Summer/Winter Break Begins

Dear Readers:

Today’s posting will be my last for the summer as I head south to Chile for the next few months. Starting next week, Geoffrey Ramsey will be taking over the reins of the Hemispheric Briefings Mailing List. Geoff has been writing for indispensable site Insightcrime.org since its launch late last year and will no doubt do an excellent job covering all the important happenings in the region over the next 2-3 months.

If you’re already a member of the Google Group (i.e. you’re reading this message as an email), you should be receiving the daily newsletter in your inbox as usual. However, the public site where I post each day (www.joshuafrens-string.com) will likely be in hibernation until August. Instead, you should be able to find Geoff’s daily posts with all the usual links at http://panamericanpost.blogspot.com/. I wish everyone an excellent summer. Saludos, JFS

Brazil Launches "Brazil Without Poverty" Initiative

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff officially launched a new anti-poverty program Thursday aimed at eradicating extreme poverty in Brazil over the next three years. The “Brazil without Poverty” initiative will expand health, education, job training, and cash-transfer programs to the over 16 million Brazilians still living in conditions of so-called “misery.” The plan also seeks to help small farmers by setting food prices and will increase the flow of development aid to Brazil’s most historically marginalized regions through the creation of new basic infrastructure projects (See a May report from the Washington Post).

AP notes that between 2000 and 2010 the country’s poorest 50 percent saw their income increase by 68 percent. The income of the wealthiest 10 percent of the nation saw its income by 10 percent over that same period, marking an important shift against the country’s notorious problem of income inequality. Moreover, over 20 million Brazilians were lifted out of poverty and 36 million moved into the country’s middle class over that period. But Dilma insisted the government still had more to work to do.

“Fighting poverty is a government duty and a task for all Brazilians,” she said during her Thursday roll-out of “Brazil without Poverty.” “We cannot forget that the most challenging crisis, the biggest and most distressing problem in this country, is chronic poverty.”

According to AFP, Social Development Minister Tereza Campello says the “Brazil Without Poverty” program plans to budget around $12.5 billion dollars per year and will extend above and beyond the country’s widely-acclaimed Bolsa Familia cash-transfer initiative. “A country that has grown like Brazil can't be content with just having a big social program like Bolsa Familia, Social Development Minister Tereza Campello tells BBC Brasil.

More details in the coming weeks.

Today’s bullet points:

· In what is turning into a crisis in the Brazilian Amazon, yet another rural land activist was found murdered Thursday. As AP reports, the latest killing comes just days after Brazilian officials discussed how they might halt deadly disputes over logging in the region. The details of the latest killing are particularly gruesome. The police chief in the southeastern Pará town where the killing took place says two witnesses to the shooting tried to take the wounded activist to a hospital, but were pulled over on their way by gunmen who got out of their vehicle to “finish off the victim,” execution-style. The group Catholic Land Pastoral, a monitor of threats against land activists in the Amazon, has contended gunmen are frequently hired by loggers and ranchers to silence protests over logging and land rights issues in the region. Thursday’s murder follows the killing of three land activists and one witness to those killings last week in the same part of Pará state. Brazilian Justice Minister Jose Eduardo Cardozo said this week the armed forces, national guard, federal police and highway police will aid state police departments in their effort to stop the recent spate of killings, although details about what that cooperation might look like have not yet emerged.

· Amnesty International is the latest to issue a statement critical of the Brazilian government’s plans to move forward with a massive dam project on the Amazon basin’s Xingu River. On Wednesday Brazil’s environmental agency approved the construction of the Belo Monte dam, despite the on-going protest of environmental activists, indigenous groups, and human rights organizations, among them the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

· IPS offers a relatively optimistic look at the impact of Rio de Janeiro’s community policing program – a shift away from what the news agency calls a “war on drugs” model for taking on violence and trafficking. Meanwhile Insight republishes journalist Julia Michael’s more critical examination of the second-phase of the community policing program in Rio, which is supposed to bring new social investment to so-called “pacified communities.” The report comes from an interview this week in Brazil’s O Globo with state public safety secretary José Mariano Beltrame who says such investment has been too slow in its disbursement.

