Leaders, policymakers, and partners unite at Africa Day 2025. Credit: Shreya Komar/IPS

By Shreya Komar
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 30 2025 (IPS)

Africa is making progress on over two-thirds of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), but the pace remains far too slow to meet the 2030 targets, especially in areas like decent employment, gender equality, and access to social protection.

This was the central warning of the newly released Africa Sustainable Development Report (ASDR), launched during the 2025 Africa Day session at the UN’s High-Level Political Forum.

The report, which tracks alignment between the African Union’s Agenda 2063 and the UN’s 2030 Agenda, offers a sobering yet actionable picture: Africa’s development efforts are gaining traction, but deep structural barriers, ranging from inadequate financing and data gaps to high youth unemployment and gender-based exclusion, continue to stall momentum.

Despite being home to several of the world’s fastest-growing economies, the continent faces an annual sustainable development financing gap of up to USD 762 billion, according to the report. Social protection coverage remains alarmingly low, with only 19 percent of vulnerable populations benefiting from any form of safety net. Public investment in social protection across most African countries is below 3 percent of GDP, significantly under the global average.

“The current pace of progress is insufficient to achieve the SDGs by 2030,” the report warns, prompting leaders to explore actionable strategies for scaling up inclusive growth, regional integration, and institutional capacity building across the continent.

Health outcomes have improved in areas like life expectancy and disease control, but maternal mortality and unequal access to care persist. Gender equality remains constrained by legal barriers, high rates of violence, and the burden of unpaid care work.

On SDG 8, the continent struggles with low productivity, informality, and youth unemployment, emphasizing the need for inclusive job creation and economic transformation. While the continent has seen some recovery in sectors like tourism, key indicators such as GDP growth per capita (down from 2.7 percent in 2021 to 0.7 percent in 2023) and youth employment remain weak. Over 23 percent of African youth are not in education, employment, or training (NEET), with women disproportionately affected. Despite its potential, tourism contributed just 6.8 percent to GDP in 2023.

Economic shocks, climate change, and geopolitical instability continue to undermine job creation and sustainable growth. The report calls for data-driven strategies, innovative financing, and integrated policies to bridge development gaps and build resilient, equitable systems aligned with both global and continental agendas.

“It is not enough to just create jobs, but we must ensure safe working conditions,” said H.E. Amb. Selma Malika Haddadi, Deputy Chairperson of the African Union Commission.

UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed acknowledged the uneven starting point for African countries, stating, “too often, Africa isn’t at the table where decisions are made but is the first to feel the impact.” She added, “Our young people deserve more than we give them,” highlighting the pressing need for inclusive investment in youth education.

Central to the discussion was the need to mobilize greater technical and financial support, scale up climate financing, tackle illicit financial flows, and reduce social and economic inequalities. Participants emphasized stronger partnerships (SDG 17), inclusive social protection systems, and youth- and women-led innovation as key enablers for transformational change. The launch of the ASDR marked a major milestone, offering data-driven insights to support national strategies.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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Members of the “We are half; we want parity without harassment!” campaign stand outside Congress in Peru in 2018, in a demonstration advocating laws such as the one passed in 2020 on parity in political participation or the 2021 law that combats harassment and violence against women politicians. Spokesperson Elizabeth Herrera holds one side of the poster on the far right in the top row. CREDIT: Courtesy of the campaign

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, Apr 25 2022 (IPS)

Women entering the political arena in Peru face multiple obstacles due to gender discrimination that hinders their equal participation, which can even reach the extreme of political harassment and bullying, in an attempt to force them out of the public sphere.

“Women elected officials at the regional or municipal level only last one four-year term,” Elizabeth Herrera, spokeswoman for the “We are half, we want parity without harassment!“ campaign, told IPS in an interview. “After that, they’re not interested anymore, they feel that the system has expelled them.”

The campaign is a civil society initiative promoted by feminist organizations such as the Manuela Ramos Movement and the Flora Tristán Center in alliance with the National Network of Women Authorities (Renama), which has been a driving force for important advances for women’s political participation without discrimination, such as the Parity and Alternation Law, in force since July 2020.

Herrera, a 36-year-old political scientist, said women in politics face a number of hurdles. “They don’t give you the floor, they slander you, they attack you on social networks, there is physical and even sexual violence, which leads you to say, I don’t want to be here anymore, what’s the point,” she said.

A report by the National Jury of Elections – the country’s electoral authority – found that 47 percent of women experienced political harassment in Peru’s presidential and legislative elections in 2021, while in the last regional and municipal elections, in 2018, the percentage was 69.6 percent.

The harassment and bullying come from both within the same party and from other parties. “If you are a female authority, the adversaries seek to expel you from the decision-making spaces, they do not want to see us there, as historically we have not been present; they tell us that it is not for us,” Herrera said.

She added that many fellow party members also harass their women colleagues, to prevent them from competing for positions in the organization or for candidacies.

“We have seen cases in which documents are hidden from them, they are insulted, and this comes on top of the online harassment through the social networks, which is brutal,” she said.

She mentioned the case of a woman authority in the Puno region, in Peru’s southern Andes highlands, who feels terrible guilt because she believes that her son took his own life due to the systematic harassment against her.

The pressure suffered by the women is so great that the campaign must request their authorization to make their cases public. “Not all of them want to speak out because of the intimidation and harassment from the members of their own parties,” she said.

Peruvian women make up half of the population and the electorate but are underrepresented politically and in elected office. Meanwhile, those who decide to participate in politics endure a combination of discrimination and harassment aimed at driving them out of politics. The photo shows protesters in Lima holding a national flag, demanding greater female participation. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

A model for drafting regional legislation

In 2017, the Inter-American Commission of Women (CIM) provided a model draft law on political violence against women in the Latin American and Caribbean region.

It described such violence as “any action, conduct or omission, carried out directly or through third parties that, based on gender, causes harm or suffering to a woman or to various women, which has the effect or purpose of impairing or nullifying the recognition, enjoyment or exercise by women of their political rights.”

It stated that the violence can be physical, sexual, psychological, moral, economic or symbolic.

The proposal raised the urgent need for governments to act on the problem, since eliminating violence against women in political life is a condition for democracy and governance in the region.

