Haiti's Electoral Pandemonium

Confusion, charges of fraud, chaos, and, for now, a “tentative” calm.

Two days after presidential and legislative elections, few have a clear idea what is next for Haiti as electoral officials work in silence, allegedly counting those ballots cast Sunday, and which were not destroyed amidst Sunday afternoon protests that rocked various polling stations around the country. In a press conference Monday, Michel “Sweet Mickey” Martelly, the musician-turned-presidential contender whose supporters led many of the anti-Preval street demonstrations in Port-au-Prince Sunday, appeared to step back from the call that elections be cancelled – a declaration he made with 11 other candidates at a Port-au-Prince hotel while votes were still being cast Sunday. In Martelly’s Monday statement, he again maintained that the elections were marred by “massive fraud” on the part of the Preval government. But Mr. Martelly suggested that, even so, he would remain open to letting the eventual results stand. Al Jazeera says the other presidential front-runner, Mirlande Manigat, made similar remarks to reporters Monday. And if the Miami Herald has it correct, those words may have broken one day of rare political unity that brought all of the country’s major presidential candidates out against the Preval government and its preferred candidate, Jude Celestin.

Meanwhile, Wyclef Jean – who joined Martelly and his supporters on the streets after the joint declaration of electoral fraud on Sunday afternoon – also spoke at Monday’s press conference. The hip hop artist, prevented from running for president after failing to meet residency requirements, made obscure references to the capital “going up in flames” if the international community did not in some way intervene. Wyclef, quoted by the LA Times:

“I came here today because I know that in 24 hours, if we do not have a decision, this country will rise to a level of violence we have not seen before.”

Such prophecies of violence have so far been unfulfilled. For its part, the international community seems prepared to validate Haiti’s election, despite continuing claims of electoral fraud. Quoted in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, Colin Granderson, head of the Organization of American States observation mission, said Monday that “as serious as some of the irregularities were, they did not invalidate the electoral process.” [The OAS’s initial estimate is that voting processes were disrupted in only 4 percent of polling stations]. Granderson added that the declaration of fraud made by 12 candidates while votes were still being cast Sunday was “precipitous, hasty, and regrettable.” Those words echo similar public statements made by Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) late Sunday night.

However, the reporting of journalists, photographers, and independent observers, all of whom greatly outnumbered official OAS-Caricom observers at polling places around much of the capital Sunday, continue to tell a quite different story. According to the AP, discontent and confusion which defined the first half of voting Sunday “boiled over” by the early afternoon. Many report polling places being ransacked while electoral officials and UN Minustah forces stood by idly. Photos from the New York Times show ballot boxes overturned and strewn about. Reuters’ photographers capture voters removing their ballots from ballot boxes in protest. I have yet to see any official estimates on turnout but initial accounts would suggest very few actually cast ballots Sunday.

As for the procedures for tallying the vote, ballots are allegedly being counted by the CEP at an unspecified warehouse in the capital. Election officials say no word about those results will come until at least Dec. 7. And if none of the candidates is declared to have won a majority, Haitians may be repeating Sunday’s electoral mayhem in a January runoff.

To other stories:

· On the Wikileaks diplomatic cable drop and its Latin American implications: a late July 2009 cable from the US Ambassador in Honduras, Hugo Llorens, strongly condemns the ouster of Manuel Zelaya and declares it illegal. RAJ at Honduras Culture and Politics comments, asking why the US was “so timid” in its actions against the coup regime if it saw the coup as so clearly illegal? On Brazil, the AP says diplomatic cables from December 2009 claim the Brazilian government was downplaying the threat of “terrorists and terrorism” in Brazil. Others are talking about Hillary Clinton asking about Cristina Kirchner’s stress levels and the division of administrative tasks between the current Argentine president and her late husband, Nestor. Beyond the cables, the AP says, the Ecuadorean government is now offering Wikileaks founder Julian Assange residency in Ecuador.

· The New York Times Sunday reports on the seizure of the Rio favela of Alemao by Brazilian security forces – this after a weeklong battle against drug gangs in the shantytown. The Times: “Residents congregated around televisions in bars and restaurants, cheering on the police as they would their favorite soccer teams, even as occasional gunfire peppered the sunny skies.” More from the AP which reports from Vila Cruzeiro, the other Rio favela where security forces have been facing off against drug traffickers. The AP says approx. 50 people are believed to have been killed in the raids. Meanwhile, police continue their search for about 200 gang members still holed up in Alemao.

· At UNASUR meetings in Guyana, Bloomberg reports that the regional organization made commitments to improve the coordination of anti-drug and anti-organized crime efforts while also pledging to isolate governments which emerge from coups. According to Rafael Correa, the latter includes adding a list of “concrete sanctions” against coup regimes to Unasur’s democratic charter, among them the closing of borders. On the former, Bloomberg says Unasur created a “security council” to coordinate cross-border operations against organized crime. Also at the summit, Ecuador and Colombia re-established full diplomatic relations, which have been frozen says the 2008 cross-border raid of a FARC camp in Ecuador. Unresolved at the summit was the selection of a new secretary general to replace Nestor Kirchner. According to Hugo Chavez that could occur at another meeting in Argentina scheduled for next month. Lula da Silva has made public that he is not interested in the position. Other names still being floating include Uruguay’s Tabaré Vazquez and former Argentine foreign minister, Jorge Taina.

