drilling process.

Chief Emergildo Criollo told me how oil company executives helicoptered into his remote village and, speaking in Spanish – which the Cofan didn’t understand – “purchased” drilling rights with trinkets and cheese. The natives had never seen cheese. (“The cheese smelled funny, so we threw it in the jungle.”)

After drilling began, Criollo’s son went swimming in his usual watering hole, came up vomiting blood and died.

  I asked Chevron about the wave of poisonings and deaths. According to an independent report, 1,401 deaths, mostly of children, mostly from cancers, can be traced to Chevron’s toxic dumping.

Big Oil treats indigenous blood like a cheap gasoline additive. That’s why the Peruvians are up in arms. The Cofan of Ecuador, unlike their brothers in Peru, have taken no hostages. Rather, they have heavily armed themselves with lawyers.

But Chevron and its Big Oil brethren remain dismissive of the law. This week, Shell Oil, got rid of a nasty PR problem by paying $15 million to the Ogoni people and the family of Ken Saro-Wiwa for the oil giant’s alleged role in the killing of Wiwa and his associates, activists who had defended these Nigeria Delta people against drilling contamination. Shell pocketed $31 billion last year in profits and hopes the payoff will clear the way for a drilling partnership with Nigeria’s government.

Congratulations, Shell. $15 million: For a license to kill and drill, that’s a quite a bargain.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 28, 2009

World Social Forum: SOS from the Amazon
Mario Osava

BELEM, Brazil, Jan 27 (IPS) – A human banner made up of more than 1,000 people, seen and photographed from the air, sent the message “SOS Amazon” to the world, in the first action taken by indigenous people hours before the opening in northern Brazil on Tuesday of the 2009 World Social Forum (WSF). The mass message reflects “our concern about global warming, whose impact we will be the first to feel, although we, the peoples of the Amazon, have protected and cared for the forests,” Francisco Avelino Batista, an Apurinan Indian from the Purus river valley in the Brazilian Amazon, told IPS.

“We are raising our voices as a wake-up call to the world, especially the rich countries that are hastening its destruction,” said Edmundo Omore, a member of the Xavante indigenous community from the west-central state of Mato Grosso on the border between the Amazon region and the Cerrado, a vast savannah region in the centre of the country. Both men belong to the Coordinating Committee of Indigenous Organisations of the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB), which joined the Quito-based Coordinating Body of Indigenous Organisations of the Amazon Basin (COICA) to create their “message from the heart of the Amazon.”


Nearly 1,300 indigenous people from about 50 countries, although mainly from Brazil, plan to raise the issues of their rights as original peoples and environmental preservation at this year’s edition of the WSF, which runs through Sunday in Belém, a city of 1.4 million people and the northeastern gateway to the Amazon.

“A crisis of civilisation” is under way, said Espinoza, who described the serious economic, energy and food problems, as well as climate change, as part of the same phenomenon.

In this situation, indigenous people should have political participation as of right, not “as folklore or as a merely cultural contribution,” Espinoza, one of the coordinators of the indigenous peoples’ presence at the WSF, told IPS.

The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, approved by the United Nations General Assembly, is of paramount importance here, he said. It should not be seen as a “utopian” document; rather, its provisions should be binding, like those of the International Labour Organisation’s Convention 169 on indigenous and tribal peoples.

Espinoza said he hoped this WSF would produce an agreement for global demonstrations similar to those held in 2003 against the United States’ invasion of Iraq.

This time around, the goal would be to mobilise “in defence of Mother Earth and against the commercialisation of life,” added to specific causes championed by each nation, such as the fight against hydroelectric power stations in Brazil that flood vast areas of Amazon rainforest and displace riverbank dwellers, he said.

The voices of indigenous people are bound to have a greater impact on environmental matters when “the risk of catastrophic climate change in the near future and disputes over natural resources are threatening the survival not only of indigenous peoples, but of humanity itself,” Espinoza said.
belonging to the Tukano ethnic group.

Indigenous and environmental issues will be even more visible on Wednesday, which is to be dedicated entirely to the Amazon region in an attempt to revitalise the PanAmazon Social Forum, inactive since 2005.

This is necessary for “a greater balance with nature,” at a time when Brazil’s plans for economic growth and the physical integration of South America are fuelling projects which have “strong negative impacts on the Amazon and Andean regions,” she told IPS.

“The hydroelectric dams flood the land and destroy biodiversity,” she said, while lamenting the fact that attempts to block the building of highways, that cause immense deforestation, have been frustrated in the courts, “which have more power.”

The presence at the WSF of presidents of Amazon region countries like Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, Evo Morales of Bolivia, and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, as well as Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo, should increase the impact of the event, hopefully benefiting the peoples of the Amazon, Machado concluded.

Indigenous peoples’ voices should be heard, because “we are the ones who were born and raised in the middle of the forest, and who lead a lifestyle that contrasts with the ambition of capitalism, which does not bring benefits to all,” said Omoré.

Furthermore, “we are the first to suffer the effects” of climate change. Rich people can cool themselves down with air conditioners and buy food in supermarkets, but “we depend on the fish in the river and the animals in the forest, so we are concerned about the future that belongs to everyone,” added Batista.

Under Bush, US Influence in Latin America Wanes.
Saturday 11 October 2008, by: The Associated Press

From left to right, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva forge alliances at a regional integration meeting in Manaos, Brazil, in early October 2008. (Photo: Antonio Lacerda / EPA)

Quito, Ecuador – In a matter of weeks, a Russian naval squadron will arrive in the waters off Latin America for the first time since the Cold War. It is already getting a warm welcome from some in a region where the influence of the United States is in decline.