Previously, the hemispheric declaration on Violence and Political Harassment against Women, adopted in 2015, had made it clear that achieving political parity required not only electoral quotas but also guaranteeing conditions for women to exercise their right to equal participation.

Strides made in Peru

In Peru, women’s rights organizations helped pushed through the first laws on gender quotas for electoral lists, which were passed in 1997, while progress was made towards the new law on parity and alternation approved in 2020.

The 2020 law contributed to the fact that in the 2021 congressional elections, women gained 35 percent of the seats in the single chamber legislature: 47 out of 130.

In the next municipal and regional elections, on Oct. 9, the law is expected to increase the scant presence of women, who despite making up half of the population and the electorate, are represented in a much smaller proportion.

There are two statistics that graphically reflect the discrimination and inequality suffered by women in politics: in the previous regional and municipal elections, in 2018, only one percent of mayors elected were women, and no female governors were elected in the 24 departments into which this Andean country of 33.5 million inhabitants is divided.

Rocio Pereyra hopes to become mayor of Pueblo Libre, a municipality on the outskirts of Lima. Showing the symbol of female power, she poses in front of the former home of Manuela Saenz, a libertarian woman who contributed to the cause of Peruvian independence and broke down gender stereotypes. “She is an inspiration to me,” says the pre-candidate for mayor in Peru’s October municipal and regional elections. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

A case in point

Rocio Pereyra, 33, is a pre-candidate for mayor for Pueblo Libre, one of the 43 municipalities that make up the metropolitan area of Lima. She will participate in the internal elections of her party, the center-left coalition Juntos por el Perú (Together for Peru), to try to win the candidacy in the October elections.

“I am leading a team that wants to bring about major changes in the district, that seeks the integral development and welfare of the local residents,” she told IPS.

In an interview in the district’s central square – where historical national independence figures such as Simón Bolívar, José de San Martín and Manuela Sáenz once converged – Pereyra stated that the low participation of women in politics has several causes, but all of them are related to discrimination and gender violence.

“We face a series of limitations that prevent us from considering ourselves one hundred percent autonomous. If you are facing violence at home or abuse from your partner, or if you do not have economic independence, it will be much more difficult for you to access spaces for political participation,” she said.

In the public sphere, Pereyra said, women are not yet recognized as equals, and are told: this is not your place, go home, do the housework, stay in the private sphere.

She said that an attempt is made to drive them out of politics by means of harassment, bullying, discrediting, invalidating their opinion and their professional, labor and political careers. “And these situations are experienced by many women when they exercise their oversight function and denounce acts of corruption,” she added.

“The message they want to send us is clear: That we better not participate in politics, because they can even mess with your family, with your children,” Pereyra said.

“Obviously women will feel even more vulnerable and will feel that they must protect their homes. So that reinforces the gender role that has been socially assigned to us. It is very pernicious,” she said.

Pereyra herself has often experienced discrimination.

“On one occasion a journalist in the district insinuated that I was involved in politics because I had a romantic relationship with a candidate,” she cited as an example.

And recently, she said, “within my own party as a pre-candidate, my interlocutor never looked at me when I spoke, but at a male colleague. Even though I was the leader, he did not speak to me.”

“Gestures can also be violent. I felt so impotent and I wanted to leave, but I said to myself, no! I’m staying and I will demonstrate my political capacity, with my actions,” Pereyra said.

“Closed. This party doesn’t care about women,” reads a banner held by a group of women demonstrators in the Peruvian capital in front of the headquarters of one of the political parties that violates the laws on gender parity in political participation. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

A new law should help

Law 31155, which prevents and punishes harassment against women in political life, has been in force since April 2021, promoted by the “We Are Half” campaign and which includes the tenets laid out by the CIM.

Herrera, the campaign spokeswoman, said that within this framework, political organizations are required to establish standards for how to address and punish these cases. “It is up to us now to monitor compliance,” she added.

In Pereyra’s view, the country will not change by decree and she argues that laws are not enough, and that what is needed is a cultural change based on education that contributes to generating gender equality and non-discrimination, and eradicates “machismo” and sexism from the political sphere.

As for the performance of women authorities or congresswomen, she raised the need for a feminist agenda.

“We do not go into politics to be an ornament or to echo what men say, but to bring up issues that affect us. The basis of democracy is equality and freedom, and this will not be possible if our rights are restricted. Our presence and feminist agenda will contribute to deepening democracy and to bringing to life the promise of a truly fair and egalitarian country,” she said.

The regional office of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) highlighted in a publication in March that the unequal distribution of power in politics undermines the effectiveness of governance in Latin America and the Caribbean.

It pointed out that despite the advances in legislation, only 19 of the 46 countries and territories in the region achieved gender parity at some point in the last 20 years, while only five achieved it at the ministerial level, two in national parliaments and one in municipalities.

Asha Abdi, a former member of Nairobi County assembly, says progress for the increased participation of women in politics in Kenya has been painfully slow. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

By Miriam Gathigah
NAIROBI, Jul 6 2020 (IPS)

In 2013, Alice Wahome ran in her third attempt to win the hotly-contested Kandara constituency parliamentary seat in Murang’a County, Central Kenya. As is typical of rural politics, the field was male-dominated, with the stakes being high for all candidates but more especially so for Wahome — no woman had ever occupied the Kandara constituency parliamentary seat.

“It was a very brutal campaign. I was harassed, verbally abused, threatened with physical violence and many unprintable things were [said to me] even in public,” Wahome tells IPS.

She says that attributes that are considered admirable and desirable in male politicians were weaponised against her and other women in politics.

“When we vocalised our opinions they said we talk too much and the underlying message is that decent women do not talk too much. When you have a stand, and are firm in your political beliefs and values, they say you are combative, intolerant and aggressive. The same qualities in men are acceptable,” Wahome says.

So vicious was the contest for the hearts of Kandara’s voters that on the morning of the 2013 general elections, the community woke to find packets of condoms branded with Wahome’s name. On the packets were messages, purportedly from Wahome, encouraging voters to embrace family planning.

“This was a smear campaign to show my people that I was not fit to be their leader. There are many things that politicians give to voters, such as food items. Distributing condoms in a rural, conservative society on the day of the elections is political suicide,” Wahome, a lawyer, says.