· A new economic team has been named by Dilma Rousseff in Brazil. Economist and Central Bank official Alexandre Antonio Tombini will be nominated to replace Henrique Meirelles as the head of the Central Bank while Guido Mantega will stay on as the country’s finance minister, says the New York Times. Regarding Dilma’s foreign affairs team, Mercopress says Marco Aurelio Garcia will stay on as a top foreign policy adviser to Ms. Rousseff as she prepares to name her pick for foreign minister this week. The news agency suggests the move means continuity in terms of Brazil’s “regionalist” foreign policy.

· From EFE, Cuban Cardinal Jaime Ortega said Monday that the 11 imprisoned dissidents who remain from the “Group of 75” will be released by the Cuban government, and be allowed to remain in Cuba after refusing asylum in Spain. No time table as of yet, however. Cardinal Ortega: “Those who remain will be released. I don’t know when. That is really not in my hands, but I have a clear promise that the rest will be freed and allowed to stay in Cuba.”

· The next round of global climate change talks have begun in Cancun, Mexico, although expectations are quite low, according to the New York Times. Nevertheless, the Washington Post reports on how Mexico is attempting to become a global leader on climate change issues – a notable bright spot in a country whose image has been tarnished by ongoing drug violence.

· Bloomberg says ALBA has plans to create a regional defense school.

· And Andres Oppenheimer in the Miami Herald on changes in US-Colombia relations under Juan Manuel Santos. While Santos does appear to be recalibrating his country’s foreign policy toward Latin American regional integration and away from its special bilateral relation with the US, Oppenheimer may be both overstating and politicizing the shift when he says “There is a growing feeling…that Santos is moving closer to Chávez.”

Regional Defense, Sovereignty, and the US in Bolivia

Defense ministers from across the Americas are meeting this week in Bolivia for the Fourth Conference of Defense Ministers of the Americas, a meeting held every 18 months to improve regional defense cooperation. As most of the English language media reports it, day one of the conference was highlighted by host president Evo Morales’s defense of Latin America’s right to choose its own political and economic allies, even such alliances include Iran. In what the AP describes as “an hour long welcome to delegates” Morales spoke to the US and its representative to Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, (without naming names). “Bolivia under my government will have an agreement, an alliance, to anyone in the world. Nobody,” Morales said, “will forbid us from doing so.” As the LA Times notes, Morales also singled out incoming US Subcommittee for the Western Hemisphere chair, Congressman Connie Mack (R-FL), calling him a “confessed assassin” and a “conspiratorial agent against our brother Hugo Chavez.” Morales: “If something happens to Hugo Chavez, the one responsible will be this U.S. congressman.”

Morales’s remarks came after Secretary Gates, speaking with journalists ahead of day one in Santa Cruz, suggested Latin American countries should be cautious in their dealings with Iran. Secretary Gates, as quoted by AFP:

“I think that countries that are dealing with Iran in this arena need to be very cautious and very careful about how they interact with the Iranians in terms of what the Iranians motives might be and what they're really trying to do.”

The AP quotes the Secretary’s Sunday comments further:

“As a sovereign state Bolivia obviously can have relationships with any country in the world that it wishes to. I think Bolivia needs to be mindful of the number of United Nations Security Council resolutions that have been passed with respect to Iran's behavior.”

In his opening statement Monday, the US Defense Secretary steered clear of non-regional issues, instead focusing his very short remarks on hemispheric cooperation, particularly natural disaster response, drug trafficking, and transnational crime. Gates said the US would support new regional efforts toward increased defense spending transparency as well and plans to offer each Latin American defense ministry two scholarships to participate in workshops on strengthening the role of civilians in military institutions. Somewhat interestingly, the US secretary closed his speech by quoting recent Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa in an appeal for increased regional defense cooperation. Vargas Llosa, by way of Gates:

“One can't fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser.”

WOLA’s Adam Isacson is at the Bolivia conference as an observer and has been updating by way of Twitter. A couple of interesting points from those updates include concerns about establishing a difference between “security” and “defense” (raised by both Brazil and Uruguay) as well the role of the armed forces in internal matters – something Peru and El Salvador, among others, appear to have defended quite vociferously.

And finally, back on the US and Sec. Gates’ presence in Bolivia, a quick look at a report from independent US military affairs publication, Stars and Stripes, suggests that even while Mr. Gates is in the region this week, his mind is certainly elsewhere.

To other stories:

· On electoral preparations in Haiti, Reuters reports that the European Union has become the latest to reject postponing this Sunday’s presidential vote. While the country’s cholera epidemic will no doubt deter voter turnout, the EU’s top envoy in Haiti, Lut Fabert, said cancelling the vote “could threaten stability” in the country. Ms. Fabert: “At the moment, the EU sees no obstacle blocking these elections from happening. The most important thing is that the process advances according to the rules and that there is a good participation of the population.” The EU is providing some $7 million to help finance Sunday’s elections. Meanwhile, the Miami Herald this morning profiles the woman some believe is the presidential frontrunner, former first lady and longtime opposition leader, Mirlande Manigat. Manigat is the wife of former Haitian president Leslie Manigat, elected in a “military-rigged” election in 1988 but ousted just four-and-a-half months later. The former president came in second to Rene Preval in 2006 elections. And yet, according to the Herald’s Jacqueline Charles, Mirlande Manigat should be considered a political outsider:

“A win would not only make her the first woman elected president of Haiti, and the second to serve, but put the country's long divided opposition in power.”

