Lat/Am Daily » History

NAFTA and Mexican maize

Peter Krupa — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 00:56:41 +0000

The Nation has a long, wonky, wonderful article on Mexican maize cultivation, the effects of NAFTA, and the dangers of genetically-modified seeds. Author Peter Canby backs up his excellent writing with piles and piles of meticulous research. Not to be missed. [link, via SM] (Image from Joel Penner.)

Playtime

Peter Krupa — Mon, 03 May 2010 03:08:47 +0000

A somewhat hilarious AP article out today profiles Chávez’ efforts to arm and train some kind of civilian militia force. Frankly, it sounds like a rip-roaring good time: Take a few days off work (unless you weren’t doing anything anyway), play army with real guns, blow things up, etc.

I have family members who do this on weekends, and have at times participated. I can vouch for the entertainment value.

But Noticias24 has gotten its panties in a twist over the fact that the drill sergeants encourage their recruits to “kill those gringos!” This brings up an interesting question that several people have asked me in the last few weeks: Do Venezuelans hate Americans?

I’ve only traveled in Venezuela three times, so my experience is somewhat limited. But what I’ve seen is that while the president of Venezuela talks a lot of smack, Venezuelans still watch baseball and drive American cars and take shopping trips to Miami and sell most of their oil to the United States. They will not hesitate to give you a piece of their minds, but they will also buy you a wijky and invite you home to meet the family.

Probably their essential Caribbeanness has something to do with it.

But also, the thing is, to hate people from another culture, it helps to have been personally hurt by that culture in some way. All the macroeconomics, international politics, and military strategy that Chávez alludes to in his lengthy Sunday ramblings are perhaps outrageous, but abstractly so for your average Venezuelan.

In my experience, you’re much more likely to get hated on for your gringoness in Nicaragua or Mexico, where direct interaction with norteamericanos has often been distinctly unpleasant. In contrast, for many decades Venezuelans got employment, training, an improved standard of living, and some pretty decent-sized piles of oil cash from their contact with the gringos.

So if you want to see real gut-level gringo-hating in Venezuela, I think you’ll have to wait till US Marines are camped out in Miraflores and drawing mustaches on the Bolivar portraits. Until then, it’s just a game.

‘The Torture Coloney’

Peter Krupa — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 03:27:31 +0000

For your Wednesday evening reading pleasure, a very long, very strange article on Colonia Dignidad, a German colony founded in Chile by a child molester/Nazi named Paul Schaefer. In addition to being the personification of the evil cult leader, Schaefer – who died last week in prison – got into evil politics as well, torturing people on behalf of Pinochet.

The whole thing’s too weird and creepy to excerpt. Just print it out.

(H/T BoingBoing.)

Pecados de mi Padre

Peter Krupa — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 03:36:43 +0000

This looks like a fascinating movie: Pecados de mi Padre – Sins of my Father – purports to be a documentary on the life of Pablo Escobar’s son, Sebastián, but it also appears to have a healthy bit of good clean footage and storytelling about Pablo himself.

However, I have to say that having read Killing Pablo the whole thing seems a little weird. According to my foggy recollection, during Pablo’s final days, 16-year-old Sebastián was Pablo’s communication link to the world and to his troops, such as they were by that point.

And he took to the job pretty heartily.

That would make Sebastián a little more than just the innocent bystander he appears to be portraying himself as. Of course, many of us at 16 would have done something similarly craven if given the chance, but I still wonder if this documentary is an attempt at laundering the past.

Anyway, lots of questions. Hope I can find this somewhere other than HBO.

(Thanks to Anahí for the tip on this one.)

Kissinger and Operation Condor

Peter Krupa — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 18:21:15 +0000

The good folks at George Washington University’s National Security Archive project report that recently-declassified memos show U.S. Secretary of State and Nobel Prize winner Henry Kissinger directly ordering underlings to cancel warnings against launching Operation Condor to military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay .

Four days later, a car bomb killed former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier and his secretary Ronni Karpen Moffitt as they drove through Washington, D.C.

Frankly, I don’t find these documents as scandalous as the NSA does, although the AP says controversy over this particular point of history has been raging for some time. Avoiding warning other governments against committing atrocities is not nearly as outrageous as directly participating in or encouraging those atrocities. I suppose the implication is that if you avoid issuing warnings, you’re probably involved somehow.

What is interesting to me is the tone of the State Department communications. To wit:

What we are trying to head off is a series of international murders that could do serious damage to the international status and reputation of the countries involved.