Fortunately, she had spent years interacting with the community, promoting health initiatives, education and the empowerment of women and girls. So despite the smear campaign, Wahome became the first woman to win the Kandara seat and is currently serving her second term in the national assembly after her 2017 re-election.

Propaganda, threats of violence and especially sexual and physical violence, public humiliation and unrelenting vicious social media smear campaigns are a few of the challenges that women in politics, like Wahome, have to overcome to win and sustain political leadership.

This is in addition to overall campaign challenges such as limited financial and human resources and vicious internal politics. But even at the political party level, the system is still skewed in favour of men who own and finance these parties.

“The political arena is very hostile towards women. The campaign trail is littered with lived experiences of women who have been brutalised for seeking leadership,” Wangechi Wachira, the executive director of the Centre for Rights, Education and Awareness (CREAW), tells IPS.

CREAW is a local partner for Deliver For Good global campaign that applies a gender lens to the Sustainable Development Goals and is powered by global advocacy organisation Women Deliver. The Deliver For Good campaign partners advocate to drive action in 12 critical investment areas, including strengthening women’s political participation and decision-making power.

Wangechi has been at the forefront of holding the government accountable for gender equality and equity, as provided for by Kenya’s 2010 gender-progressive constitution, which demands that all appointed and elected bodies constitute one-third women.

Article 27 (8) of the Constitution’s Bill of Rights says: “The State shall take legislative and other measures to implement the principle that no more than two thirds of the members of elective or appointive bodies shall be of the same gender.” 

The national assembly is obligated to enact the Constitution of Kenya (Amendment) Bill 2018, also known as the Gender Bill, to realise this provision. But more than 10 years down the line, this obligation remains unfulfilled. In 2019, parliament did not even have the required two thirds of members present in the house — the requisite quorum for a constitutional amendment — to vote on the bill.

“The national assembly has failed the women of Kenya. We have gone to court to push for the national assembly to enact legislation to correct blatant gender inequalities. There is too much resistance and push back from a patriarchal system,” Wangechi says.

It is this resistance that women in politics find themselves up against in their quest for leadership. Women account for just 9.2 percent of the 1,835 elected individuals in 2017, a marginal increase from 7.7 percent in 2013, according to a report by National Democratic Institute and the Federation of Women Lawyers-Kenya, the latter being another Deliver For Good local partner. 

This report shows that in the 2017 elections, 29 percent more women ran for office than in the 2013 general elections and there are now more women in elected positions across all levels of government. But Asha Abdi, a former member of the Nairobi County Assembly, tells IPS that progress has been painfully slow.

Overall, there are now 172 women in elective positions — up from 145 in 2013. In the 2017 general elections, 23 women were elected to the national assembly compared to 16 in 2013, and another 96 were elected to the county assemblies compared to the 82 women in 2013.

As such, women account for 23 percent of the national assembly and senate, with this figure including the 47 seats reserved exclusively for county women representatives. 

Human rights campaigners say that the momentum to hold the national assembly accountable had picked but as the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, concerns are rife that the gender agenda is no longer a priority.

“COVID-19 has not slowed down political activities in this country. In fact, leaders are behaving as if we are going into elections tomorrow and not 2022. We have serious political re-alignments and nobody is speaking for women,” Grace Gakii, a Nairobi-based gender and political activist, tells IPS.

“Ordinary Kenyans are more concerned with staying safe from the virus and feeding their families. So some of the small gains we have made could be lost during this pandemic because there is no one to hold political parties and powers that be accountable,” she says.

Recognised as East Africa’s economic powerhouse by the World Bank, this economic giant lags behind its neighbours in as far as women representation across government bodies is concerned.

In South Sudan, the figures for women in politics are higher, with 28.9 percent in elected positions. Uganda has 34 percent, Tanzania and Burundi 36 percent, and Rwanda 61 percent.

“Political campaigns and the intense lobbying that goes with it are very difficult for women. There are many meetings at night and exclusive meetings in ‘boys’ clubs’. Society is warming up to women but too slowly. When you vie against men, all the male opponents gang up against you, because it is considered a big insult to be defeated by a woman,” Abdi says.

While the 2017 general elections showed a small shift in the political landscape, resulting in the election of the first three female governors and the first three female senators, Wahome says that the road ahead remains long and winding.

She says that women in politics should and can successfully rise to the challenge.

Wahome encourages women to draw strength from others who have tried and succeeded, saying that with time, patriarchal attitudes and customs will shift. She particularly encourages women to engage in grassroots transformative projects with their communities.

“There are many areas to choose from including education and community health. Let the people see what you can do and later, they will back you all the way to the top.”

Young protesters demand better hospitals and public transport, while calls for political reform are less focused. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 10 2013 (IPS)

In response to the mass street protests in Brazil, President Dilma Rousseff proposed a raft of reforms of the political system which appear to be bogged down by red tape and interminable party negotiations – precisely the kind of thing the demonstrators are complaining about.

After millions of young people mobilised for weeks in the country’s main cities, leftwing President Rousseff sent a request to Congress on Jul. 3 asking it to organise a plebiscite to select a list of issues that would be subsequently debated by the legislature.

The issues suggested included: election campaign financing, currently based on private and public contributions; whether or not to continue the system of stand-ins for senators; rules on party coalitions for elections to the lower house and town councils; and ending secret votes in Congress.

“We still don’t know how the plebiscite questions will be phrased, but in principle it will be a consultation so that the electorate can say whether they want Congress to debate political reform,” said Mauricio Santoro, a political analyst and adviser to Amnesty International, when IPS asked him if it would be binding.

He said, “probably the plebiscite questions will define the issues that the legislature would have to address, but the specific nature of any changes would emerge from parliamentary debate.

“Initially, Rousseff put forward her political reform as a limited kind of constituent assembly (to rewrite the constitution), but that idea was immediately discarded as too controversial,” Santoro said.

“To address popular demands, we regard it as essential to make a broad and immediate combined effort to renew the Brazilian political system,” said President Rousseff, who belongs to the leftwing Workers’ Party (PT).

“There was a big effort to demand an overhaul of the political system. But so far, the efforts have unfortunately failed to produce significant results,” Santoro said.