“The U.S. Fourth Fleet can come to Latin America but a Russian fleet can’t?” said Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa. “If you ask me, any country and any fleet that wants can visit us. We’re a country of open doors.”

The United States remains the strongest outside power in Latin America by most measures, including trade, military cooperation and the sheer size of its embassies. Yet U.S. clout in what it once considered its backyard has sunk to perhaps the lowest point in decades. As Washington turned its attention to the Middle East, Latin America swung to the left and other powers moved in.

The United States’ financial crisis is not helping. Latin American countries forced by Washington to swallow painful austerity measures in the 1980s and 1990s are aghast at the U.S. failure to police its own markets.

“We did our homework – and they didn’t, they who’ve been telling us for three decades what to do,” the man who presides over Latin America’s largest economy, President Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva of Brazil, complained bitterly.

Latin America’s more than 550 million people now “have every reason to view the U.S. as a banana republic,” says analyst Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue think tank in Washington. “U.S. lectures to Latin Americans about excess greed and lack of accountability have long rung hollow, but today they sound even more ridiculous.”

From 2002 through 2007, the U.S. image eroded in all six Latin American countries polled by the Pew organization, especially in Venezuela, Argentina and Bolivia. (The others were Brazil, Peru and Mexico.) People surveyed in 18 Latin American countries rated President Bush among the least popular leaders in 2007, along with President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and just ahead of basement-bound Fidel Castro of Cuba, according to the Latinobarometro group of Chile.

In three years of presidential elections ending last year, Latin Americans chose mostly leftist leaders, and only Colombia and El Salvador elected unalloyed pro-U.S. chief executives. In May, the prestigious U.S. Council on Foreign Relations declared the era of U.S. hegemony in the Americas over. And in September, Bolivia and Venezuela both expelled their U.S. ambassadors, accusing them of meddling.

Along with the loss in political standing has come a decline in economic power. U.S. direct investment in Latin America slid from 30 percent to 20 percent of the total from 1998 to 2007, according to the U.N. Economic Commission on Latin American and the Caribbean.

The U.S. still does $560 billion in trade with Latin America, but in the meantime other countries are muscling in. China’s trade with Latin America jumped from $10 billion in 2000 to $102.6 billion last year. In May, a state-owned Chinese company agreed to buy a Peruvian copper mine for $2.1 billion.

Other countries are also biting into U.S. military sales in the region. Boeing Co. is vying with finalists from France and Sweden for the sale of 36 jet fighters to Brazil. Venezuela’s Chavez has committed to buying more than $4 billion in Russian arms, from Sukhoi jet fighters to Kalashnikov assault rifles. In April, Brazil and Russia agreed to jointly design top-line jet fighters and satellite-launch vehicles, and Brazil is getting technology from France to build a submarine.

“Similar deals could have been made with the United States had it been willing to share its technology,” said Geraldo Cavagnari, of the University of Campinas near Sao Paulo.

Last month, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin offered to help Chavez develop nuclear power. Even Colombia, the staunchest U.S. ally in South America, isn’t limiting its options. After expressing alarm about the Russian warships a week ago, its defense minister, Juan Manuel Santos, promptly headed for Russia himself to discuss “better relations in defense.” Chavez says he expects to hold joint Russian-Venezuelan naval exercises as early as November.

Bolivia also is looking to deepen ties with Russia and Iran.

Although the Islamic republic’s ambassador has yet to arrive in South America’s poorest country, its top diplomat there announced Friday that Iran will open two low-cost public health clinics.

And while Bolivia’s only announced Russian hardware purchase is five helicopters for civil defense, Moscow’s ambassador told the AP – after Bolivia booted the U.S. ambassador – that Russia has every right to help Latin American nations arm themselves.

“We know of many historical cases of U.S. intervention in Latin American countries,” said the diplomat, Leonid Golubev.

Thomas Shannon, U.S. assistant secretary of state for the hemisphere, wouldn’t comment directly on whether the U.S. has lost influence in Latin America. But he added that there is no doubt that the U.S. still holds most of the military power in the Caribbean, and said it has no interest in reviving “Cold War rhetoric.” Shannon also noted that overall U.S. aid to the region will reach $2.2 billion for 2009, to total more than $14 billion during Bush’s presidency.

However, critics point out that roughly half that aid is for the military or counternarcotics, and that Washington sends more money annually to Israel alone. Even U.S. giving has been dwarfed by Chavez’s checkbook diplomacy, which easily eclipses U.S. aid between outright gifts and discounted oil.

His largesse has lured several longtime U.S. friends. Honduras’ president, Manuel Zelaya, said last month that after pleading with Washington and the World Bank, he accepted $300 million a year from Chavez for agricultural investment to help fight rising food prices.

“Allies, friends, did not help me when I asked,” he said.

Costa Rica’s president, Oscar Arias, says Venezuela offers Latin America about four or five times as much money as the United States. Costa Rica has become the 19th member of Petrocaribe, through which Chavez sells Caribbean and Central American nations cut-rate oil at very low interest.

The diminished profile of the U.S. in Latin America comes after a history of welcomed influence dating back to President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor” policy of the 1930s, which emphasized cooperation and trade over military intervention. There have been major bailouts, such as Washington’s $20 billion rescue of Mexico in the 1994 peso devaluation crisis. As former Assistant Secretary of State Otto Reich noted, “We are the assistance bureau of first choice for the region.”

