The littlest samba queen

By Peter Krupa | Published: February 15, 2010

That 7-year-old samba queen got her moment in the spotlight at Carnival this weekend. And she burst into tears. Too many photographers, it seems. It’s not clear whether she did the whole parade, but her father held her hand across the finish line. Some people still seem upset about the whole thing. I, for one, hope Julia Lira can someday look back on this from the pinnacle of a brilliant career and laugh.

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“We are all Juárez”

By Peter Krupa | Published: February 15, 2010

Is Mexico’s border war on drugs over? Last week, Calderón made a trip to Ciudad Juárez in an attempt to stem the political fallout from a massacre in which narcos gunned down 15 innocent youths. He was met with angry protests. In his speech, he talked about a new strategy for combating crime there, including scholarships, education, health, and what have you.

That is to say, though he’s promised the military won’t back down, he’s backing away from emphasis on military solutions to drug trafficking. As El Universal put it:

He indicated that it would be a mistake to think that the city’s problems could be fixed with just the presence of the military.

For this reason, he stated that his program would include aspects of health-based education and citizen participation.

The question is, did the massacre actually scare the administration into a change of strategy, or is this political hot air that will dissipate with time? Perhaps he realizes that the juarenses are truly angry, and it’s time to change the strategy. Malcom Beith, for one, says some good sources tell him off the record that the war on drugs is over, and the emphasis is being shifted to human trafficking.

Calderón returns to Juárez on Wednesday to continue trotting out his new plan.

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FARC: Now dealing in death, antiquities

By Peter Krupa | Published: February 9, 2010

The FARC says it has a new hostage: The sword of Simón Bolívar. The claim was published on Colombian news Web site Anncol and accompanied by a photo. According to Colombia Reports:

(Via Anncol.)

The sword has had a long and tumultuous history in Colombia, in which myth and rumour are often indistinguishable from fact. In 1974, leftist guerrilla group M-19 stole the sword from Bolivar’s country house, a museum outside of Bogota.

The sword then supposedly passed to the hands of infamous drug trafficker Pablo Escobar, in return for favors granted to the M-19. Escobar’s son, Juan Pablo, says the sword hung on the wall of his childhood bedroom “like a toy.”

After the M-19 demobilized in 1991, they returned the sword in a ceremony in Bogota. Afterwards, the weapon’s exact location was not known. According to popular rumor, it was passed on to Fidel Castro for some time.

More recently, no one knew the whereabouts of the sword, and the FARC says they stole it from a small museum in January. The big question is, what will they do with it? I can think of at least one Latin American president who would be keenly interested in negotiating the sword’s release, and possibly making a reality TV show out of the process.

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The Donkey Library

By Peter Krupa | Published: February 8, 2010

The Biblioburro is a great story. Once a week, Mr. Luis Serano saddles up his two burros with a selection of books and rides off into Colombia’s backwoods (in the eastern Caribbean area) to give people a chance to read. In 2008, the New York Times published an excellent profile of the institution.

Now film director Carlos Rendón Zipaguata – who shot a documentary on the Biblioburro – will be doing a feature-length film, according to El Tiempo.

Here’s a little video I found on the Biblioburro (not, I don’t think, shot by Mr. Rendón).

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

Job growth

By Peter Krupa | Published: February 8, 2010

Apply within. (Via Wikimedia Commons.)

If you’re looking to suckle at the teat of government largess, I hear Nicaragua is hiring. La Prensa reports that since Ortega took office in 2006, the government has added 7,506 employees to its payrolls. If you think that sounds bad, it gets worse.

The number does not include new teachers, and only 710 of the new hires were health care personnel. And in 2006, the government only had about 39,000 people on the payroll. That is to say, in four years, the government of one of the poorest countries in the world increased its administrative personnel by almost 20%.

I would never argue that a state should take the Washington Consensus route and gut the bureaucracy reflexively, as a matter of policy. But as the Prensa article points out, every additional córdoba spent on a paper-pusher’s salary is a córdoba that’s not spent on infrastructure. It also begins to smack of political patronage.

Posted in Economy, Nicaragua, Politics | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Safety in numbers

By Peter Krupa | Published: February 8, 2010

Visit Mexico! (Image via Wikimedia Commons)

You would think from media reports that traveling to Mexico is a good way to get decapitated. But technically, that’s only true if you’re a law enforcement official in a border state. The AP points out that in fact, the murder rate in Mexico has been falling since 1997, when it reached a high of 17 murders per 100,000 people.