As for her political platform, the Herald calls Ms Manigat a “constitutionalist” but one who “advocates tearing up the Haitian constitution, starting over and giving Haitians living in the diaspora the right to hold office, including the presidency.” She has focused during her campaign on “reshaping education” by allowing primary-aged children to attend for free; “decongesting” the capital of Port-au-Prince; and “reining in non-governmental organizations.” She has also been a vocal critic of Interim Haiti Reconstruction Plan charged with directing post-quake rebuilding but has also insisted she should would not scrap the plan all-together as president. Ms. Manigat has also gone to great lengths to distance herself from outgoing President Rene Preval. Manigat, on Preval and the importance not just of the presidency but of the legislature, much of which will also be elected Sunday (99 parliamentary seats and 11 of 30 Senate seats are up for grabs as well):

"People are saying Préval has the intention of pulling off a Putin. If they have a majority in both chambers they could name Préval as prime minister... and I would not be able to do anything. It would be very bad for the country. But there is such a rejection of Préval that I wonder if he realizes how unpopular he is right now.”

• Late Addition: CEPR's Dan Beeton in the LA Times this morning has the case against holding Haitian elections Sunday. Beeton: "If the Obama administration wants to stand on the side of democracy and human rights in Haiti, as it did in Burma, it should support the call of Haitian political parties and groups to postpone the elections until all parties are allowed to run and all eligible voters are guaranteed a vote...Continued support for sham elections...would add to a long list of U.S. injustices against one of our closest neighbor states."

· In Honduras, golpista president Roberto Micheletti has submitted a report detailing his version of the June 2009 coup d’etat against the government of Manuel Zelaya to the country’s truth and reconciliation commission, says EFE. Micheletti again added that his succession of Mr. Zelaya was “in accord with constitution.”

· From EFE, in Mexico, business leaders in the city of Matamoros are the latest group of organized interests to call on President Felipe Calderon to “dial down” the country’s drug wars. “We’re asking (Calderon) for a truce and for him to exchange war helicopters for tractors to make the countryside more productive, to exchange the machines guns for loans for businesses, to exchange each exploded grenade for a job,” the vice president of the Federation of National Chambers of Commerce, Julio Almanza, said Monday. The AP says police shot and killed an innocent doctor while carrying out an investigation into the murder of ex-Colima governor Silverio Cavazos-Ceballos yesterday. The story seems illustrative of so much that is wrong with the country’s security forces. The AP:

“Police were mounting an operation to find the killers Sunday when they came across the doctor in an area near the crime. He was startled by officers and began to run away. They shot him when he ignored orders to stop. [State Prosecutor Arturo Diaz] said he had nothing to do with the crime.”

· In Mexico City, the mayors of over 100 cities from around the world committed their local governments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions ahead of next week’s Cancun climate summit. Organized by Mexico City mayor Marcelo Ebrard, the LA Times says “the voluntary pact…states they will develop and implement local climate-change action plans that are ‘measurable, reportable and verifiable.’” Meanwhile, at Foreign Policy, climate expert Bill McKibben on what to expect (and what not to expect) from next week’s UN climate meetings in Mexico.

· More on Colombia’s growing role in regional anti-drug/anti-crime operations from EFE, which says the Andean country’s Air Force began conducting joint counter-narcotics operations with the Dominican Republic this week. The object, according to the Colombian military: “to close off Caribbean air space to narcotrafficking flights.”

· At AQ, competing opinions from Patricio Navia and Steven Griner about “re-electionism,” with related implications for the case of Nicaragua and its President Daniel Ortega. [Tim Rogers at Time with more on how the Costa Rica-Nicaragua border dispute appears to have boosted Ortega’s national popularity.]

· Lilia Schwarcz for the New York Review of Books, on Dilma Rousseff, in the shadow of Lula. Also, from the Financial Times, news that Dilma appears prepared to keep current finance minister Guido Mantega on board. The decidedly less “developmentalist” Central Banker Henrique Meirelles’s future with the government remains uncertain.

· And finally, Guatemala’s Constitutional Court has blocked the request for the extradition of former Guatemalan Interior Minister, Carlos Vielman, from Spain. The Court ruled there to be “insufficient grounds” for the extradition request at the present moment. Vielman was arrested in Spain at the request of the UN-backed CICIG which has accused the ex-minister of “creating a criminal structure within his ministry and Guatemala’s national police during the first year of the 2004-2008 administration of conservative President Oscar Berger.” It was that structure, according to the CICIG, which was responsible for extrajudicial killings at two Guatemalan prisons, currently being investigated by the anti-impunity commission. More from Central American Politics, as well as my earlier brief on the matter.

Editor’s Note: As mentioned yesterday, I will be in Haiti until next Tuesday. Daily briefs will be on pause until then but a safe and happy Thanksgiving holiday to all. JFS

Elections in the Time of Cholera

Amidst still unmoved rubble, cholera, and waves of anti-MINUSTAH protests, the New York Times writes that this Sunday does not look like “the best time to choose a president” in Haiti. Nevertheless, the vote will go on, despite requests from some candidates that the elections be delayed:

“[T]he election on Sunday may be Haiti’s most important in decades. Not only are competing crises demanding attention, but with the country poised to receive billions of dollars in international reconstruction money, the new president will have a historic ability to reshape the country, from its economy to its justice system to deciding where and how to house more than a million earthquake refugees.”

And yet the question for which few have an answer is who will even turn out for this week’s apparently historic elections. OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza called voter turnout the “big problem” last week. And the reasons seem quite obvious. Insulza:

“There are a lot of people who left town because of the earthquake. There are people afraid of the cholera. There are people angry at the government. There are so many obstacles to getting people to vote.”