· As a high commission of former global leader’s released their damning assessment of the global war on drugs, calling it a “clear failure,” new figures from the epicenter of the drug wars – Mexico – show 70% of Mexicans in opposition to one of the commission’s principal recommendations: legalization. Additionally, 82% of those polled in the Encuesta Nacional sobre la Percepción de Seguridad Ciudadana en México, carried out by Mitofsky, say public security has worsened over the last two years while 71% say they approve of the decision to increase the presence of the military to take on problems of public security. Mexico’s Proceso reports.

· HRW’s Nik Steinberg, author of an excellent recent piece in The Nation on the drug wars in Monterrey, talks with WNYC’s Leonard Lopate about drugs, violence, and human rights abuses in what has long been considered one of Mexico’s most prosperous cities.

· AP says charges have been filed by Mexico’s Attorney General’s office against Tamaulipas Zeta cell leader Martin Estrada Luna – a man suspected of being involved in the killing of hundreds of individuals whose bodies have been pulled from mass graves in the northern Mexico state in recent months. The charges include kidnapping, drug trafficking, involvement in organized crime, and illegal possession of firearms but do not yet include murder of any of the individuals recovered from the San Fernando graves. Born in Mexico, Estrada grew up in the US and was only deported back to his home country in 2009.

· Ahead of Sunday’s presidential poll in Peru, the Wall Street Journal has a final look at the race between Ollanta Humala and Fujimori, as well as the vocal role author Mario Vargas Llosa has played during the election campaign. To those who have followed MVL’s thoughts on the economy over the last two decades, perhaps one of the most interesting splits this year’s election season has caused has been between the Nobel Prize winner (and his son, Alvaro), both unlikely Humala backers, and their (former?) friend and colleague, neoliberal economist Hernando de Soto. De Soto has come out in support of Keiko Fujimori. On Washington’s view of Sunday’s election, CEPR’s Mark Weisbrot comments in The Guardian on US government’s strong dislike of Humala. Bloomberg has final Ipsos/Apoyo poll numbers before Sunday which put Fujimori at 51.1% and Humala at 48.9%.

· In Venezuela, representatives from nine Latin American countries gathered yesterday to discuss the creation of a new continental news agency that might unite already existing state-backed wire services from around the region. TeleSur highlights the new umbrella body, apparently to be called the Unión Latinoamericana de Agencias de Noticias (ULAN).

· El Universal and TeleSur report on Lula da Silva’s visit with Hugo Chavez in Caracas yesterday – the ex-Brazilian president’s first since leaving office in January. AP highlights Chavez’s statements before that meeting re: his decision to continue handing over to Colombia FARC rebels picked up in Venezuelan territory. Next week Chavez heads south to Brasilia for his first meeting with Dilma Rousseff.

· And finally Mexico’s Central Banker Agustín Carstens was in Brazil this week, the second candidate for the IMF’s managing director opening to visit the country less than a week. (French Finance Minister Christine Lagard paid Brazil a lobbying visit earlier in the week). So far only Uruguay has publicly endorsed the Mexican economist in his bid break Europe’s monopoly atop the Fund. The Wall Street Journal reports, noting, among other things, that Carstens is a Chicago Cubs fan.

Former Leaders Call for Paradigm Shift in Global Drug Policy

A group of former world leaders says current global anti-drug policies have “clearly failed” in their objective to curtail both supply and consumption of illegal drugs. In a 24-page report, available here and set to be officially unveiled later today in New York, the Global Commission on Drug Policy recommends new steps be taken toward the legalization of certain drugs while also demanding an end to the “criminalization, marginalization and stigmatization of people who use drugs but do no harm to others.”

In addition, the commission calls on governments around the world to be more willing to experiment with alternative drug policies and legislation.

The BBC notes that the report is particularly critical of the US, saying the country must abandon anti-crime approaches to drug policy and adopt strategies rooted in health treatment and human rights.

“We hope this country (the US) at least starts to think there are alternatives,” says Cesar Gaviria, adding that the report’s authors do not believe US polices have been evolving in a way that is “compatible with our (countries’) long-term interests.” Gaviria says countries like Mexico and Colombia have an important role to play in pushing for such a discussion to begin in the US.

Responding to the report, the office of US drug czar Gil Kerlikowske rejected those claims, as well as many of the commission’s recommendations about legalization. “Making drugs more available - as this report suggests - will make it harder to keep our communities healthy and safe,” the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy said in statement released Wednesday.