The murder rate in Mexico today is 14 per 100,000 people, and in Mexico City, it’s only 9 per 100,000 people. That’s comparable to L.A., and significantly better than Washington, D.C., where the murder rate is 30 per 100,000.

I can testify to the relative safeness of Mexico City from personal experience. Last year I spent 10 days there and did not come back dead. Instead, I enjoyed many hours wandering around the Centro Historico, looking at the architecture, and eating everything I could find. I visited nearby pyramids, went to a play, and hung out with friends in several other historic neighborhoods. It was one of the best vacations of my life.

Of course, they occasionally kill someone and sew his face to a soccer ball, but for you as a tourist, this only means your plane ticket will be cheaper because all the other Americans are scared out of their minds.

If Mexico still sounds too risky for you, that’s OK, but you sure as hell better forget about the 2016 Olympics. Last anyone released official statistics, the murder rate in Brazil was 24 per 100,000 people.

Posted in Mexico, Travel, War on drugs | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Two massacres

By Peter Krupa | Published: February 8, 2010

Scene of the crime (via La Prensa Gráfica)

Two massacres are unsettling a tenuous calm in El Salvador. The first took place about a week ago. A group of gunman wearing black ski masks and armed with an M-16, a 9mm handgun, and a .22 caliber handgun appeared at a swimming hole where about a dozen gang members were bathing. They opened fire, killing seven of them. President Funes insisted that the attack was an example of gang-on-gang violence.

But on Saturday, there was another massacre, in an area north of San Salvador. This time five gunmen wearing black ski masks entered a restaurant, with both M-16s and 9mm weapons. They separated out the men from the women, took them into a separate room, and checked them for tattoos (the sign of gang membership). When they found no tattoos, they said it didn’t matter, that someone had to die that night, and opened fire on the group.

Five were killed, six wounded.

While the police continue to blame the gangs, others are floating the theory that the massacres were incidents of social cleansing – that is, vigilante killings carried out by organized groups intended to eliminate mara members. Such vigilante groups are historically very dangerous and very hard to control.

Posted in El Salvador, Human Rights | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Who’s the best paid of them all?

By Peter Krupa | Published: February 8, 2010

Of the top 12 highest paid presidents in the region, who do you think is number one? OK, fine, Barack Obama, who makes about US$400k annually. What about number two? Colombian news magazine Portafolio says it’s Guatemalan President Álvaro Colom, who makes about US$220k annually presiding over a country of 12 million people.

At the bottom of the list is Bolivia’s Evo Morales, who supposedly makes $22,200 a year, which is not enough. And around about the middle is Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, who makes about US$90k, which is surely not true. Canada’s Stephen Harper didn’t even make the list, which has to be a mistake (or maybe because he’s only a prime minister?). And finally, Cuba’s Raul Castro supposedly makes only $30 a month, which is not a big deal when you already own an entire country.

(link: “Los 12 presidentes que mas ganan en América”)

Posted in Cuba, Guatemala, Odd, Politics, Venezuela | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Update on N. Kirchner’s surgery

By Peter Krupa | Published: February 8, 2010

He’s fine. The surgery was “routine,” removing some plaque from his carotid artery and placing a shunt. All that drama about last rites and whatnot was, well, drama. Below is an illustration from Clarín explaining what exactly went on. Click to enlarge.

Click to enlarge

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

Blowout

By Peter Krupa | Published: February 8, 2010

Everyone knows that opinion polls in Costa Rica are notoriously inaccurate. But it’s never clear exactly how inaccurate they’ll be, or in which direction. Four years ago, Oscar Arias was supposed to win a comfortable victory, but barely squeaked it out by about 18,000 votes. The opposition was putting their faith in the inaccuracy of the polls again this year. They forgot, however, that gross errors can go either way.

So yesterday Laura Chinchilla became Costa Rica’s first woman president by basically a landslide. She won 46.7% of the vote, comfortably above the 40% that she needed to avoid a runoff. Her two closest opponents both won in the low 20s. Just a week or two ago, however, Chinchilla had been polling at 41.9%, which would have been within striking distance for a runoff. What happened?

Simply enough, either a huge portion of the Costa Rican electorate regularly changes its vote at the last minute, or Costa Rican polling company Unimar is incompetent to do polls with an accuracy better than ±5%. The moral of the story: Polls in Costa Rica are useless.

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

  • 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]