Political reform has been discussed in Brazil for the past 15 years or more, but different party interests have stood in the way. And to judge by the differences of opinion it has given rise to in the last few days, even between parties that are government allies, there is little prospect for change.

“It’s a national malaise,” said researcher Fernando Lattman-Weltman of the Laboratory of Political Studies at the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV), referring to the resistance to change displayed by the political parties, in an interview with IPS.

The opposition and the electoral authorities also question the effectiveness of a plebiscite and of the subsequent debate in Congress, which the government wants to settle before the 2014 general elections.

And many are criticising the plebiscite itself.

Santoro said, “it’s perfectly possible to have political reform without setting up a constituent assembly.

“Much can be achieved by just changing the laws or party statutes, and even if it is necessary to amend the constitution, this can be done through parliament; the only difference is that 60 percent of the votes are needed instead of a simple majority, as in a constituent assembly,” he explained.

Lattman-Weltman was more direct, saying all political reform is the responsibility of the legislative branch.

“When (the political classes) speak of reform, they want to divert the attention of the protesters, who are asking for more participation in decision-making,” said political scientist Ricardo Ismael, of the Pontifical Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro.

“They are attempting to co-opt the energy of the street protests, when it is clear that the issue (of the plebiscite) is not one the demonstrators consider their own. What the protesters want is more hospitals and better public transport. Otherwise, their dissatisfaction will continue,” Ismael told IPS.

The demonstrators are also criticising impunity, corruption and the political wheeling and dealing of national and local political leaders, whether allies or opponents of the governing PT.

In Ismael’s view, the key question is to take concrete measures, such as banning off-the-books election campaign slush funds (“caixa dois”), limiting or prohibiting private contributions, and increasing transparency, for instance by providing voters with information on the sources of campaign financing prior to the elections.

According to Ismael, these issues should be discussed first in Congress, and then a plebiscite should be held.

Meanwhile, Lattman-Weltman regards it as “essential” for Congress to also reform the current rules on stand-ins for senators. In Brazil, senators have unelected temporary substitutes who can assume their seat if they step down for some reason, such as taking a cabinet post.

“It’s ridiculous. People vote for a senator without knowing who his or her replacement will be,” he said.

But the most controversial issue is the election system for members of Congress and town councils, at present by what are known as “open lists” in which candidates’ “excess” votes are redistributed to other candidates within their party. The result is close to proportional representation.

The debate is whether this should be changed for a constituency-based “first past the post” system for electing members of the legislature: the candidate gaining a majority of votes wins the district seat.

Another option is the “closed list” system in which votes are cast for parties rather than people and candidates are selected according to the party’s own list. This option is preferred by the traditional parties. A further possibility is the two-round system (run-off voting), advocated by some civil society organisations.

The lack of consensus among the parties is reflected in the divergent opinions of the political analysts interviewed.

Lattman-Weltman favours closed-list voting “because it will strengthen the parties and drastically reduce the number of candidates and campaign costs,” as well as facilitating closer oversight.

In contrast, Ismael is in favour of maintaining proportional representation, but would like to see a ban on party coalitions for the purpose of electing members of the lower house and town councillors. He said closed lists would be “worse,” because they would “severely curtail the number of parties” (there are currently dozens), hindering renewal.

However, the two experts do agree that campaign contributions from private companies should be banned or limited, so that government officials are not beholden to them, for instance when it comes to tendering for contracts.

Marco Aurélio García, Rousseff’s foreign affairs adviser, said that one of the causes of the “unrest” in Brazil is that the economic and social changes achieved by a decade of PT governments “have not gone hand-in-hand with institutional transformation of the branches of state, political parties and the media, ownership of which is heavily concentrated.”

In an opinion column published in the Argentine newspaper Página/12, García added that, as in other parts of the world and particularly in South America, “the institutions were timid and did not rise to the occasion when the public sphere was enlarged and new political actors joined the scene.”

In this context, he said public financing of campaigns was needed in order to “eliminate the influence wielded by economic interests in elections.”

He said other mechanisms should also be used to secure “wider participation of society in political life,” including instruments like the power to recall elected officials and more plebiscites and referendums.

Non-party-political young protesters, now in the midst of an ideological battle. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 6 2013 (IPS)

The street marches in Brazil, initially non-party-political, have begun to take on the hues of leftwing political and social groupings, which are now trying to set the course of the movement that emerged from online social networks.

Augusto de Franco, founder of Escola de Redes, a research group devoted to netweaving, said the movement that originated in large cities like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro was driven like a “swarm of bees, a manifestation of interactions that could only occur in highly connected societies,” like what has happened in Madrid and other Spanish cities, or in Tahrir Square in Egypt.

The demonstrations were triggered by one specific issue, a hike in public transport fares. But they have grown into the largest protests in the country since 1992, when demonstrations led to the resignation of then president Fernando Collor de Melo.

This time the protests began with 5,000 young people and swelled to 1.5 million in 10 days. And they are innovative in nature, according to Franco.

“They were not centrally organised, they had no formal leadership (although several short-term leaders emerged). They were not masses convened by centralised organisations, but multitudes of people that formed constellations,” he told IPS.

The swarm, without a queen bee, is now in the middle of an “ideological tug-of-war,” according to João Pedro Stédile, leader of the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST – Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra) which is now joining the protests.

“Since young people do not have a mass organisation, the social classes have begun an ideological debate. They dispute the young people’s ideas in order to influence them,” Stédile said in an interview with IPS.

“On the one hand is the bourgeoisie that used Globo (Brazil’s largest broadcaster) and other media outlets to put the right’s demands in the mouths of young people and on their placards. On the other hand is the left and the working class, that are trying to get on to the streets to push their own agendas,” he said.

In Stédile’s view, the protests broke out because of an urban crisis resulting from the current stage of “financial capitalism.”

He listed factors like property speculation, which has raised rents and real estate prices by 150 percent over the last three years, and stimulation of automobile sales, which has led to “chaotic” traffic, without effective parallel investments in public transport.

“Young people are not apolitical. They are doing politics in the best way possible, in the streets. But they are not linked to political parties. They do not reject the ideology of the parties, but their methods,” Stédile said.

Sociologist Emir Sader offered other explanations, like utopian ideals, rebelliousness and “healthy disrespect for authority” that he said were characteristic of young people.