Others no have lost their national identification cards, a requirement to vote in the country – although the government body that issues the ID cards has said it registered “30,000 more than the 400,000 it anticipated in the last quarter.” [It’s likely, according to the Times, that this was largely due to new banking rules]. And yet, according to El País, both an OAS electoral mission and a Caricom observer mission insisted late last week that Haiti continues on a “good path” toward elections. The head of the UN MINUSTAH mission, Edmond Mulet, echoed those statements telling Al-Jazeera that “Cholera is not a reason not to have elections.” Mulet: “I think that elections are important for the political stability, for the social stability of the country, for the reconstruction of the country.”

For its part, the US will provide some $14 million in election-aid while “several dozens of international observers will be monitoring the balloting,” the Times says. The report, like a piece in the Miami Herald this morning, adds that, while poll numbers are far from reliable, local media has selected three candidates as the frontrunners: former first lady Marlinde Manigat; Jude Celestin, Mr. Préval’s endorsed successor; and Michel Martelly, “a kompa singer formerly known as Sweet Micky who draws large crowds and is banking on votes that might have gone to Wyclef Jean.”

Meanwhile, on the cholera epidemic, the New York Times also ran a piece this weekend criticizing those who have blamed Nepalese MINUSTAH forces for likely bringing cholera to the country. Those who care about accountability will probably disagree – an issue the AP’s Jonathan Katz looks at in a long report on cholera in Haiti from last Friday.

Editor’s Note: Tomorrow will be my last post here for the next week. No posting at Hemispheric Brief from Wednesday, Nov. 24 until Tuesday Nov. 30 as I will be in Port-au-Prince for the aforementioned Haitian elections. Updates to follow. JFS

To other stories:

· In Colombia, at least seven former high-ranking intelligence officers, currently under investigation for their roles in the country’s domestic spying scandal, are seeking asylum outside of Colombia (or have already done so). That information came from Interior Minister German Vargas Lleras after Panama granted asylum to DAS’s former director, Maria del Pilar Hurtado on Friday. Vargas Lleras criticized the Panamanian government saying the charges Ms. Hurtado would have faced – for illegal communications intercepts and criminal conspiracy – are “not political crimes” and thus should not have been grounds for an asylum request. For its part, the Panamanian Foreign Ministry said the decision was an attempt to “contribute to political and social stability in the region.” As the BBC reports, Ms. Hurtado has already left the country and was not challenged by DAS-controlled immigration officers as she left. On what this means for investigations into illegal spying, the BBC adds:

“As head of the DAS from 2007-2008, Ms Hurtado was one of the few people who could possibly directly implicate former president, Alvaro Uribe, in the illegal wiretapping of his political opponents and the judges who were seeking to block his actions and re-election prospects.”

· Also on Colombia, the Latin American Herald Tribune and Colombia Reports both report on further developments in anti-drug cooperation between Colombia and Venezuela. After a six hour meeting in Cartagena this weekend, Colombian Defense Minister Rodrigo Rivera and Venezuelan Interior Minister Tareck El Aissami “signed a preliminary agreement that will now be studied by the respective presidents of the two countries,” says the LAHT.

“The agreement outlines several lines of action in the anti-drug battle, including coordinated and simultaneous operations, creation of a comprehensive intelligence platform, intelligence-sharing on drug-trafficking routes and exchange of experiences in that area. It also calls for training programs and greater control over the trafficking of chemical precursors used to manufacture illegal drugs.”

In Jamaica, meanwhile, President Juan Manuel Santos also signed a new bilateral anti-drug accord with Jamaican PM Bruce Golding this weekend. And in Colombia, senior officials believe they killed another senior FARC commander in a military strike Saturday. Fabian Ramirez, second in command of the southern block of FARC, was targeted in the attack.

· In Mexico, the AP says former governor of Colima, Silverio Cavazos Ceballos, was shot and killed as he left his office Sunday. CNN on the beginning of extradition proceedings for US-born trafficker Edgar Valdez Villarreal, aka La Barbie. The Washington Post, from last Friday, on the precarious position of Mexican medical workers in the country’s drug wars. More on the abandonment of Ciudad Mier in a long report from the Wall Street Journal. And, from Reuters, a report suggesting that a divided Mexican Congress is unlikely to pass President Felipe Calderon’s recently proposed measures to reform the country’s police forces and create a “unified police command.” [The proposals would also fight money laundering.] PAN Senator Alejandro Gonzalez, who heads the Senate's justice committee, tells Reuters, “There is no consensus among lawmakers, not even within the PAN. There is a lot of opposition to the proposal for a unified police command.” The unified police command would bring municipal police forces under the control of state governors, effectively ending what Reuters calls a “dysfunctional system of 2,200 different jurisdictions across the country.”

· ABC News foreign correspondent Jim Sciutto writes at the New Republic about disappointing half-steps taken by the Obama administration on Cuba. And now, Sciutto contends, with “Republican control of Congress [in particular, the ascension of pro-embargo, Cuban-American Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen to chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee], any Congressional effort to ease trade or travel restrictions will “effectively be killed.” Sciutto also highlights on-going reforms in Cuba – embodied, perhaps, in ongoing releases of political prisoners, the most recent of whom, Adrian Alvarez, Arencibia, spoke to BBC Mundo in Spain this weekend.

