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 , , | 5 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

Slick

By Peter Krupa | Published: March 6, 2010

(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:

  1. We cleaned everything up.
  2. Even if we didn’t clean everything up, it’s not increasing cancer rates.
  3. Even if it is increasing cancer rates, blame the State oil company that took over operations in 1992.
  4. 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:

Posted in Ecuador, Environment, History, Human Rights | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Los Reyes

By Peter Krupa | Published: March 5, 2010

“The Accordion Kings” looks like an awesome documentary, but it doesn’t appear to be out on DVD yet. Check it out at the Miami Film Festival this weekend and make me jealous.

And just because it’s Friday, more vallenato.

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

I bet you think this earthquake’s about you

By Peter Krupa | Published: March 5, 2010

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.

Posted in Chile, Economy, History | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Oops. (Also: Yay!)

By Peter Krupa | Published: March 5, 2010

Chilean officials have significantly revised downward their estimate of the death toll from last Saturday’s earthquake. It was over 800. The new death toll estimate is 279.

Carmen Fernández, the director of the emergency management agency, known as Onemi, said in an interview that in several badly damaged municipalities, officials had erroneously included the names of people who were missing on the lists of those who had been killed.

I guess that means the death toll could still rise substantially. For now, though, I’m sure those 500 people are happy to be officially alive.

Posted in Chile | Tagged , | 2 Comments

  • DAILY LINKS

    • 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.)

    • Cuban dissident Guillermo Farinas ended his hunger strike yesterday after 134 days. Farinas decided to end his strike after the Cuban government said it would release political prisoners rounded up in the "Black Spring" crackdown of 2003. Get well soon. [link]

    • The Uruguayan selection, which has made it to the quarter finals of the World Cup, just received a shipment of half a ton of fine cuts of beef for the mother of all asados in preparation for a contest against Ghana on Friday: "450 kilos of lomo, 200 of entrecot, 75 of vacío, 75 of colita de cuadril, 150 of ojo de bife and 50 kg of picaña." [link]

    • Hitmen have assassinated the PRI candidate for governor of Tamaulipas State, Rodolfo Torre Cantú. Torre was gunned down along with six others at about 10:30 this morning on a highway on the way to a campaign event. Drug mafias are assumed to be responsible. [link]

    • From the days when coups were something of a regional sport, new documents detail a famous British ballerina's role in a plot to topple the government of Panama. The plan was to use her yacht to gather men and arms, then "land somewhere and collect in the hills." It didn't work. [link]

    • Mexico's Attorney General's Office has posted on its web site irrefutable evidence that gold-plated AR-15s and diamond-studded pistol grips are not nearly as cool-looking as they sound. The deadly knick-knack collection is said to belong to Valencia Cartel leader El Lobo. [link]

    • Two Brazilian ranchers were sentenced to 30 years in prison apiece for ordering the killing of an environmentalist nun: "Prosecutors said the pair offered to pay a gunman $25,000 to kill the 73-year-old [Dorothy] Stang because she had prevented them from stealing a piece of land that the government had granted to a group of poor farmers." [link]


    • This video of a kidnapping and car chase in Mexico is notable mainly for the bad-assitude of the TV journalists who were on this like white on rice. Well done, gentlemen.

    • The Economist takes a peak at the Mockus phenomenon in Colombia: "His moustacheless beard gives him the air of a Baltic pastor... He is financing his campaign with a bank overdraft. His supporters rely on Facebook and make their own posters; street vendors sell unofficial campaign T-shirts." [link]

    • Some cruise lines will cease traveling to Antarctica after this cruise season, as a ban on the use and carriage of heavy fuel oil goes into effect next year. The ban came after a 2007 incident when a Gap Adventures ship got punctured by ice and sank, causing a mess. [link]