Among the 19-person commission are former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, Brazil's ex-President Fernando Henrique Cardoso and former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria. The group also includes former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, current Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, Latin American writers Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa, the EU's former foreign policy chief Javier Solana, and former US secretary of state George Schultz.

The Global Commission has been co-funded by Richard Branson of Virgin Group Ltd., George Soros's Open Society Foundation, the Instituto Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and the Centro Edelstein de Pesquisas Sociais in Brazil. It’s a continuation of the Latin American Commission on Drugs and published its report on drug policy in Latin America in 2009.

The Guardian notes that the release of the Global Commission’s report is accompanied in the UK today by an open letter from a variety of legal experts, academics, artists, performers, and politicians to PM David Cameron, urging Britain to undertake a “swift and transparent” review of its current drugs policies. The signatories call for new drug decriminalization policies similar to those implemented in Portugal in 2001. The letter comes on the 40th anniversary of Britain’s 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act.

Today’s bullet points:

· In a 32-1 vote in Washington, the OAS voted to restore Honduras to the inter-American organization Wednesday. The Miami Herald reports. Ecuador was the only country to vote against restoration at the present moment. With far-right opinions about Zelaya’s return over the weekend – a move which opened the door to Wednesday’s vote -- Roger Noriega and José Cardenas obsess over Hugo Chavez at Fox News and Foreign Policy, respectively. At Upside Down World, meanwhile, Chuck Kaufman of the Alliance for Global Justice writes on last week’s congressional briefing organized by the Americas Forum and entitled “How 21st Century Socialism Subverts Democracy in Latin America” – perhaps a sign of things to come, in Honduras or elsewhere, from the Latin Americanist Right.

· The Nation, in partnership with Haiti Liberté, has begun releasing stories from the Haiti archive of diplomatic cables obtained by Wikileaks. Dan Coughlin and Kim Ives report yesterday on the ultimately unsuccessful efforts of Washington and US petroleum companies to prevent then-President Rene Preval from joining Venezuela’s regional discount oil initiative, PetroCaribe. The full story is worth reading at The Nation.

· In Peru where the influence of Hugo Chavez has been much-written about in recent months, Jo-Marie Burt and Coletta Youngers profile left-leaning nationalist candidate, Ollanta Humala (See their profile of Keiko Fujimori here). The two authors highlight the coalition of intellectuals and former political figures who have lined up behind Humala, many out of fear over the possible return of fujimorismo. Last week former president Alejandro Toledo was the latest to come out publicly for Humala. Many figures in the country’s human rights community have made similar pronouncements. Perhaps the most unlikely Humala supporter has, of course, been Nobel Prize winning author Mario Vargas Llosa, who announced this week he will no longer allow Peru's El Comercio to reprint his biweekly column, calling the conservative paper “a propaganda machine” for Keiko Fujimori. El Comercio responds here. AFP, meanwhile, reports on a decision by indigenous activists in Peru’s Puno region to halt anti-mining protests against a Canadian silver company until after Sunday’s vote. The region, says the news agency, is considered to be a Humala stronghold.

· Lula da Silva is on a regional tour this week. After visits to Nicaragua, Panama, and the Bahamas, the former Brazilian president is meeting with Raul Castro today in Cuba before going on to Caracas. For his part, Hugo Chavez re-appeared in public Tuesday after being down for weeks with a bum knee. The Venezuelan president said he will be heading to Brasilia for his first official meeting with Dilma Rousseff on June 6 before going on to Ecuador and Cuba.

· The New York Times says final approval has been granted by Brazil’s top environmental agency for the construction of the huge Belo Monte hydroelectric dam. The Inter-American Commission for Human Rights (IACHR) has been among the dam’s critics. In mid-April Brazil withdrew the candidacy of the former Human Rights Minister Paulo Vannuchi for a seat on the IACHR because of the inter-American body’s request that the project be halted.

· CNN says a Spanish Court has approved the extradition of former Guatemalan interior minister Carlos Vielmann back to Guatemala to face murder charges stemming from incidents at two prisons in the country in 2005 and 2006. Vielmann will likely appeal the extradition ruling.

· Reuters with a long report on what drug wars in Monterrey could presage for the rest of Mexico.