· New demands from Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez that legal actions against Globovisión magnate Guillermo Zuloaga go forward. Chavez also accused Zuloaga of being behind “$100 million plot” to assassinate him.

· A fascinating piece from IPS on Brazil-Venezuela economic relations – specifically how Brazilian-based construction and engineering companies are building much of Venezuela’s new infrastructure, and without fears of expropriation. “The Brazilian construction companies work comfortably with the Venezuelan government, because behind them is the Brazilian government with its integration policy, with the understanding between both countries and Brazil's BNDES (National Development Bank),” says the director of the Venezuelan-Brazilian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Fernando Portela.

· Richard Javad Heydarian at Foreign Policy in Focus on Iran’s diplomatic and economic push into Latin America, with a focus on Venezuela and Brazil.

· Finally, opinions. In the Miami Herald, Janet Redman of the Institute for Policy Studies on upcoming Cancun climate talks. Andres Oppenheimer on the fears of some that the line between civilian and military affairs is fraying in Latin America. And in the Wall Street Journal, Mary Anastasia O’Grady on Haiti and what she sees as ongoing problems of corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency in the country.

Anti-MINUSTAH Protests Hit Port-au-Prince

Protests against the UN’s MINUSTAH peacekeeping forces reached the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince on Thursday, demonstrating growing frustration with the security forces many believe were responsible for bringing the current cholera epidemic to the country. As CNN reports a planned protest near the center of the capital began peacefully yesterday but soon turned violent as it moved toward the presidential palace.

The UN was not the only institution against which anger was directed. CNN also reports that President Rene Preval – and the presidential candidate he has endorsed, Jude Celestin – were singled out by demonstrators. CNN:

“Several threw rocks at a campaign poster for presidential candidate Jude Celestin, whose candidacy has been endorsed by outgoing president Rene Preval. Others threw Molotov cocktails at the poster. Some Haitians have said Celestin is a symbol of what is not working in the country, and that Preval's endorsement of him means the election -- set for November 28 -- will not be fair.”

CNN, also quoting one of Thursday’s protestors who expresses disappointment with the Preval government and little faith in next week’s scheduled vote:

“The Haitian government is doing nothing for us. And we know the international government is still spending a lot of money for the Haitian people. But Preval, with his government, he still keeps their money to take back to the United States to buy some house… This is not election time.”

Al-Jazeera’s reporting on unrest in Port-au-Prince Thursday adds that the military wing of the national police fired tear gas into at least one camp for the internally displaced, across the road from the national parliament – that while young demonstrators “pelted” MINUSTAH vehicles with stones yelling “Cholera: It's Minustah who gave it to us!” and “Minustah, go home.” Meanwhile, independent journalist, Ansel Herz, speaking to Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman from Cap-Haitien yesterday, says the idea that protests are being “manipulated” doesn't “hold much water.” Rather, frustrations have much deeper roots. Herz:

“There have been longstanding accusations against the peacekeeping mission here for abusing Haitians and for lacking transparent investigations into any of these alleged human rights violations.”

From the Washington Post’s William Booth this morning, a more specific – although somewhat superficial – focus on next Sunday’s presidential vote, which, according to Booth, “Haitians pray is not another disaster.” The packed field of 19 includes a “charismatic carnival singer who used to perform in drag, a former first lady whose husband was ousted by a military coup and a rich industrialist who boasts of surviving seven assassination attempts,” says the Post. Some of the most telling information from the piece is the decidedly US-focus. The paper quotes US ambassador to Haiti, Kenneth Merten, who recently said he had not met anybody the US cannot work with, amongst the 19 contenders. Merten also takes what some may find as a rather absurd position on recent violence. Merten: “By Haiti standards, it has been quite peaceful.”

The Post also provides a thin case for making the following conclusion about the current government: “If Preval has done anything, he has brought Haiti relative stability.”

More on US statements regarding the current government and upcoming elections, from CNN’s report on Haiti. Mark Ward, the acting director of the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development, says, for example, U.S. authorities continue to have “a lot of confidence” in the Haitian government's “response to the outbreak.”

Lastly, some opinions. The Washington Post does not take a position on the elections but says that the US must focus on the “longer-term priority” of “improving Haiti's severely inadequate water systems so that drinking water is not contaminated by sewage.” Rory Carroll at the Guardian critiques the “republic of NGOs” aid model. And also at the Guardian, independent journalist Isabeau Doucet has a very good piece providing context for the recent wave of protests against MINUSTAH.

To other stories:

· From the AP, a report that the International Criminal Court has begun “preliminary investigations” in Honduras to decide if there is reason to open an actual case in connection to human rights crimes that followed the June 2009 coup against the government of Manuel Zelaya. Few details right now about the nature of those investigations.

· Meanwhile, EFE reports that rights groups in Honduras are blaming the government of Porfirio Lobo for the deaths of at least five peasants killed by private security forces in Bajo Aguan this week. “This massacre is clear evidence of how the armed forces of Honduras, the National Police and the army of oligarch Miguel Facusse have again united to make the power of the boot and the rifle count over that of law and justice,” reads a joint statement from the Human Rights and Agrarian Platform. A total of 16 peasants have been killed in the region so far this year, the two organizations maintain. The most recent killings come over disputed land which the agriculturalist Miguel Facusse maintains control over but which the National Agrarian Institute says was purchased by the government more than 10 years ago to distribute among landless peasants.