But the U.S. has an ugly legacy of covert intervention in countries including Chile, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Cuba. Chile’s center-left president, Michele Bachelet, was jailed and tortured by a U.S.-backed military dictatorship in the 1970s. She recently recalled telling Washington’s ambassador to Chile an old joke: “Some say the only reason there’s never been a coup in the United States is because there’s no U.S. Embassy in the United States.”

The United States has also long served as chief educator to Latin America’s elite. Correa is among its presidents with a U.S. graduate degree – though that didn’t stop him from accusing the CIA of infiltrating his military, or refusing to renew a lease for U.S. counterdrug missions to fly out of Ecuador.

With the U.S. facing its own financial crisis, it’s unlikely to be able to leverage economic influence in Latin America anytime soon. Sen. Barack Obama’s senior adviser on Latin America, Dan Restrepo, acknowledges that his candidate is essentially proposing a symbolic shift in style – albeit adding a special White House envoy for the Americas.

“Barack doesn’t see the United States as the savior of the Americas, but as a constructive partner,” Restrepo told the AP.

Reich, an adviser to Sen. John McCain who served three Republican presidents in the region, put it even more bluntly.

“No matter who is elected in November, there is not going to be any money for Latin America,” he said. “Latin Americans expecting financial resources, any kind of help from the United States, they are barking up the wrong tree.”

——–

Associated Press writers Dan Keane in Bolivia, Eduardo Gallardo in Chile and Stan Lehman in Brazil contributed to this report.

 The original September 15th posting:

Bolivia crisis summit for Latin American leaders:
Deadly violence over nationalisation campaign of Evo Morales brings intervention led by Chile and Brazil.

guardian.co.uk, Monday September 15 2008

Latin American leaders are to gather in Chile today in an attempt to end a political crisis in Bolivia that has seen more than a dozen people killed.

Violent clashes between supporters of Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, and his opponents have led to concern among neighbouring countries. Chile’s president, Michelle Bachelet, who is the temporary president of the 12-member Union of South American Nations, called the emergency summit late last week.

The scale of the protests against Morales’s plans to rewrite Bolivia’s constitution and redirect gas revenues has forced the president to declare a state of siege in some opposition-led provinces. Bachelet said: “We can’t remain impassive in the face of a situation that worries us all.”

***

The violence began two weeks ago. The government says at least 30 people have died in protests in the eastern province of Pando, while local officials put the number at 15.

All the presidents of the continent’s major nations are expected to travel to the summit in Chile today except for Alan García, the president of Peru. He is understood to be sending his foreign minister and has issued a statement supporting the elected Morales government.

Also attending the meeting will be José Miguel Insulza, the secretary general of the Organisation of American States.

The Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, could prove the key mediator. Brazil imports half its natural gas from Bolivia. Lula warned last week that the summit could only be effective if proposals from both the Bolivian government and the opposition were represented.

“If the two sides haven’t asked us to meet and we make a decision that neither side will respect, the meeting will end up being useless,” Lula said.

Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, a close Morales ally, hailed the gathering as an “extraordinary summit”. “Fascism must be stopped in Bolivia. A tragedy must be avoided,” he said.

Chávez has backed Morales in accusing the US of supporting the anti-government protests in Bolivia. Both presidents expelled US ambassadors last week. Washington responded in kind while calling the allegations baseless.

Several other Latin American presidents have defended Morales in the diplomatic spat with America. In a statement published on Sunday in Cuba’s communist youth newspaper Juventud Rebelde, Raúl Castro accused Washington of meddling in Bolivia’s internal affairs.

—————

IN THE MEANTIME   THE US AMBASSADORS WERE EXPELLED FROM VENEZUELA AND BOLIVIA – WILL THIS MOVE EXPAND TO A FEW MORE LA STATES?

————–

At least 28 have died in violence. Evo Morales’ government and the opposition accuse each other of arming paramilitaries.
By Patrick J. McDonnell, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 15, 2008

SANTA CRUZ, BOLIVIA — The death toll in last week’s violence in a remote northern province rose to more than two dozen, Bolivia’s government said Sunday, as it held frantic talks with opponents to avert further bloodshed.

Sporadic clashes were reported Sunday on roads outside this eastern city, center of opposition to President Evo Morales. Many Bolivians expressed fears that a tense situation could spin out of control if a deal was not reached.

***
Venezuela expels U.S. ambassador
Bolivia crisis sparks concern.
Bolivia orders U.S. ambassador expelled.
Each side has accused the other of arming illegal paramilitary groups.

***

“Better that we take action now, before we have 100 or 1,000 dead,” said Gov. Mario Cossio of Tarija province, designated negotiator for the states opposed to Morales.

There was no immediate word on the outcome of the talks in La Paz, the capital.

Rifts have been widening for two years, with intermittent outbursts of violence, but so far Bolivia has avoided falling into full-fledged civil conflict. However, many analysts call the current crisis the nation’s most perilous point in decades.

“Political, civic and union leaders must know that whatever happens from now on — whether this country becomes a peaceful and harmonious society or a battleground — will be because of their work,” the daily La Razon editorialized Sunday.

The government and the opposition called Sunday for an independent investigation into Thursday’s killings in Pando, a sparsely populated province along the Amazonian frontiers with Brazil and Peru.