· AP on the arrest of a top FARC commander, Guillermo Torres, alias "Julian Conrado," by Venezuelan authorities this week.

· Insight on the discovery of some 200 FARC “uniforms” in the possession of on-duty members of the Ecuadorean military. Three soldiers have been arrested.

· The Guardian says a Chilean judge will examine claims that agents of Augusto Pinochet injected poison into Neruda's stomach while he was treated in Santiago's Santa Maria clinic for prostate cancer less than two weeks after the Sept 11, 1973 coup against Salvador Allende. Chile's Communist Party called for the investigation after the poet's former driver said agents of the dictator injected the 69-year-old on the day he died.

· El Faro on Salvadoran Mauricio Funes’s proposal to implement a system of obligatory military service for “at risk” youth in his country.

· Colombia’s El Tiempo on the final approval of the Ley de Victimas. The bill now heads to the president’s desk for signing.

· Human Rights Watch’s Daniel Wilkinson pens an essay in the New York Review of Books reviewing Claudia Lopez’s new edited collection “And They Refounded the Nation” about parapolitics under Alvaro Uribe.

· And finally three human rights press releases: HRW condemns the imprisonment of six Cuban dissidents convicted in recent weeks for distributing pamphlets criticizing Raúl and Fidel Castro in Havana’s Revolutionary Square. Amnesty International calls on the Venezuelan government to investigate the murder of a seventh member of a single family killed over the weekend in Aragua. Aragua police officers are suspected to have been involved in each of the killings, says Amnesty. And the Committee to Protect Journalists condemns a grenade attack late Sunday on the offices of the Mexican newspaper Vanguardia in the Coahuila city of Saltillo.

Wikileaks: Honduras AG Says He Never Issued Zelaya Warrant

In private meetings with the US Embassy shortly after the June 2009 ouster of Mel Zelaya, the chief justice of the Honduran Supreme Court, Jorge Alberto Rivera Avilés, and the country’s attorney general, Luis Alberto Rubí, claim they never issued a “request for an arrest warrant” nor an actual “arrest warrant” for the then democratically-elected Honduran president. According to diplomatic cables from the US Embassy in Honduras obtained by Wikileaks and released this morning by El Faro, Rubí met with the US Embassy in Tegucigalpa in the hours immediately following the 2009 coup, telling officials there that he had only ordered the “confiscation of polling materials” and “had not asked for Zelaya’s arrest” in the days before his kidnapping and expulsion.

Shortly thereafter, however, Rubí’s story came out to the public looking significantly different. In a press conference on June 30, the attorney general praised the ouster of Zelaya for its supposed “legality” and maintained that the action had been taken after the issuance of an international arrest warrant against the president. The alleged documentation calling for the president’s arrest also went public leading one to believe the aforementioned Honduran officials were either being less than honest in his talks with the US Embassy or that the coup regime fabricated documents attempting to legitimate the coup after the fact.

In an interesting passage of one cable cited in the El Faro report, US ambassador Llorens also cites conversations he had with three prominent Honduran businessmen Antonio Travel, Emilio Larache, and Emin Barjum shortly after the coup. Similar to Rubí and Rivera Avilés, the men note the “illegal” nature of the coup but support the coup regime no less under the notion they could successfully wait things out until November elections “restored a constitutional government.”

A July 24 cable from the US Embassy in Tegucigalpa, obtained by Wikileaks and released to the public earlier this year, said there was “no doubt that the military, Supreme Court and National Congress conspired on June 28 in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup against the Executive Branch.”

Speaking at a press conference after returning to back to Honduras this weekend, Zelaya called for a thorough investigation into his 2009 ouster.

Today’s bullet points:

· More on Honduras as the OAS prepares to vote on the readmission of Honduras to the inter-American body today. FNRP deputy coordinator Juan Barahona says the FNRP opposes the return of his country to the OAS this week, arguing the Lobo government must first prove it can comply with all the points of the Cartagena Accord before its brought back into the fold. Speaking with TeleSur, Barahona says that to allow Honduras back into the OAS this week would allow the coup d’etat of 2009 to be “left in impunity. Just as Honduras’s expulsion from the OAS came through consensus, its re-integration should so too come through consensus, says Barahona. Ecuador has said in recent days it opposes Honduras’s re-admission this week, but added it will abide by whatever decision the OAS reaches today.