Meanwhile teenage demonstrator Rafael Farías told IPS young people have “warmth and intuition, and they heard the call.”

“We are young and we want to be noticed,” said Farías. And their voices were heard by the executive, legislative and judicial branches, which have already come up with some short-term solutions, such as lowering transport fares, creating anti-corruption mechanisms, devoting more resources to health and education and debating a much-postponed political reform.

But the voices of the young have also reached the ears of social organisations and the wide spectrum of leftwing parties, including the governing Workers’ Party (PT) of President Dilma Rousseff. Another PT leader, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011), himself urged it to join the protests.

According to Lula, the right must be prevented from “appropriating” the movement and “pushing” the government to the left in order to “deepen the changes.”

Stédile said “It is not about putting slogans into the mouths of young people. They have their own, and the simple fact of taking to the streets and showing their anger is a political contribution for the whole of society.”

“The problem is how to mobilise the working class, because when it gets going it can achieve structural changes and strike at the interests of capital and the mass media,” he said.

The strategy has already shown results in the most recent demonstrations, which have had more diverse demands and participants, including trade unions and movements for the rights of women, gays, peasants and indigenous people.

“We are trying to mobilise the working class and include issues that are of interest to workers and all Brazilian people,” the MST leader said.

In addition to increased public spending on healthcare and education, they are calling for a 40-hour work week and heavier taxes for the rich and a lighter tax burden on the poor, and for elections campaigns to be fully funded by public financing.

And demands of a less urban nature are being raised, such as speeding up the demarcation of indigenous territories and land reform.

Social movements have different issues on their agendas, such as suspension of mining concessions and oil block auctions.

“In my opinion, the uprising has a social and economic basis,” Stédile said. “Instead of giving the young people political direction, it is necessary to put the working class in motion, in other words, to get poor people and workers also out on the streets. That is the challenge.”

These sectors must regain the representational space on the streets that they lost over the last decade of government by a party led by a trade union leader like Lula, with his long track record and high prestige, with whom they identified but from whom they became gradually distanced.

“The left in general became bureaucratic in its methods, although leftwing groups of young people in many cities were quite influential and were responsible for organising the protests,” Stédile said.

Sader, a PT activist, said “the left has to fight for the leadership and direction of this movement with a clearly popular and democratic orientation.”

This is a well-known strategy in Latin American history, which some analysts doubt is effective, while others support it.

“This movement has an increasingly plural agenda. People are crying ‘enough!’ Although specific political groups are trying to capitalise on the movement, its outcome has yet to be seen,” historian Marcelo Carreiro told IPS.

For his part, economist Adhemar Mineiro said: “The government would do well to depart from the tracks to which it returned with the old discourse of adjustment and competitiveness, and address the masses on the streets to discuss a new development model.”

Trade unions’ and social organisations’ ability to call people out on the streets will be seen on Jul. 11, when they have convened a national day of protests and strikes.

“We are aware that the media and conservative and rightwing sectors are attempting to influence the mobilisations with goals that are opposed to the interests of the majority of the Brazilian people,” said the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT) central trade union, one of the 77 organisations behind the Jul. 11 strike.

That is why “the organised participation of the working class is vitally important in this new scenario, to ensure a positive outcome for this situation,” it said.

During recent flooding in Budapest, the Danube rose to 8.9 metres. Credit: Zoltán Dujisin/IPS

By Zoltán Dujisin
BUDAPEST, Jun 15 2013 (IPS)

Record floods in Central and Eastern Europe have highlighted some of the challenges of climate change for the continent, as well as the floods’ potential to spur populist politics.

An extraordinarily long winter followed by weeks of intense rains has saturated soils and caused large rivers, such as the Danube and the Elbe, to overflow. The floods have wreaked havoc in the region, killing 21 people and forcing the evacuation of several tens of thousands.

In Halle, Germany, 30,000 people were forced to leave their homes, after the Elbe reached its highest levels in 400 years. In Austria, mudslides brought about the closure of roads and train lines. The Polish capital of Warsaw was partially flooded, and in the Czech Republic, 20,000 people were evacuated from 700 different localities.

Most of the flood victims – 10 out of 21 – are Czech, having been hit by heavy rains that at one point brought down hail stones of the size of ping-pong balls.

Czechs feared for the fate of their medieval capital Prague, as authorities mobilised heavy machinery to sustain one of the city’s oldest symbols, the Charles Bridge, dating from the 14th century. Hospitals and even the city’s zoo were evacuated.

The Czech government has estimated the damage at 800 million Euros, promising to waive the income tax for companies affected by the catastrophe.

None of this drama was apparent in the Hungarian capital Budapest, where the Danube rose to 8.9 metres, the highest water level ever recorded.

In contrast to the chaos and fear seen elsewhere in the region, the floods became a hotspot for what authorities call “catastrophe tourism”, in reference to the masses of locals and foreign visitors who gather around the riverside, taking pictures and often obstructing authorities’ efforts to contain the flood.

In a city whose bridges are usually a prime location for suicide attempts, many were surprised to see a few daring tourists using them to dive into the flooded river. Citizens appeared equally unconcerned; youths drove skim boards into the water while the wealthiest water skied.

The calm and surreal atmosphere in Budapest nevertheless reflected a situation firmly under control, in the capital as well as in the countryside.

Testing governments

The differences in responses to the floods have highlighted the need for comprehensive and preventive strategies in a region where extreme weather phenomena are likely to increase as a result of climate change.

“Floods such as these put to test the ability of affected societies to adapt,” Sergio Tirado, a researcher at the Centre for Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Policy in Budapest, told IPS.

“The impact of climate change will be more or less severe depending on the region’s response, namely in terms of developing early warning systems or improving physical protection barriers against water rises,” he said.

Yet while many activists have directly blamed global warming for the recent events, Tirado was cautious about making direct causal links. “It is likely that as a result of climate change, the frequency of such extreme weather events is increasing, and this problem may grow in future decades.”

The smooth handling of the floods by Hungarian authorities has been hailed as a victory by its prime minister, Viktor Orbán, which in the last few years has become the European Union’s (EU) most controversial politician due to his authoritarian tendencies.

Orbán has been criticised by European officials for his heavy-handed approach to governance. He has been accused of challenging the independence of the judiciary, conducting widespread purges in the public administration and endangering freedom of expression.