In La Paz, Interior Minister Alfredo Rada said 10 more bodies had been found. That would bring the death toll to at least 26 in Thursday’s confrontation. Two more deaths were reported Friday in Pando, when the army retook control of the airport in Cobija, the provincial capital. The army is now patrolling the province, which is under martial law.

Rada labeled Thursday’s killings near the town of Porvenir a genocide organized by Pando Gov. Leopoldo Fernandez, an opponent of Morales.

The government has accused the governor and his allies of importing sicarios, or hired killers, from Peru and Brazil to shoot down defenseless peasants allied with the president. Fernandez has denied provoking the violence and blamed the central government for the clash.

On Saturday, Morales called the killings a massacre and told a crowd in the central city of Cochabamba that a “fascist, racist coup” was being mounted.

The conservative leaders of five of Bolivia’s nine provinces are aligned against Morales and his socialist program of nationalizations, land reform and stiff resistance to what he calls U.S. imperialism.

***

Critics call Morales a communist tyrant who seeks dictatorial powers. Morales, who won 67% of the vote in a recall election last month, says his policies have benefited the needy masses in South America’s poorest nation.

Foes of Morales are seeking greater autonomy for their provinces and a bigger share of revenue from gas and oil fields, which are concentrated in the dissident regions. Morales says his rivals want to take away funds that aid the poor and put the cash into plans to break away from Bolivia. The opposition denies separatist or violent motivations.

“We want peace, but with dignity,” said Ruben Costas, the governor of Santa Cruz province and a central opposition figure.

The president has frequently accused Washington of collaborating with his enemies and last week expelled U.S. Ambassador Philip S. Goldberg for allegedly fomenting rebellion. In his farewell address Sunday, Greenberg called Morales’ charges against him “false and unjustified,” and said his expulsion would have “serious effects in many forms.”

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a close Morales ally, tossed out the U.S. envoy in Caracas, saying he acted in solidarity with the Bolivian president. Washington responded by expelling both the Venezuelan and Bolivian ambassadors.

The Bolivian armed forces chief, Gen. Luis Trigo, has rejected Chavez’s offer to send in help should Morales be ousted.

The deteriorating scenario has alarmed Latin American leaders, who have expressed support for Morales. Several nations, including neighboring Brazil and Argentina, have offered to help mediate, but Morales has not agreed.

Today, South American leaders are to gather in Chile for an emergency session aimed at preventing Bolivia’s slide into civil war. Morales reportedly planned to travel to Santiago. The Bolivian opposition has also asked to attend.

The crisis has strong ethnic and regional roots.

Morales, Bolivia’s first Indian president, enjoys massive support among indigenous peasants from the western highlands, where La Paz is situated. Morales has charged that white and mixed-race “oligarchs” in Bolivia’s lowland provinces are out to get him.

“Their plan is to topple the Indian,” Morales told the crowd in Cochabamba this weekend. “They may topple the Indian, but they won’t topple the Bolivian people.”

patrick.mcdonnell @latimes.com

==========

A Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) Press Release – September 16th

Bolivia: A Profound Breakdown of Communication with Latin America.
•       Upwards of Thirty Dead in Bolivia
•       The Unforgivable has Again Happened, The Taking of Innocent Life
•       Was the Expulsion of the U.S. Ambassador Inevitable?
•       The import of UNASUR’s Strong but Dignified Role

With UNASUR having just met in Santiago, Chile to discuss the escalating crisis in Bolivia, the stage is set for a huge surge of autonomy for Latin America, owing to a series of newly auto-generated, self-managed and extensive regional initiatives.

In an extraordinary shift from a decades-long hegemonic status-quo during which Washington exercised de facto hemispheric supremacy, the U.S. role has dramatically diminished, at times becoming almost irrelevant.

In fact, even though U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Thomas Shannon, is a relatively enlightened figure who at times has stressed a rational dialogue between Venezuela, Bolivia, and Washington, U.S. attention toward the region, when at all focused, has been willful, narrow-minded, and self-absorbed.

Once installed in office, the Bush administration found itself distracted from Latin American issues by the Iraq war, giving the region the required space to develop its own consensus on regional developments, regardless of Washington’s ululations. This has heightened the ability of hemispheric leaders to halt or reverse some of the most imprudent U.S. policies that had gained ascendancy starting in the Clinton administration, and which then blossomed under Bush. Nevertheless, despite all signs to the contrary, the Bush administration continues to act as if its fiat still is supreme in Latin America, when, in fact, it has rapidly shrunk. An example of this is the revival of the Fourth Fleet as a Washington policy riposte, and with it the pretense of gunboat diplomacy on the ready, after a half-a-century of the fleet being dismasted, and the use of the “terrorism” factor to reassert an authority that is no longer exercisable.

Washington cannot continue to conduct itself as if it had a backyard in which Latin America could be firmly found. The U.S. has been absent from the region for far too long to attempt to roll back the tide of anti-private capital, anti-U.S. sentiment that has swept over much of the region. In its stead, the region yearns for a “third way” and for change. In fact, during this period of unilateral neglect, due to Iraq, the hemispheres started going its own way, coming up with new formulas in its quest to diversify relationships, pluralize its world trade contracts and engage in constructive relations across the board, including forming ties to what Washington, at the time, sees as “rogue” nations. During this period of transition, more left-leaning presidents were being elected president than ever before in the Americas’ history, a raft of regional organizations (which did not include the U.S. as a member) were formed, the region suddenly saw a remarkable rise in its importance on the world stage as its metal and agricultural commodities increased in relevancy and value during the current fuel and food crisis, and new links emerged between Latin America and India, China, Russia, and the EU.

