Half-spring forward

By Peter Krupa | Published: March 10, 2010

The last time I was in Venezuela, I never quite figured out what time it was. My laptop clock was always off by a half hour, in one direction or the other. When I got home, I remembered that Chávez had ordered the clocks moved back by half an hour to give kids more time to get to school.

In the realm of wacky, dictator-like decisions, putting your country one half hour off the entire rest of the world is pretty competitive. (Though it’s not nearly as awesome as building a gold statue of yourself that rotates to face the Sun. Get on it.) These days, however, Venezuela’s business folk are saying that putting the time back the way it was will save electricity.

Maybe they’ll compromise and move it back 15 minutes.

Anyway, this is as good an excuse as I’ll ever get to post this “who’s-on-first/what’s-on-second” exchange between Chávez and his education minister when the time change was implemented back in 2007. Right, OK, adelante. Wait.

Posted in Odd, Venezuela | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Mexico’s Supreme Court rules against human rights commission

By Peter Krupa | Published: March 10, 2010

Supreme Court building.

Bad news for human rights in Mexico. The Supreme Court ruled today that the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) can withhold information related to ongoing investigations from the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) if it so chooses. More specifically, the ruling upheld Article 5 of the Attorney General Act, which states:

[The PGR] will provide information to the National Human Rights Commission when requested in the exercise of its functions, as long as the information doesn’t put ongoing investigations or the safety of individuals at risk.

Emphasis mine. Of course, the PGR itself gets to decide what “risk” means. I imagine they like to err on the side of caution. This means it will be basically impossible for the CNDH to intervene and stop human rights violations in progress, as most of the bad ones (forced disappearance, unlawful detention, torture, etc.) take place during the “investigation.”

The court’s vote in the ruling was split, 7-4. There is no reaction yet from the CNDH.

(Image used courtesy of Thelmadatter via Wikicommons.)

Posted in Human Rights, Mexico | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Rush Limbaugh, health care reform protester sex tourist

By Peter Krupa | Published: March 9, 2010

(Via Costa Rica's Diario Extra.)

Rush Limbaugh has said he’ll move to Costa Rica if Congress passes health care reform. But that can’t be right. By Limbaugh standards, Costa Rica is practically Stalinist, what with the social security system providing government health care and government clinics to everybody who pays into the system (workers must contribute about 15% of their paycheck, if memory serves, or they get sent to a gulag in Cañas).

What’s Rush really after? I’ll tell you: Ass.

Yes, ass. In addition to being great at socialized medicine, Costa Rica is great at The Sex Tourism. And Rush knows something about The Sex Tourism. Either that, or he had something far more scandalous in mind when he traveled to the Dominican Republic in 2006 on a private jet with a bunch of dudes and a bottle full of Viagra.

It would also explain why he had Costa Rica on the tip of his oily tongue. Like, maybe he’s been here before? Had he been, you would never notice. He would blend in with his listeners down here like an old shoe, all the other divorced, good-ol’-boy, Parrothead, fat-assed shit-kickers from Texas and Florida and Alabama, bellied up to the bars along Gringo Gulch like hogs in slop, drinking $4 beers and flirting with prostitutes who call them papi and ask for money so they can buy their kids school supplies.

I hope Rush isn’t a Pacific Coast kind of guy, because there are no private hospitals out that way to treat his inevitable venereal diseases. Anyway, he’ll be happy to learn that the government-run clinics are actually quite nice.

Posted in Costa Rica, Odd, Travel | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Bigelow turns lens south

By Peter Krupa | Published: March 9, 2010

Terrifying.

Fresh off her Best Picture win for The Hurt Locker, director Kathryn Bigelow is talking about her next movie. It’s called Triple Frontier, a mistranslation of Triple Frontera, which is the border region shared by Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. The area is famous for being a no-man’s land, where anything goes, legally speaking.

It’s also famous for getting the stink-eye from the U.S. government for fostering terrorism boogies. Wrote MSNBC in a totally objective, non-panic-inducing article from 2007:

The Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia has taken root in South America, fostering a well-financed force of Islamist radicals boiling with hatred for the United States and ready to die to prove it, according to militia members, U.S. officials and police agencies across the continent.

In the minds of geography-challenged Americans, South America is practically Mexico, which is practically Tucson, so, you know, run for your lives. The U.S. military sent troops to Paraguay in 2005, ostensibly for “joint military exercises,” but more likely to supervise some extra-judicial killing and torture, like in the good old days.