As a result, the conservative prime minister, under attack at home and abroad, saw the floods as an opportunity to stoke citizens’ patriotic feelings and regain lost popularity.

Orbán capitalised on the efforts of the 10,000 soldiers, volunteers and even prisoners that were involved in placing some 10 million sandbags along the 700 kilometres of Danube riverside located in Hungarian territory.

During the floods, TV and online coverage constantly showed the prime minister in action: Orbán was always at the site of events, wearing rubber boots and a vest, walking against the river current, flying in helicopters, discussing hydrographic maps with experts and cracking jokes with workers.

Looking extremely tired, the prime minister made frequent live updates on the spot to keep citizens informed on what he called “the worst floods ever”.

Opposition politicians, alarmed by Orban’s successful show off of his leadership abilities, rushed to imitate the prime minister and were seen setting up dikes along flooded areas. Pro-government media were quick to show one of these dikes breaking.

While Hungarians were relieved that only 1,500 people required evacuation and that not a single victim was reported, many of Orban’s opponents will be concerned that his stunts against the forces of nature will convince many that he is strong enough to endure another onslaught of criticism from the European Union.

The São Paulo Forum expressed its support for Nicolás Maduro in the upcoming presidential elections in Venezuela. Credit: Raúl Limaco/IPS

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Apr 2 2013 (IPS)

The São Paulo Forum, which groups leftist political parties and organisations of Latin America and the Caribbean, sees a victory by Venezuela’s acting President Nicolás Maduro in the Apr. 14 elections as key to the future of the left in the region, and to “containing the right”.

Maduro, the new leader of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), and Henrique Capriles, the candidate of the heterogeneous opposition coalition, will face off at the polls to win the six-year term to which the late Hugo Chávez (1954-2013) had been re-elected in October.

“For us the elections here are key, because an eventual defeat (of Chavismo) in Venezuela would mean a setback in the regional process of integration,” historian Valter Pomar, executive secretary of the Forum and a leader of Brazil’s governing Workers Party (PT), told IPS.

“It’s not the Brazilian or Argentine economy that would be affected in the case of a defeat (of Maduro) – which won’t happen – but the entire economy of Latin America, especially the weakest countries or the ones that are lagging the most in terms of industrial development,” Pomar said.

Parties that belong to the Forum, created in 1990 in São Paulo on the initiative of Brazil’s PT – in opposition at the time – currently govern Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Several of those countries belong to the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), Latin America’s alternative integration bloc founded by Venezuela and Cuba, or are beneficiaries of Venezuela’s Petrocaribe programme, which provides oil to 17 Caribbean and Central American nations under preferential payment conditions.

According to the Forum, Chávez’s initial election as president, in December 1998, marked the start of the rise to power of several of the group’s member parties. And since then, it says, none of them have been defeated in elections.

That does not count Chile’s Socialist Party, defeated by rightwing President Sebastián Piñera in 2010, because it was just one member of the centre-left Coalition of Parties for Democracy that governed since 1990.

The Forum working group, with 38 delegates from 27 parties in 18 countries, met Monday Apr. 1 in Caracas to pay homage to Chávez – who died of cancer on Mar. 5 – and express support for Maduro.

“This is an excellent show of support, which indicates to the popular movements of Latin America and the Caribbean that Venezuela is strategic and that the victory of Nicolás (Maduro) will also be a victory for the people,” Rodrigo Cabezas, a PSUV leader and Latin American Parliament lawmaker who hosted the gathering in Caracas, told IPS.

Maduro, meanwhile, said “this is the time of the greatest expansion of the struggles for the new independence of Latin America from U.S. hegemony and imperial domination. The road is just beginning in this new phase.”

The acting president and candidate, who joined delegates to the Forum in a visit to the mausoleum that holds Chávez’s remains in Caracas, expressed “special recognition of the Cuban revolution, as a forerunner to this Latin American and Caribbean process…It drove in the first peg, liberated the first territory, and generated the dynamic of resisting, fighting and winning,” he said.

“Yes, we are worried that the right is setting up an international operation, not only national operations, to deal us a blow. There is a counteroffensive by the right in the region, as seen in Honduras and Paraguay – the latter involving a coup by parliament,” Pomar said.

He was referring to the Jun. 28, 2009 coup that overthrew Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and the Jun. 22, 2012 toppling of Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo.

Nevertheless, “we see a situation of equilibrium. The right has failed to defeat us in the main countries where we govern, and we have not managed to get them out of power in Mexico, for example. But this relative equilibrium will not last forever,” Pomar said.

According to the Brazilian politician, “what could work in our favour is accelerating the changes in each country and deepening integration, a fundamental issue, because for many countries in the region it is impossible to forge ahead with the processes of change in an isolated manner. That’s why the presidential election in Venezuela is essential for us.”

This is reflected by the fact that the Forum has focused more on the vote in Venezuela than the Apr. 21 presidential elections in Paraguay, where the left is participating without a real chance of winning against the front-runners, who belong to the country’s traditional political forces: the Colorado and Liberal parties.

The Forum working group’s meeting also briefly discussed other international events, particularly the threats to global peace posed by the heated situation between South Korea and North Korea, the conflict in Syria and Iran’s nuclear programme.

Although the group agreed to protest what it called the provocation caused by U.S. military activities in South Korea, there were also voices in the meeting that complained that North Korea’s behaviour “facilitated” Washington’s alleged provocation.

In the debate on the situation in the Korean peninsula, the theory was set forth that the conflict there strengthens U.S. protagonism in the Asia-Pacific region to the detriment of China and its partners in the BRICS bloc – Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa – of emerging powers.

On the regional front, the meeting agreed that the most urgent situation involves the peace talks between the Colombian government and the FARC rebels, taking place in Havana.

As in nearly every Forum meeting, the Puerto Rican independence activists, this time through the words of Héctor Pesquera of the Hostosian National Independence Movement, insisted that the fight against the remnants of colonialism in Latin America not be forgotten, and called for the release on humanitarian grounds of Oscar López Rivera, who has spent nearly 32 years in maximum security prisons in the United States on charges of seditious conspiracy and armed robbery.