***

The Breakdown of Bilateral Relations:

The latest U.S. flare-up with Bolivia most likely could have been avoided by a non-pro forma U.S. statement categorically declaring that this country would neither recognize nor have any form of relationship with the Santa Cruz-led breakaway departments in the Europerized, somewhat white and wealthy eastern sector of the country, just as Brazil and the other Latin American nations saw fit to do.

Instead, for a number of months U.S. Ambassador Philip Goldberg assumed the role of quarterback at meetings with the opposition, discussing strategies with his team.

He did this even though the opposition figures had clearly called for extra-constitutional actions against democratically-elected Evo Morales, even his ouster, and in spite of the fact that his widespread support was affirmed in July’s recall elections. (For more information, see COHA Research Associates Chris Sweeney and Jessica Bryant’s article, “Bolivia in Crisis”).

Washington claims that Goldberg’s meetings with the opposition were protocolic and conducted during routine visits to the secessionist regions.

It also insisted that he categorically denies La Paz’s accusations of his signaling support behind the opposition, let alone any involvement in secret plots against the central government. Yet, complicating matters in the Andean country is the fact that any number of U.S. ambassadors throughout Latin America –particularly dating back to the inauguration of the present U.S. administration– have a lengthy record of intervention in the domestic affairs of the countries to which they have been accredited. It is no secret that the State Department has had a long history of inappropriate and often covert intervention in Latin American internal affairs, often making use of a Reagan-era institutional facility known as the National Endowment for Democracy. Goldberg’s predecessors, Manuel Rocha and David Greenlee, persistently inserted themselves into Bolivian domestic issues. This scenario often involved U.S. ambassadors on station elsewhere in the region, where they openly threatening the end of remittances, trade benefits, or U.S. development assistance to a given country, if a leftist regime was elected to office –El Salvador and Nicaragua would be some examples of these. They also have pressured conservative political parties in such countries as Bolivia, El Salvador and Nicaragua to unite behind one candidate in order not to split the vote, allowing the otherwise weaker leftist candidate to ship into office.

Ultimately, a historical memory was invoked of humiliation, plunder and such transgressions as the Chaco war and a spate of U.S.-backed military Juntas under which the largely aboriginal majority of Bolivians have suffered as a result of self-serving past U.S. policies. Such acts of arrogance and intolerance that Washington recurrently has visited upon the region, served to incite the unbridled passions of a man with the Brobdingnagian temper of Hugo Chávez and even the more self-disciplined Evo Morales.

***

Washington Diplomacy or Lack of it:
In Washington’s eye, there always has been a distinction to be made between Evo Morales and his Venezuelan counterpart. While they are very different in temperament and style, the two share some major similarities, one of them being a sense of loyalty and solidarity with one another. What has made them into slippery fish for the Bush administration to handle is that no matter how garish may be their personal stylistic flaws, neither Chávez or Morales can in any manner be condemned for any democratic lapses, lack of human rights observance, nor mistreatment nor abuse of their citizens. You may consider them confrontational non-conformists, or condemn them for their non-adherence to traditional codes of diplomatic behavior, but you cannot cite them for being antipathetic in their behavior towards their own people. Surely there was enough here of democratic substance with which the U.S. could do business.

It is clear that the U.S. remains largely oblivious to the multifaceted developments that are taking place in an increasingly self-confident Latin America. Washington would do well to introduce a sense of perspective on Iraq and terrorism, and turn its attention once again to its vital national interests in this hemisphere. These issues go far beyond drugs, terrorism and security concerns. If the U.S. is to play a constructive role there, it must architect a new relationship with the region that can be deemed credible and taken to heart. Its investment must be more than just a Parthian shot aimed at a token act of respect for their sovereignty and must display an earnest concern for the area’s well-being.

***

UNASUR’s Debuting Role:
If such a re-positioning does not happen soon, it may well be too late for Washington to develop cooperative and mutually beneficial policies. Latin American-led trade agreements such as the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) could appear more sensitive and better adapted to regional well-being than any U.S.-crafted free trade agreement with nations that are too weak, like Costa Rica and Panama, to defend their authentic self-interests against subsidized U.S. farm products. Also, the fledgling Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) joins the Organization of American States as a multilateral, democratic body capable of facilitating regional integration and conflict resolution. The difference is, of course, that the former does not include the U.S. as a member. It is this stunning difference that ultimately could lead to the supplanting of the OAS by UNASUR a development that would be sure to lead to the return of Cuba to a major regional body. At its September 15 emergency meeting on the Bolivia crisis in Santiago demonstrates, the leaders of this multilateral organization are capable of engaging in constructive and balanced dialogue that is certain to profoundly affect the separatists. Refusing to fall prey to the mudslinging in which U.S. diplomacy frequently engages, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa dismissed probing by the press into the possibility of covert U.S. intervention in Bolivia, a charge that Correa himself was not making in other contexts, and he reiterated the support of member states to the restoration of order and preservation of unity in Bolivia.