· In a story I have admittedly had trouble keeping track off, Costa Rica said Thursday it will take Nicaragua to the International Court of Justice over an ongoing border dispute related to the San Juan River. That filing comes after the Permanent Council of the OAS voted, 22-1 to hold a special foreign ministers meeting on the matter (Venezuela voted against, Nicaragua boycotted, and seven countries abstained). The OAS meeting is set for Dec. 7. But according to EFE’s reporting, Nicaragua may concur with Costa Rica that the ICJ is in fact the more appropriate location for the dispute to be resolved. EFE: “Nicaraguan Ambassador Denis Moncada noted that his country’s president, Daniel Ortega, will go to the International Court of Justice to establish the border, given that this is a matter on which the OAS has no jurisdiction.” For his part, former Costa Rican president Oscar Arias said this week the UN Security Council would be the best place for a resolution to be sought. For a detailed account of the conflict thus far, the Alliance for Global Justice’s Nicaragua News Bulletin has a complete summary.

· The LA Times this morning reports on daily life and violence in Nuevo Laredo and the “violence-ridden state of Tamaulipas.” Al-Jazeera with a video report on a recent case of “vigilante justice” in the small town of Asención, Chihuahua. El Diario de Juarez says two suspects connected to Los Aztecas have been arrested in the killing of three individuals connected to the US consulate in Juarez last March. From El Universal, Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission now says 66 journalists have been killed in the country since 2005. Twelve others remain “disappeared.”

· Reuters looks at the agenda which ALBA member governments hope to push at the upcoming UN climate summit in Cancun. Reuters, on one of the ALBA proposals: “ALBA leaders want the rich world to commit to a near-50 percent greenhouse emissions cut from 1990 levels by 2017 -- far deeper than cuts planned by any developed nation -- and to give as much money to fight climate change as for defense budgets.”

· At Foreign Policy, Helen Coster on the tension between international child labor standards and the fact that such labor is strongly unionized in Bolivia. Coster: “Unionized child workers and their advocates argue that because child labor is a necessity born of poverty, it can't and shouldn't be eradicated. But they want the government and NGOs to differentiate between child labor -- which they see as an economic necessity -- and exploitation, which is how they characterize children working in dangerous jobs, like mining, and harvesting Brazil nuts and sugar cane.”

· The Council on Hemispheric Affairs with a good summary of the future of US-Cuba relations during the next US Congress.

· The Economist with a critique from the right of nationalizations and what it calls “state socialism” in Venezuela. And from the Real News Network, an interview with journalist and author Ben Dangl who has the critique from the Left of some left-leaning Latin American governments’ and their increasingly antagonistic relationship with social movements.

· In Peru, indigenous activist Alberto Pizango, the leader of protests in Bagua in June 2009, says he will run for president in 2011 on an indigenous rights platform. IKN has the latest poll numbers from Peru this week which put former Lima mayor Luis Castaneda three points ahead of Alejandro Toledo and nearly six points ahead of Keiko Fujimori.

· And, from Mercopress, more rumblings about possible new secretary generals at UNASUR. Uruguay’s Pepe Mujica allegedly had a long conversation with his Ecuadorean counterpart recently, and while no consensus has yet been reached, Rafael Correa has suggested former Uruguayan President Tabaré Vazquez or outgoing Brazilian President Lula da Silva remain the frontrunners.

That Which Unites: Impunity in El Salvador, Uruguay, and Mexico

On the 21^st anniversary of the assassination of one Salvadoran and five Spanish Jesuit priests, human rights defenders in El Salvador have once again come out with strong statements rejecting a 1993 amnesty law that continues to prevent justice in the cases being served. Salvadoran human rights ombudsman, Oscar Luna, tells EFE that it’s the fiscalía general who has failed human rights activists for not taking up the case. Luna also says he supports the annulment of the 1993 law, calling such a move a potentially “positive message” for the country and its fight against impunity.

For his part, Benjamin Cuéllar of the Instituto de Derechos Humanos de la Universidad Centroamericana (Idhuca) says the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has been clear in its demands regarding human rights justice in the country. Investigation of the facts of the crime, the arrest of those responsible, reparation to victims, and repealing of the amnesty law all must be carried out, he says, in order for the country to fall in line with international human rights norms.

Meanwhile, the National Security Archive in Washington DC continues in its efforts to get US government documents about the assassinations declassified. The NSA, at Unredacted, has more about the search for missing documents that might shed light on the case.

From El Salvador to Uruguay, IPS also this morning on the persistence of impunity following cold war terror in the region. This week Argentine poet Juan Gelman went before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Quito to testify about the murder of his daughter-in-law and the kidnapping of his granddaughter in 1977. The testimony came as part of efforts to repeal an amnesty law in Uruguay, passed shortly after its return to democracy in 1985. While courts in Uruguay have found a variety of ways to get around the “ley de caducidad” over the last half-decade, the controversial “expiry law” remains on the books. Here’s Juan Gelman, to IPS:

“The impunity that has reigned for 25 years in Uruguay (since the end of the 1973-1985 dictatorship) will continue. No one has been issued with a final sentence, no one at all. And the state knows who the guilty parties are.”

Juan Gelman, his once-kidnapped granddaughter Macarena, and Sara Mendez, an Uruguayan woman who was tortured in the infamous Automotores Orletti detention centre in Buenos Aires before being flown clandestinely returned to Uruguay in a Plan Condor operation in 1976, all testified in Quito this week.