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Mar 19 2013 (IPS)

What is Hugo Chávez’s legacy to Latin America? The best way to evaluate a head of state is to examine what is left behind after his or her death. In the case of Chávez, his image is obscured by a series of ideological and cultural prejudices that hide a clear perception of who he was.

Chávez’s obvious faults have been exaggerated out of proportion by the ideological radicalisation that accompanied him. He was provocative to the point of using Iran, Libya and Syria to symbolise his independence from the United States.

However, his goal was not to find legitimacy as an international leader, but as a regional one. For this reason, he tried to highlight everything that could show up Washington’s impotence and decline.

His foreign policy, focused essentially on Latin America, was very simple: let us recover the message of our liberator, Simón Bolívar, to unite our peoples and free ourselves from the historic domination of the United States.

The arrival of former U.S. president George W. Bush was providential for Chávez: as the worst face of the United States, he was a useful confirmation of the Venezuelan president’s denunciations. With President Barack Obama, in contrast, he had to tone down his criticism.

His reputation as an international pariah was not due to his support for Cuba, which today is not regarded by anyone as a revolutionary or terrorist threat.

But a head of state who embraces “representatives of evil” like (the late Libyan leader) Muammar Gaddafi or (Iranian President) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is bound to spark rejection throughout the West, not only in the United States.

This was combined with a lack of understanding of Venezuela, since Chávez’s verbosity and his use of language that was neither elegant nor formal, but appropriate for stimulating the participation and identification of the poorest classes – his real political target – was interpreted in the West as demagoguery rather than as a means of communication. But this was the way Chávez was able to reach the popular classes not only in Venezuela, but also in Latin America as a whole.

Almost 200,000 poor Latin Americans recovered their sight thanks to Chávez, who paid for cataract operations in neighbouring countries, carried out by brigades of Cuban doctors. (People in Cuba were disconcerted to learn that one of the beneficiaries in Bolivia turned out to be sergeant Mario Terán, who killed revolutionary icon Che Guevara in La Higuera).

It is a fact that, thanks to Chávez, Latin America has made great strides towards integration. His name is associated with the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our Americas (ALBA), the Bank of the South (BanSur) and the boost that Venezuela’s incorporation has given to the Southern Common Market (Mercosur).

It is easy to brand all this as populism. But labels do not cancel an uncomfortable reality: in Latin America, the middle class is greatly outnumbered by the poorer classes. And traditional politicians were only interested in the middle class (if not merely the elites).

The region’s shift to the left in the last decade is surely due to the brutal impact of the neoliberal policies of the previous decade; but also to the entry of native peasants and the poorest segments of the population into the political arena.

This is why Chávez’s legacy is much greater than it might appear. It seems inevitable that Venezuela will have to cut back on its international solidarity (a worrying prospect for Cuba, in particular) and will cease to be a paradigm in the regional political scenario.

On the other hand, in this era of globalisation, the effort to take up again the ideals of Bolívar is inescapable and represents a true alternative to the betrayal of the liberators by the elites of the times. (Bolívar himself, in a famous phrase, said “he who serves a revolution ploughs the sea.”)

Only the selfishness of the elites can explain why Latin America, a substantially homogeneous region, more so than Europe and Africa, let alone Asia, has not integrated so as to compete more strongly and effectively at a global level.

While geopolitical influence in this century is swinging towards Asia, where China and India individually are more powerful than all of Latin America, it is in this region where new policies and pathways to more participative democracy are being forged, not in Europe, Africa or Asia.

It is hard to say whether Latin America will ultimately discover the road to unity. Chávez has done much more in this direction than any other head of state in recent history. This is his legacy. Time will tell whether, like Bolívar, he has ploughed the sea.

If he has, Hugo Chávez will go down in history as a frustrated dreamer, and details like his friendship with Ahmadinejad, his excessive verbosity or his vulgar language will not help explain the failure of Latin American unity. That will be the responsibility of the entire political class and its national egocentricities.

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Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard faces a tough race in the elections scheduled for September. Credit: Senator Kate Lundy/CC-BY-2.0

By Kalinga Seneviratne
SYDNEY, Mar 18 2013 (IPS)

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s comments about foreigners taking Australian jobs in a speech made last week in Rooty Hill, the working-class heartland of Sydney’s western suburbs, has brought issues of immigration, asylum and race back into election campaigning.

Opinion polls ahead of federal elections scheduled for September have indicated that Gillard’s governing Australian Labour Party (ALP) will likely lose the race by a huge margin to the opposition Liberal Party.

Hostility towards boatloads of asylum-seekers who receive bridging visas to live and work here is on the rise. Meanwhile, the opposition claims that the government has lost control of Australia’s national borders. Gillard has now added yet another dimension to the anti-foreigner sentiments in the community by drawing attention to the abuse of the 457 visa programme by unscrupulous employers.

The programme is uncapped and driven by employer demand. At the end of January, according to recently released statistics from the Immigration Department, 105,330 foreigners were currently working on 457 visas, an increase of 25.6 percent from a year ago.

With 20 percent, Indians topped the list of 457 visa holders, followed by the UK, Ireland and the Philippines.

A majority of these visa holders are believed to be working in the government healthcare system where there is a shortage of skilled personnel including doctors and nurses.

Another area popular among employers and foreign workers is the booming mining industry.

The latest official immigration statistics indicated that, by Jan. 31, the most popular professions for 457 visa holders were as IT specialists, cooks, marketing specialists and medical practitioners.

“We inherited from the former government a 457 temporary foreign worker visa programme that was out of control,’’ Gillard said in a speech in Sydney on Mar. 4. “And every step of the way we have been putting in place new conditions to crack down on the rorts.”

Gillard admitted there were legitimate uses for the visas to address skills shortages but added that, too often, local workers who have the skills are not given jobs. “In those circumstances I want to make sure that Australian workers are coming first.’’

Focus group research being conducted for the governing ALP this month has indicated that Premier Gillard’s “Aussie jobs first” campaign slogan has tested favourably with voters, especially in Labour’s strongholds such as the sprawling western suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne.

Gillard’s comments are linked to the decision on Feb. 23 by Immigration Minister Brendan O’Connor to further tighten the conditions under which the visas are issued amid mounting pressure from the union movement to toughen the rules.