· On human rights in Honduras, Human Rights Watch is calling on the Lobo government to ensure government officials stop attacking the credibility of human rights prosecutors in the country. The head of the country’s Human Rights Unit, Sandra Ponce, was the most recent target of such attacks. After opening an investigation into the deaths of seven alleged youth gang members in Ciudad Planeta, near San Pedro Sula, Deputy Secretary of Security Armando Calidonio publicly criticized Ponce and her Unit for targeting the police during their investigations. Since those statements, Ponce has received numerous threats.

· In a letter from the US House to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, 87 Democratic members of Congress say the Honduran government must be more actively “pressed” by the US to end abuses by state security forces. The group also calls for the suspension of U.S. aid to the Honduran military and police until “mechanisms are in place to ensure security forces are held accountable for abuses.”

· Regarding Honduras’s political future, various suggestions this week that former first lady Xiomara Castro de Zelaya could be a candidate for president in 2013. AFP reports after an interview with Castro de Zelaya. In its coverage of this weekend’s return of Zelaya, IPS says Castro de Zelaya will run. This morning Democracy Now also airs an interview with the former first lady. And finally Lisa Sullivan of the School of the Americas Watch was among those who accompanied Mel Zelaya back to Honduras Saturday. She posts a report-back from this weekend’s historic event, highlighting its regional significance.

· Colombia’s El Espectador has a good interview with Colombian foreign minister Maria Angela Holguín, the woman responsible for implementing quite significant shifts in that country’s foreign policy over the last nine months. TeleSur, meanwhile, interviews the woman who preceded Holguín, current UNASUR Secretary General Maria Emma Mejía, about regional integration.

· Ahead of elections in Peru, journalist Gustavo Gorriti of IDL-Reporteros speaks with WOLA’s Adam Isacson about Sunday’s vote and why much of the country’s intelligentsia has opted for Ollanta Humala. Jo-Marie Burt and Coletta Youngers, meanwhile, offer a closer looker at Keiko Fujimori and legacies of Fujimorismo. And Ollanta Humala sits down for an interview with TeleSur.

· As an autopsy gets underway to determine the definitive cause of death of former Chilean president Salvador Allende, a file from a military court’s investigation into Allende’s death suggests the former leader “may have been shot from a small firearm before he shot himself with a machine gun from under his chin.” The New York Times and AP report in English; Chile’s CIPER with the longer story in Spanish. AP also reports on new calls that the death of Chilean poet and longtime Communist Party activist Pablo Neruda be investigated. Neruda died on 23 September 1973, less than two weeks after the coup against the Allende government. The cause of death was then said to have been prostate cancer.

· The body of a possible witness to the killing of two land reform activists in the Brazilian Amazon was found Sunday just one day before the Brazilian government said it will increase policing in the Amazon rain forest in an effort to stem such attacks. The group Catholic Land Pastoral says more than 1,150 rural activists have been killed in Brazil over the past 20 years.

· AP and BBC on a brief visit to Bolivia Tuesday by Iranian defense minister Gen. Ahmad Vahidi. Vahidi is wanted by Argentina for allegedly helping to organize the bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994 which killed 85 people. Vahidi was in Bolivia for the inauguration of a defense academy for ALBA member states. Late Tuesday, Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca wrote a letter to Argentine Foreign Minister Hector Timerman saying that Vahidi had left the country at the request of the Bolivian government.

· Reuters says four Cuban men who threw anti-government leaflets in Havana's Revolution Square were sentenced Tuesday to up to five years in prison by a Cuban court. Elizardo Sanchez of the independent Cuban Commission of Human Rights has asked Amnesty International to put the men on the group’s list of “prisoners of conscience.”

· The International Crisis Group has a new report assessing the work of Guatemala’s UN-backed anti-impunity commission, CICIG.

· And the LA Times notes the passing of longtime Guatemalan human rights advocate Ricardo Stein. The Times calls Stein one of the “key architects” of the 1996 Guatemalan peace accords. In neighboring El Salvador during the 1980s, he helped create the Center for Information, Documentation and Support for Research at the Jesuit-run University of Central America. From 1998 to 2006 he directed the Soros Foundation Guatemala. Stein was 62.