Really? That’s what you’re concerned about? The “reputations of the countries involved?” I would have been concerned about the people to be extra-judicially tortured and murdered.

Anyway, it’s not like we needed further proof that Kissinger is a war criminal. Can you un-nominate someone for a Nobel Peace Prize?

Peter Krupa — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 04:02:42 +0000

Today from The Mex Files, a brief look at a despicable figure from Mexican history, Victoriano Huerta: “He hunted down Zapatistas (and anyone who looked like they might be a Zapatista — meaning, basically — everybody), stringing them up and engaging in a scorched earth policy across Morelos State.” [link]

NAFTA and Mexican maize

Bigelow turns lens south

Peter Krupa — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:20:14 +0000

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.

Slick

Peter Krupa — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 01:58:34 +0000

(Image via Diedre Woollard.)

The problem with documentaries – especially issue documentaries – is that they go over the top, often mistaking haranguing for journalism (think Michael Moore). It is possible to be simultaneously an advocate and a journalist, but it is exceedingly difficult. So I was happy to find that Crude – a 2009 documentary on petroleum contamination in the Ecuadorian Amazon – manages to pull it off.

The film follows a legal team bringing a lawsuit against Chevron for environmental contamination in the Amazon dating back to the 1960s. The class-action lawsuit was filed in 1993 on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadoreans, and there has not yet been any ruling. For all the gory details, Vanity Fair published a comprehensive article on the battle in 2007.

Though it’s a pretty shocking case of a corporation hurting people in order to make money, the film does a great job presenting the arguments on both sides. Chevron’s arguments in its defense seems to go like this:

We cleaned everything up.
Even if we didn’t clean everything up, it’s not increasing cancer rates.
Even if it is increasing cancer rates, blame the State oil company that took over operations in 1992.
Even if the pollution predates 1992, Chevron (then Texaco) was operating as part of a consortium with the State oil company, so blame them too.

There’s got to be some Latin term to describe this cascading logical fallacy (if you cleaned everything up, why even bother arguing 2, 3, and 4?), but Chevron does have a point about the State oil company – PetroEcuador – and the State in general. Where was the Ecuadorian government when all this was happening?

Not to say that this should let Chevron off the hook. Certainly not. But the majority of the world’s oil is extracted by State-owned oil companies, especially in Latin America (PetroEcuador, PdVSA, Pemex). So much the worse considering that the State and its dependencies are supposed to be serving the people. They should be next to the chopping block.

Anyway, here’s a good “60 Minutes” piece on the Chevron controversy:

I bet you think this earthquake’s about you

Peter Krupa — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:42:40 +0000

Don't you? Don't you?

It’s always embarrassing to watch Americans reduce human affairs to a handful of particular assumptions based on their own culture wars and then apply them to the rest of the world. Such has been the case with – unbelievably – Chile’s Feb. 27 earthquake.

It started with a ridiculous Wall Street Journal op-ed arguing that the low earthquake death toll owed itself to the miracle of Chicago-school economic theory as implemented by Pinochet. This argument should be ignored, or at best, laughed off. Do not feed the trolls.

Instead, it has caused an earnest and vociferous reaction from the other team, which, using common sense, historical knowledge, and actual data, makes a pretty good case for the Chicago school having nothing to do with it.

Still, it’s exhausting. The same Cold War characters have been having the same binary good/evil arguments in the United States for half a century now. This wasn’t an accurate way of understanding the world during the Cold War, and it’s not an accurate model for understanding history now.

The thing is, the world does not exist according to the prevailing intellectual currents in the United States of America. Chile is a whole country, full of people who do things and have thoughts and organize themselves into groups for the accomplishing of particular goals. They have history which, though at times influenced by U.S. intervention, is their own.

Whether or not the Chileans got ideas from the United States, or were pressured by the United States, or were defended by people on the left from the United States, is irrelevant to the way Chile is today. The relevant part is how Chile reacted to those pressures and influences, and in that sense, the Chileans are the masters of their own destiny. They built their own country, the richest in the region, and they’ll rebuild it.

Americans – babyboomers, in particular – are accustomed to a world that revolves around them. Increasingly, it doesn’t. Better get used to it.

Peter Krupa — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 22:39:57 +0000

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would require the U.S. government to release documents related to human rights violations in Argentina during the dictatorship. A similar effort released a trove of information on U.S. involvement in the Pinochet business in Chile. The bill still has to pass the Senate. [link]