***

Washington and the Bolivian Blow Up:

The near breakdown of relations between Washington and La Paz in the midst of the Bolivia crisis, perfectly exemplifies the disastrous consequences of the inherent intolerance and disrespect that the U.S. has long exhibited towards the region. Despite La Paz and Washington’s ideological differences, Assistant Secretary Shannon, while being a very significant improvement over his two most recent predecessors, Otto Reich and Roger Noriega, might have used this opportunity to more clearly indicate a U.S. commitment to the spirit as well as the letter of democratically-elected governance in the region, and that any form of separatism would be condemn. More vigorous support of Morales and the central government in the face of the reckless and greedy same plan of the pro-autonomy leaders in Bolivia might have provided a compelling reason for the secessionists to preserve order and avoid the violence which, tragically, has already claimed upwards of thirty lives.

This analysis was prepared by COHA Director Larry Birns and COHA Research Associate Raylsiyaly Rivero
September 16th, 2008

***

COHA Forthcoming Research

Puerto Rico: Another Lone Star?
By COHA Senior Research Fellow Juan Carlos Toledano

Venezuela’s Military in the Hugo Chávez Era
By COHA Research Fellow Alex Sánchez and COHA Research Associate Raylsiyaly Rivero

A Closer Look at the Violence in Bolivia
By COHA Research Associate Mary Tharin

Raul Castro and the Recent Reforms in Cuba
By COHA Research Associate Melissa Penn

Venezuela: Internal Opposition to Chávez
By COHA Research Associate Ruth Rivero
For full article click here

This analysis was prepared by COHA

Tuesday, September 16, 2008 | Press release 08.96

The Council on Hemispheric Affairs, founded in 1975, is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan, tax-exempt research and information organization. It has been described on the Senate floor as being “one of the nation’s most respected bodies of scholars and policy makers.” For more information, please see our web page at www.coha.org; or contact our Washington offices by phone (202) 223-4975, fax (202) 223-4979, or email  coha at coha.org.

Thirty-five Years Ago, Latin America Experienced Its Own September 11.

by: Teo Ballve, Colombian Writer, The Progressive, September 9, 2008.

In 1970, Salvador Allende became the democratically elected president of Chile. On Sept. 11, 1973, the Chilean military, supported by Washington, overthrew Allende and in his place a US-financed 17-year regime of terror took over. Latin America, which experienced its own September 11 thirty-five years ago, is no longer under Washington’s thumb.

And Washington, once the unofficial arbiter of the politics and economies of Latin America, has been sidelined, as progressive reformers have claimed victory in an ever-growing number of countries.

***

The political waters began turning in 1999 in Venezuela. The country’s leftist president, Hugo Chavez, came from the most unlikely of sources: the military.

Today, left-leaning leaders control almost every country of South America. These leaders are by no means a uniform bunch. But they all share the popular mandate of addressing the needs of the most disadvantaged citizens of Latin America, where nearly half the population of 550 million lives in grinding poverty.

Fulfilling campaign promises, many of these leaders have defied Washington’s economic and political strictures – first introduced in post-Sept. 11 Chile – in trying to lift millions out of poverty.

Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa have moved to take a larger share of profits from their nations’ vast oil and gas reserves to reinvest the money in anti-poverty programs.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a former union organizer, has similar plans for the profits expected from newly discovered massive oil reserves.

***

When Allende made similar reforms in Chile, President Nixon’s National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger famously sneered, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” The Nixon administration’s next move was to cut off all multilateral and bilateral foreign aid to Chile, fulfilling Nixon’s order to “make the economy scream.”

From his tragedy, new hope has arisen.

——–

Teo Ballve is a freelance journalist and editor based in Colombia. He can be reached at  pmproj at progressive.org.

We love, personally, Brazil – and have many friends in this stirring giant of a country. www.SustainabiliTank.info has much to thank to Brazil since our early visits to the country close to 35 years ago. Our Brazil button on this web – shows this only in small part. It was in Brazil we learned about the power Renewable Energy has to free us of all those effects that result from the addiction to petroleum. Furthermore, it was a nuclear physicist, Prof. Jose Goldemberg of Sao Paulo who made it clear to us, already then, that nuclear power is no solution. It was Dr. Jaime Rothstein of Sondotecnica, Rio de Janeiro, who already then showed us how the economy can benefit from moving away from oil imports and grow from local programs. He wrote those ideas up still at the time that Brazil was run by Generals and I witnessed how he presented his ideas to them and they saw the clear National interest in what he was saying.

We also love Fortaleza – the town in the State of Ceara, Northeast of Brazil – pushing 3 million people (in reality nobody knows the exact number of inhabitants – this because of the fact that the boom in the city has attracted additional people from the country-side) and that sits on the “shoulder” of Brazil. We were introduced to this town by Professor Jose Oswaldo Carioca who was the Rapporteur from Brazil, on topics of Biomass, to the preparatory meeting of the UN Conference on New And Renewable Sources of Energy (UNCNRSE – Nairobi, 1981). We have been many times to Fortaleza – and kept up contact with him and his people from the University of Ceara – the last time at the meeting in November 2007 that dealt with Green Chemistry.

Brazil’s secret is that with 185 million people it is dependent on the US only for 2.5 percent of its gross national product, compared with 25 percent of G.N.P. for Mexican exports – so, if the US economy slows down it does not have to have a major impact on Brazil. Brazil has a huge internal market, and the moment former President – Professor Henrique Cardozo – understood this – and made a go for developing this market by helping the poor and not only worry about the rich, and when his successor – “Lula” (Fernando Henrique Cardoso) of labor-leader fame, continued these policies of respecting the conventional economy while at the same time enhancing the social aspects of the country – Brazil started to boom. Brazil today is the Latin progressing giant that did not get stuck in populism rhetoric, but did go directly for fattening up the ranks of its middle class.