To a quick wrap up of some other stories:

· The Washington Office on Latin America has a new report out on civil-military relations in Latin America – namely the major contradiction in US policy toward the region by which why U.S. aid programs so frequently encourage the mixing of police and military roles while clearly defining the separation of the two at home. The full text of “Preach What You Practice” is available via Just the Facts, and comes as the region’s defense ministers – including US Defense Sec. Robert Gates – prepare for a regional summit in Bolivia.

· On that same topic, El Universal reports the return of the Mexican military to Chihuahua border to “reinforce security.” The federal police will apparently maintain their lead role in Operación Coordinada Chihuahua. No specific date has been set for the return of the military, according to the paper. In addition, there seem to be questions about whether the military ever really pulled back from its roll in border operations.

· Also on Mexico, Secretary of Public Security, Genaro Garcia Luna rejected this week the notion that there was a “narco-insurgency” in the country. More from La Jornada.

· Notimex reports on the return of some Ciudad Mier residents to the town they mostly abandoned one week ago. According to Mexican officials, some 300 families have made their way back home after being displaced to nearby Ciudad Miguel Aleman after a new round of threats from cartels in the city, most notably Los Zetas.

· A terrific report from ProPublica on the demise of regional newspaper reporting in Mexico, related to the drug wars. Quoted in ProPublica:

“The Fundación MEPI, an independent investigative journalism center, studied the crime coverage of 11 regional newspapers and found that the drug-trafficking cartels receive little mention. The data, and interviews with journalists, shows that threats, bribery and pressure are shaping the news delivered to hundreds of thousands of Mexicans who live outside the capital, Mexico City.”

A look at the whole report is worthwhile.

· Returning to the question of impunity, the Committee to Protect Journalists demands justice in the case of assassinated El Diario de Juarez journalist Armando Rodriguez, killed two years ago. From a letter written by Rodriguez’s fellow journalists and published on Nov. 13 on the front page of El Diario:

“Two years later our rage is even greater, because we see the ease with which the president of the republic, Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, lies when he publicly announces that they have detained suspects in relation to Armando's death, when actually no one has been remanded, by the power of the state or federal law, to answer for this act.”

· Venezuela handed over three alleged Colombian guerrillas to its neighbor this week, says EFE.

· The Wall Street Journal reports on a bill sent to the Bolivian legislature this week that would nationalize pensions, lower the minimum retirement age and increase pension benefits. The system was privatized in 1996 during a wave of neoliberal restructuring and privatization. According to the paper, the new bill comes after “extended negotiations with labor unions” and would push the retirement age down to to 58 from 65 – “with an even lower retirement age for women with children and those working in dangerous industries such as mining.”

· From BBC Mundo, more on cocaine flights to Africa on old commercial aircrafts being purchased by drug traffickers. “Aerolineas Cocaina,” the BBC cleverly calls the operations.

· A 3^rd protestor was killed in Haiti during anti-UN riots on Wednesday, although other reports seem to indicate the demonstrations are tapering off.

· And finally, from MercoPress, an interview with Lula’s top foreign policy adviser, Marco Aurelio García about strengthening “institutional” mechanisms for regional integration in Latin America, specifically Mercosur and Unasur. Garcia, who is in the running to be Dilma’s foreign affairs minister apparently, says the administration of President Lula da Silva was very effective in advancing continental integration, but adds that leaders “still need to give the process the necessary institutional framework.” After Mercosur and Unasur are secure, Garcia says, the next step is consolidating the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States.

The Audacity of Independence; Or How Connie Mack Learned to Hate Colombia

It’s something that was probably impossible just 100 days ago.

Using the speech that marked his first 100 days in office as his platform, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos put speculation to rest Tuesday, announcing that he will extradite businessman and alleged drug kingpin Walid Makled to his native Venezuela rather than to the United States. The latter, the AP reports, has called Makled Venezuela’s most important drug trafficker. Earlier this week Florida Republican and incoming chair of the House Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, congressman Connie Mack, made Makled’s extradition from Colombia to the US one his first priorities saying,

“It appears that the [Obama] administration's posture with Chávez is to give into Chávez, and make some attempt to reach our hand out to Chávez like that will get us somewhere. If we could get Makled here, I think he could provide a lot of evidence about the Venezuelan government's involvement in narco-trafficking.”

Speaking to reporters by phone after Tuesday’s announcement, Mack contended the United States had “completely dropped the ball” and lost the chance to “shine the light on a lot of bad behavior by Hugo Chavez and his government.”

In many ways, Mack’s words demonstrate that the Makled case is not of significance to many US lawmakers because of who Makled is. Rather, it’s about where Makled is from and who he claims to know. A one-time Chavez ally, Makled fell out with the Venezuelan government sometime around 2008. He has, however, maintained that members of the Venezuelan military continued to protect him and the international trafficking networks he controlled until his detainment in Colombia in August of this year.

According to Juan Manuel Santos, the decision to send Makled back to Venezuela to be tried was a relatively clear and straightforward one. “I gave my word to Chavez that, once judicial procedures are carried out, we will hand over (Walid Makled) to the Venezuelan authorities," the Colombian president told reporters Tuesday. [The fact that, unlike in the US, Makled is also wanted on murder charges in Venezuela seems significant as well.]