Since Bigelow says Triple Frontier is being written by the same journalist who wrote The Hurt Locker, I imagine it’ll have something to do with terrorism and U.S. military operations in the border region, rather than the piles and piles of other things that happen in Latin America, which again just goes to show that Americans are only interested in the rest of the world insofar as they can view it through the narrow lens of their own domestic preoccupations.

Posted in Argentina, Arts and Culture, Brazil, History, Paraguay | Tagged | Leave a comment

Falta de respeto

By Peter Krupa | Published: March 9, 2010

Two Costa Rican congressmen almost came to blows yesterday on the floor of the legislature over a “falta de respeto.” As is typical of a Costa Rican sissy-fight, everyone is pretty polite about the whole thing, at least up until the end. You will note that Oscar López, the diputado who steps, is blind. Often during political rallies, he threatens to beat the opposition with his cane. No one figured he might mean it literally.

La Nación has all the gritty details.

Posted in Costa Rica, Odd, Politics | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Parapolíticas on the ballot

By Peter Krupa | Published: March 9, 2010

La Silla Vacia has published a great interactive map showing where the sketchy politicians will be running for office during Colombia’s legislative elections this month. Colombia has had a tough time putting together a Congress free of links to paramilitaries, drug trafficking, and left-wing guerrilla groups. Dozens of former lawmakers are under suspicion or actually in jail from the parapolíticas scandal, but as the interactive map indicates, family members or close allies are standing in for them in many elections.

Posted in Colombia, Politics | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The new novela

By Peter Krupa | Published: March 8, 2010

In Medellin, Colombia, a newspaper poll found that 78% of the population believes narconovelas (soap operas about drug trafficking mafias) are bad for young people, that they’re “teaching young people to seek the easy life and believe wealth can been obtained quickly and illicitly.”

Strictly speaking, however, that lesson is correct, especially in Latin America. Wealthy people – I’m talking the kind of wealthy people who can afford to own and maintain several yachts – don’t usually get their money “licitly,” through clever ideas and middle-class hard work. They get it by having a rich family, a juicy government hookup, or both.

Traditional telenovelas have always been about poor-meets-rich, and the aspirations of the former to become the latter. The difference is that they’re populated by hacienda owners and suit-wearing mansion-havers, not capos and kingpins.

In that sense, I guess you could argue that telenovelas haven’t really changed. They’ve just been updated.

Posted in Arts and Culture, Colombia, War on drugs | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Subsidies for drug traffickers

By Peter Krupa | Published: March 8, 2010

One of the longstanding, legitimate criticisms of NAFTA is that it put small farmers out of business by flooding Mexico with subsidized (and therefore cheap) U.S. corn. Apparently, Mexico had a mechanism in place to keep that from happening, in the form of its own subsidy program. As a cynical person such as myself might expect, things immediately went awry.

Reports the LA Times:

Today, the fund — far from helping the neediest — is providing large financial subsidies to the families of notorious drug traffickers and several senior government officials, including the agriculture minister.

The program allots cash to plots of land, not to individual farmers, so obviously the largest landholders end up getting the lion share of the pie, while the truly needy get a pittance. (In that sense, it sounds pretty similar to how U.S. farm subsidies work.)  Of the US$1.3 billion handed out last year, something like 80% went to 20% of the farmers.

(Image courtesy of Sam Fentress.)

Posted in Mexico, Trade | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Criminal

By Peter Krupa | Published: March 7, 2010

Violent toys and video games are now illegal in Venezuela. The law – called the Law for the Prohibition of Violent Video Games and Toys (Ley para la Prohibición de Videojuegos Bélicos y Juguetes Bélicos) – was passed in November and went into effect on Wednesday.

So what does it say, exactly?

The law prohibits “the manufacture, import, distribution, purchase, sale, rental, and use of violent toys and video games.” The all-important definition paragraphs of the law (published along with the rest of the law starting on page 2 of the December 3, 2009, edition of La Gaceta [PDF]) read as follows:

Article 3
1. Violent video games: Video games or programs that can be use on personal computers, arcade systems, video game consoles, portable devices or mobile telephones, or any other electronic or telephonic device, that contain information or images that promote or incite violence and the use of weapons.

2. Violent toys: Objects or instruments that in form mimic any kind of weapon used by the National Bolivarian Armed Forces, weapons of war used by any other nation, citizen or state security forces, as well as those that, though not promoting war, establish the kind of game that stimulates aggressiveness or violence.

No word yet on how Venezuela’s arbiters of justice plan to deal with the scourge of rubber bands, sticks, Space Invaders, spit wads, baseball, Madden NFL 2010, Wii Boxing and finger guns currently plaguing the nation. The punishment paragraphs muddle things further:

Article 13. Those who in any way promote the purchase or use of violent toys or video games as defined by this law will be punished with a fine of between 2,000 and 4,000 tax units.