We follow on this website the Brazilian effort to open further doors to its economy in the US – as spearheaded by its diplomats and business people at the Brazilian-American Chamber of Commerce (BACC) headquartered in New York. Today I was full of surprise by the practical recognition of The New York Times – as evidenced by the Center-Front-Page serious reporting on Brazil that originated in Fortaleza. Brazil is following China and India, as third developing country that makes progress by having turned to help its own poor people. Sure, with a population only as big as 1/6.5 as the two larger upstarts, but with a territory their size, and natural riches that are immense, it has the potential to move forefront lined up with these other two giants. As it is becoming also an oil power – the sky is the limit – and the Brazilian diplomacy starts showing its muscle. So, the article’s timing, as a follow up to the crash of the WTO negotiations, should be viewed as a warning to the US that some countries – now led by China, India, and Brazil, will not allow themselves pushed around by a US-EU leadership that thinks very little of the impact of economic decisions on those “others.” China, India, and Mexico will suffer if the US and EU economies falter, but not Brazil. The Brazilians will just simply continue with their “Bolsa Familia” social programs and their successful microcredit programs, spearheaded by government banks like the Bank of the Northeast, and get more and more people to buy refrigerators and TVs. They will expand electricity use, and will drive using biofuels. They seriously develop solar, wind, and sea-wave technologies – and at their own pace the huge oil resource they found off-shore. I said “at their own pace,” because they are in no hurry to deplete those resources because others want to buy the oil. They will release some of this oil to the market – and this as refined products – just about as much as they think that is needed as funds for their national development program. We hope that they will not allow anyone to push them beyond as far as they find it to be to their own interest. Exporting soy beans and products, as well as other agricultural products, and ores, is just fine. They are going also for high-tech and medicines. All what they want is access to markets – like the ethanol market in the US and in Europe. If these are not forthcoming, there is no push to give in to demands by other economic powers. So, please read the following article carefully – so it is getting clear why Brazil can indeed afford to stand up to these other powers.

Strong Economy Propels Brazil to World Stage. Strong Economy Propels Brazil Into Long-Anticipated Global Role.

By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
Published: July 31, 2008, The New York Times – FRONT PAGE MAJOR ARTICLE.

From FORTALEZA, Brazil — Desperate to escape her hand-to-mouth existence in one of Brazil’s poorest regions, Maria Benedita Sousa used a small loan five years ago to buy two sewing machines and start her own business making women’s underwear. Also – Recent oil discoveries off the coast of Rio de Janeiro State have led to a construction boom in the port town of Angra dos Reis.

Riding a Wave of Growth:

Today Ms. Sousa, a mother of three who started out working in a jeans factory making minimum wage, employs 25 people in a modest two-room factory that produces 55,000 pairs of cotton underwear a month. She bought and renovated a house for her family and is now thinking of buying a second car. Her daughter, who is studying to be a pharmacist, could be the first family member to finish college.

“You can’t imagine the happiness I am feeling,” Ms. Sousa, 43, said from the floor of her business, Big Mateus, named after a son. “I am someone who came from the countryside to the city. I battled and battled, and today my children are studying, with one in college and two others in school. It’s a gift from God.”

Today her country is lifting itself up in much the same way. Brazil, South America’s largest economy, is finally poised to realize its long-anticipated potential as a global player, economists say, as the country rides its biggest economic expansion in three decades.

That growth is being felt in nearly all parts of the economy, creating a new class of super rich even as people like Ms. Sousa lift themselves into an expanding middle class.

It has also given Brazil new swagger, providing it, for instance, with greater leverage to push for a tougher bargain with the United States and Europe in global trade talks. After seven years, those negotiations finally broke down this week over demands by India and China for safeguards for their farmers, a clear sign of the rising clout of these emerging economies.

Despite investor fears about the leftist bent of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva when he was elected to lead Brazil in 2002, he has demonstrated a light touch when it comes to economic stewardship, avoiding the populist impulses of leaders in Venezuela and Bolivia.

Instead, he has fueled Brazil’s growth through a deft combination of respect for financial markets and targeted social programs, which are lifting millions out of poverty, said David Fleischer, a political analyst and emeritus professor at the University of Brasília. Ms. Sousa is one such beneficiary.

Long famous for its unequal distribution of wealth, Brazil has shrunk its income gap by six percentage points since 2001, more than any other country in South America this decade, said Francisco Ferreira, a lead economist at the World Bank.

While the top 10 percent of Brazil’s earners saw their cumulative income rise by 7 percent from 2001 to 2006, the bottom 10 percent shot up by 58 percent, according to Marcelo Côrtes Neri, the director of the Center for Social Policies at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro.

But Brazil is also outspending most of its neighbors on social programs, and overall public spending continues to be nearly four times as high as what Mexico spends as a percentage of its gross national product, Mr. Ferreira said.

The momentum of its economic expansion is expected to last. As the United States and parts of Europe struggle with recession and the fallout from housing crises, Brazil’s economy shows few of the vulnerabilities of other emerging powers.

It has greatly diversified its industrial base, has huge potential to expand a booming agricultural sector into virgin fields and holds a tremendous pool of untapped natural resources. New oil discoveries will thrust Brazil into the ranks of the global oil powers within the next decade.