But in the big picture what seems most important about Santos’s announcement is not any one particular pledge made about the extradition of any one particular drug trafficker – although this is not to imply Makled was any normal drug kingpin. Nor does the significance of what Santos stated Tuesday lie in the fact that Colombia seems to have snubbed its principal ally and military benefactor, the United States, although again that may be implied. Rather the take away seems to be two-fold. First, it’s another indication of Latin America’s new independence vis a vis the United States. In a trend which began with the centre-left governments elected over the last decade, Colombia’s Juan Manuel Santos’s actions prove that the centre-right desires independence as well. Second, Santos’s decision seems to demonstrate that even two often ideologically opposed countries are capable of rebuilding strong relationships with one another on their own terms. Just weeks ago, Santos and Chavez took new steps toward cooperating on counter-narcotics operations as well as reestablishing economic ties with one another. As a just released report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research maintains, deepening regional and bilateral commercial ties between Venezuela and Colombia are behind the recent diplomatic thaw – something Juan Manuel Santos also suggested on Tuesday, when he said Venezuela was in the process of repaying some $800 million owed to Colombian exporters.

Colombia, a country which has been touted by many for what it may have to teach others struggling against organized crime, may just have taught us something even more important about international diplomacy. We’ll see if anyone here took note.

To other stories:

· On anti-UN protests in Haiti, the AP reports that President Rene Preval is “appealing for calm” as worries spread that protests could spread to the capital. Preval’s appeal came during a national address Tuesday which followed an announcement from health officials that cholera-related deaths in the country had gone over 1000. According to the president, barricades erected by protestors were beginning to hinder the ability of doctors to respond to the public health crisis. Part of Preval’s written statement, directed at demonstrators is quoted in the Miami Herald this morning:

“Those who are creating the violence, who are looting warehouses, who are destroying other citizen's wealth, you should be reminded that no serious government will tolerate the state of disorder you are creating.”

For its part, the UN was forced to cancel flights carrying 3 metric tons of soap, other medical supplies, and personnel to Haiti’s second largest city, Cap-Haitien, because of ongoing protests there. A UN World Food Program storehouse was destroyed as protests also targeted police stations and UN outposts, particularly those run by the Nepalese, in the Northern Haitian city. At least two demonstrators have been killed thus far – one shot and killed by a member of the UN’s peacekeeping forces. The Wall Street Journal adds that the streets of Cap-Haitien were reopened Tuesday. It also reports that cholera has officially jumped the Haitian border and is now present in the Dominican Republic. The AP’s Jonathan Katz and Time’s Jessica Desvarieux and Tim Padgett, meanwhile, look at the implications of protests on presidential elections, currently still scheduled for one week from Sunday, as well as the well-organized targeting of UN Minustah forces by protestors. And the New York Times’ Randal Archibold highlights how medical authorities once again said they have no intention of conducting a full study into the origins of cholera in Haiti. As for the protestors, here’s UN Minustah spokesman Vincenzo Pugliese:

“’These are not genuine demonstrations. They are using spoilers paid to create chaos.”

· In Honduras, at least five landless campesinos (Tiempo says six, the FNRP says 12) have been confirmed dead in Bajo Aguán after being allegedly attacked by private security forces at an African palm farm which the peasants intended to occupy. The region has been the site of some of Honduras’s most intense land struggles for months. And according to Tiempo, President Pepe Lobo has now decided to send in state security forces to “to protect property” and “restore order” in the area.

· Nicaragua’s La Prensa reports on a new report by the Observatorio para la Protección de los Defensores de Derechos Humanos which indicates an upswing in violence against human rights defenders in the country.

· At Foreign Policy, Christina Larson, a fellow at the New America Foundation, on the “reverberations” of the drug wars being felt throughout Mexico – not just along the US-Mexico border, what Larson cleverly (and ironically?) calls “newspaper Mexico.” An excerpt from Larson’s piece:

“Sitting inside the heavily guarded presidential residence, Los Pinos, in Mexico City, waiting to speak with one of Calderón's advisors, I examined the portraits of mustachioed national heroes staring down from their gold frames…The palace had the feel of a bunker, but not because the drug wars resemble "an insurgency," as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in September -- it's clear that most of the violence is directed at rival gangs, not the state. But it's also clear that Mexico's "war on drugs" cannot be regarded as a law enforcement issue alone; it concerns the whole of society. And society at large must be engaged if the war is ever going to end.”

· The Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones on what appears to be restarted economic growth in Venezuela during the third quarter. The growth would be the first uptick in economic activity in seven quarters.

· Emily Achtenberg at NACLA on Bolivia’s state-run lithium industry. The New York Times yesterday on Russian oil giant Gazprom which has joined “a growing list of companies” planning to drill for oil in Cuba’s coastal waters. And the Guardian yesterday on how Brazil’s Petrobras is trying to become the world’s largest oil producing company – something which could happen as soon as 2015.

· A phone call I would have liked to have listened in on this week: NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg calling Uruguayan President José Mujica to pledge his “financial assistance” to the country’s fight against tobacco giant Philip Morris. According to the New York Times, “the cigarette giant objects to two new Uruguayan laws. One covers 80 percent of the front and back of cigarette packages with a graphic health warning. The other bans more than one type of any brand of cigarette, such as Marlboro red, gold and silver.” Uruguay became a leader in the global anti-smoking campaign under its former oncologist president, Tabaré Vazquez. The country hosts the Fourth Conference on the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control this week, says IPS, which adds that Latin America, more generally, is now on the cutting edge of the global anti-smoking, pro-public health movement.

· And finally, returning to where we began this morning, Michael Shifter in El Colombiano on an upside down world, and why he believes Colombia and Latin America, more broadly, should not forget about the United States amidst its new streak of assertive independence.