Article 14. Those who import, manufacture, sell, rent, or distribute violent toys or video games will be punished with 3 to 5 years in prison.

Emphasis above is mine. “Promoting” could include everything from advertising a game console that plays violent video games, to posting on a chat forum, making a statement on television, or telling your friends about a violent video game. In short, it’s the kind of “chilling-effect” law that can be interpreted into applying to just about anyone.

The bitterly hilarious subtext to the whole thing is that the one really “promoting” violence and war in Venezuela is Hugo Chávez. Forget toys, he’s setting up peasant armies and arming them with real guns. He’s spent US$4 billion since 2007 on  high-tech Russian weaponry like Su-27s and tanks. And he’s constantly posing for photos holding weapons, like it’s the coolest, manliest thing ever.

Venezuela has the second-highest murder rate in the world, and fully 91% of those murders don’t even get investigated. These are real problems. Banning Pac-Man is not a solution.

Posted in Human Rights, Politics, Venezuela | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Location, location, location

By Peter Krupa | Published: March 7, 2010

I’ve experienced several earthquakes during my years in Costa Rica. I think the strongest was the Cinchona quake. At the time it hit, I was having lunch at a restaurant. The quake came on slowly, laterally, and went on for some time. I remember looking out the trembling window and seeing parked cars bouncing back and forth on their shocks.

Even though it killed dozens of people and displaced an entire town, to me it felt like a curiosity. That quake was 6.1 on the Richter scale. I said to myself, “Not so bad.”

So compared to that experience, when another earthquake hit Costa Rica on Friday night, I thought for sure it was a 6, or at least a 5.5. It only lasted six seconds, but it felt like a truck hit the building. Everything jumped. There was a low roar. It scared the bejesus out of me.

Come to find out, it was only a measly 4.4. So why so scary?

Read More »

Posted in Chile, Costa Rica | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

  • DAILY LINKS

    • The New York Times reports that lithium is the next big commodities boom, just as soon as people start buying millions of electric cars. The metal was never in much demand before, but now it's a principle ingredient of lithium ion batteries. The world's largest lithium reserves are found in Bolivia, but multinational companies are exploring in Argentina and Chile as well. [link]

      - #

    • When the Chilean Carabinero police said they were going to crack down on looters, they weren't messing around. So far, they've got 168 in custody, which has frightened other looters into giving back about US$3 million in stolen merchandise in exchange for amnesty. [link]

      - #

    • Brazil is hitting U.S. imports with trade sanctions in retaliation for U.S.' illegal cotton subsidies. The tariffs on U.S.-made cars, fresh fruit, food goods, and (of course) cotton will go up. The World Trade Organization awarded Brazil US$829.3 million in annual retaliatory trade restrictions against the U.S. last year. [link]

      - #

    • Patrick Corcoran has written a nice essay on why Mexican President Felipe Calderón is screwing the pooch with his security policy: "[T]he impression [is] that the administration, rather than adopting a detached and objective perspective of Mexican security, is simply addressing issues according to their importance in the media. Instead of guiding public opinion, the administration is chasing it." [link]

      - #

    • Honduran ex-President Mel Zelaya has found himself a job with Venezuela's PetroCaribe project as "Political Council." PetroCaribe gives Venezuelan oil to member states at preferential rates, one would assume in exchange for political favors. [link]

      - #

    • Argentina's "El Secreto de Sus Ojos" won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at last night's ceremony. The film is something of a detective thriller: A worn-out cop goes back to the past to solve a decades-old murder. [trailer, link]

      - #

    • Victims of rape at the hands of the military during Guatemala's civil war gathered in Guatemala City to tell their stories and call for justice: "Up to now, Alvarado said, no case of rape during the war has been investigated, much less brought to trial, so that the outrages remain in a state of 'total impunity.'" [link]

      - #

    • Environmental groups have been burning up the internet, trying to get James Cameron to give an Academy Awards shout-out to the people of Ecuador and their lawsuit against Chevron. They call it a real-life version of what happened in Cameron's Avatar. [link]

      - #

    • Eight people died in Peru when a bar served them soft drinks mixed with methanol. Police are investigating. Methanol - also known as wood alcohol - is ethanol's evil, deadly twin, and used in antifreeze, solvents, and fuel. [link]

      - #

    • Remittances to Latin American countries will stabilize in 2010, according to the Inter-American Development Bank. They fell 15% in 2009, to US$58.8 billion, below 2006 levels. The IDB cites economic recovery in the U.S., Spain, and Japan as factors in the stabilization. [link]

      - #