Yet while exports of commodities like oil and agricultural goods have driven much of its recent growth, Brazil is less and less dependent on them, economists say, having the advantage of a huge domestic market — 185 million people — that has grown wealthier with the success of people like Ms. Sousa.

In fact, with a stronger currency and inflation mostly in check, Brazilians are on a spending spree that has become a prime motor for the economy, which grew 5.4 percent last year.

They are buying both Brazilian goods and a rising flood of imported products. Many businesses have relaxed credit terms to allow Brazilians to pay for refrigerators, cars and even plastic surgery over years instead of months, despite some of the highest interest rates in the world. In June the country reached 100 million credit cards issued, a 17 percent jump over last year.

At Casas Bahia, a modestly priced Brazilian furniture-store chain, the number of customers buying items on installment nearly tripled to 29.3 million from 2002 to 2007, said Sônia Mitaini, a company spokeswoman.

Riding a Wave of Growth – continued:

Other signs of new wealth abound. In Macaé, an oil boomtown near Rio de Janeiro, contractors are racing to finish new shopping malls and luxury housing to keep up with demand from oil-service firms. At a port in Angra dos Reis, a town known for its spectacular islands, some 25,000 workers have found jobs building oil platforms.

Petrobras, Brazil’s national oil company, shocked the oil world in November when it announced that its Tupi deepwater field offshore of Rio de Janeiro could hold five billion to eight billion barrels of oil. Analysts think there could be billions of barrels more in surrounding areas.

While the oil will be expensive and complicated to extract, Petrobras has said it expects to be producing up to 100,000 barrels a day from Tupi by 2010, and hopes to produce up to a million barrels a day in about a decade.

The new oil plays are setting off an investment boom in Rio de Janeiro, with an estimated $67.6 billion expected to flow into the state by 2010, according to the Rio de Janeiro State Federation of Industries, an industry group. Petrobras alone expects to invest $40.5 billion by 2012.

Some economists say a slowdown in the rest of the world’s economy, especially in Asia, which is soaking up much of Brazil’s exports of soybeans and iron ore, could crimp growth here. “But that probability is small,” said Alfredo Coutiño, the senior economist for Latin America for Moody’s Economy.com.

In fact, because Brazil’s economy has become so diversified in recent years, the country is less susceptible to a hangover from the struggling United States economy.

Brazil’s exports to the United States represent just 2.5 percent of Brazil’s gross national product, compared with 25 percent of G.N.P. for Mexican exports, according to Moody’s.

“What makes Brazil more resilient is that the rest of the world matters less,” said Don Hanna, the head of emerging market economics at Citibank.

The rest of the world certainly has helped. Soaring prices for minerals and other commodities have created a new class of super rich.

The number of Brazilians with liquid fortunes exceeding $1 million grew by 19 percent last year, third behind China and India, according to a survey by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini.

At the same time, President da Silva has deepened many of the social programs begun 10 years ago under Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who as president ushered in many of the structural reforms that laid the foundations of Brazil’s stable growth today.

In Ms. Sousa’s case, for instance, she owes much of the success of her underwear business to loans she has received from the Bank of the Northeast, a government-financed bank that has awarded microloans to 330,000 people to develop businesses in this fast-growing region.

Other programs, like Bolsa Familia, give small subsidies to millions of poor Brazilians to buy food and other essentials. Bolsa Familia, which benefits 45 million people nationwide in distributing an annual budget of about $5.6 billion, has been far more effective at raising per-capita incomes than recent increases in the minimum wage, which has risen 36 percent since 2003.

The bottom-up nature of such social programs has helped expand formal and informal employment as well as the Brazilian middle class. The number of people under the poverty line — defined as those earning less than $80 a month — fell by 32 percent from 2004 to 2006, Mr. Neri said.

The programs have been particularly effective here in Brazil’s northeast, historically one of poorest parts of the country. Residents here have received more than half the $15.6 billion doled out in social programs from 2003 to 2006, according to Empresa de Pesquisa Energetica, an arm of the Energy Ministry.

People here are using that new wealth to buy items like televisions and refrigerators at a faster rate than the rest of the country. The northeast, in fact, passed the country’s south in electricity use this year for the first time, the energy agency said.

Many families have bridged the gap to the middle class by using Bolsa Familia to meet basic needs, and then applying for small loans to start businesses and escape the informal economy. That is what Maria Auxiliadora Sampaio and her husband did in Fortaleza, a coastal city of 2.4 million people. They were receiving Bolsa Familia payments of about $30 a month, which they used to support their three children. Then, two years ago, Ms. Sampaio used a microloan of about $190 to buy nail polish and kick-start her manicure business, which she runs from home.

Today she is making around $70 a day — about four minimum salaries per month, she said. With her next loan she plans to put about $140 toward a stove to sterilize nail clippers, which today she does with hot water.

The fruits of her new business have allowed the couple to retile their house and buy a television and a cellphone. This month her husband, who works at a Cachaça factory, was able to realize a dream: to buy a drum set.

He plans to use it in a band that plays forró, a traditional music in the northeast. “We always ate and paid bills, but he waited and waited,” and finally bought the set for about $780, she said.

“I feel like we are part of this group of people that are coming up in the world,” said Ms. Sampaio, 28. “When you don’t have anything, when you don’t have a profession, don’t have the means to live, you are no one, you are a mosquito. I was nothing. Today, I am in heaven.”

 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/31/world/…