But many political and social commentators here believe that the Prime Minister’s comments were also a veiled reference to local resentment towards the influx of asylum seekers.

As the election campaign heats up with Gillard on the back foot, Andrew Jakubowicz, professor of sociology at Sydney’s University of Technology observes, “The unions are angry over the 457 enterprise agreements with the big miners; the masses are angry about supposedly ‘uncontrolled borders’ penetrated by asylum seekers on unstoppable boats; the working classes are angry about rapidly changing neighbourhoods, inflows of strangers, and poor job and housing prospects caused by too many settlers competing for too few resources; and the ‘bleeding hearts’ are angry about human rights violations (the blocking of asylum seekers’ entry to Australia) and the moral thuggery of the main parties.”

Jakubowicz told IPS that the 457 visa is a human rights question more than a racial or economic issue. But when “everyone in the commentariat says it’s a dog whistle, then it becomes a dog whistle for racism”.

The unions, which back the ALP, have for a long time been at loggerheads with the government over the temporary visa. They are a formidable lobby group, though their power to cripple business has been curtailed by reforms to collective bargaining laws over the past two decades.

In May 2012, they opposed a government decision to allow billionaire mining magnate Gina Rinehart to hire 1,700 foreign workers to be employed in the Roy Hill mining project in the Pilbara region of western Australia.

Meanwhile, opposition leader Tony Abbot has come out in support of the 457 programme.

He said one of the most “jarring” aspects of the prime minister’s approach was the “assault” on foreigners.

“The fact is, people from overseas have made a magnificent contribution to our country. And trying to stir people up against them is the last thing that the prime minister should be doing.”

The opposition leader said a government under his party would make the 457 visa a mainstay of their immigration policy.

His view has found strong echo among the business community. Australian Mines and Metals Association Chief Executive Steve Knott said up to 80 percent of miners had used or planned to utilise the 457 visa programme.

“It’s unfortunate that asylum seeker policy and the need for skilled workers on the 457 visa programme have been combined in the political discourse as they are completely separate issues,” he said, adding, “the prime minister is clearly getting pushed around by the union movement.”

Saleh Saqqaf, a Jordanian who has lived in Australia for over 30 years and is an Arabic language broadcaster here, argues that the debate should focus on the working conditions foreigners face here.

“Are they treated fairly and given the same wages as Australians? Why can’t Australians be trained for these jobs?” he asked.

If foreigners “are brought here to be paid less money than Australian people, then obviously the Australians are upset. This is not racism,” he told IPS. “The Arabic community has the highest unemployment rate in this country and many people wonder why they can’t be trained for these jobs”, rather than having to compete with immigrants.

(END)

A huge crowd accompanied Chávez’s body Wednesday Mar. 6, 2013 from the Military Academy hospital. Credit: Agencia AVN

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Mar 6 2013 (IPS)

Part of the legacy left by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who died Tuesday, was his determined struggle for the integration of Latin America independent of the standards and models of the industrialised North, and for the reinvigoration of left-wing radicalism in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Chávez forged ahead in the field left open by the end of the Cold War, using as a tool the oil and financial resources that he employed in an almost discretionary manner in Venezuela, and with a charisma and gift for communication not seen in a leftist leader since Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

“When it seemed that Castro’s leadership abilities would not be seen again, Chávez showed up to display a new manifestation of the radical left and encourage that tendency throughout the region,” Carlos Romero, director of graduate studies in political science at the Central and Simón Bolívar universities in Caracas, told IPS.

Elected and re-elected several times as president of Venezuela since 1998, Chávez “felt called upon by destiny to follow the path of (independence hero) Simón Bolívar and be a kind of revolutionary leader in the world against the empire, the United States – something more rhetorical than practical,” Demetrio Boersner, who taught diplomacy and political science to several generations in Venezuela, told IPS.

His election preceded that of Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, whose countries are partners of Venezuela, Cuba and several Caribbean island nations in the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA).

He was also in power before the current and former left-leaning governments of Venezuela’s allies in the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR), an integration scheme in which Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay were joined by Venezuela after Chávez pulled the country out of the Andean Community, made up of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.

In the international arena, Chávez “leaves several big assets, like the projection of his political approach not only in the region but also reaching out to distant countries, encouraging other actors, like Russia and China, to get more involved in this region,” Romero said.

“Another was the integration, with ideas that were not necessarily correct but were novel, based on more authentic models than those promoted by the West,” he said.

Besides founding ALBA, Chávez played a key role in the creation of the recently established South American Community of Nations (UNASUR) and Community of Latin American and Caribbean State (CELAC), and of the regional Latin American TV network Telesur, the Banco del Sur (Bank of the South), and an incipient regional currency, the sucre, to facilitate intra-regional trade without the need for euros or dollars.

A third asset was “the use of oil as a key instrument of cooperation, as Petrocaribe used it, to balance the national accounts and boost the energy capacity of many countries in the region,” Romero said.

Petrocaribe supplies 18 countries in the region with Venezuelan oil on easy payment terms,” and should be maintained and improved as a cooperation scheme,” Boersner said.

But the academic drew a line, saying “Chávez talked about integration, but with his ideological intransigence, he tended to divide nations and governments into two blocs, supposedly made up of good guys on the left and bad guys on the right.”

By doing so, “Chávez became the heir to the ideas of Soviet-type bureaucratic collectivism, whose failure was demonstrated by the fall of the Berlin Wall, but which survived in Cuba, precisely under his mentor and inspiration, Fidel Castro,” Boersner said.

Romero said Chávez managed to “reinvigorate Marxist radicalism in Latin America, but with populist and authoritarian elements mixed in. But with that he managed to confront (free market) liberalism and social democracy in the region.”

Former Salvadoran guerrilla fighter Joaquín Villalobos wrote in the Spanish newspaper El País that Chávez was “the first left-wing leader with revolutionary aims to have an enormous amount of cash at his disposal. Other populist experiments did not enjoy such a lengthy boom period, and the communist countries were never rich.”

Chávez was always able to back up his integrationist or redemptive message with funds, whether they went to health or literacy programmes, refineries in Brazil, Nicaragua or Ecuador, fuel for poor neighbourhoods in the United States, military cooperation, food purchases or loans to businesses far outside of Venezuela’s borders.

Romero believes it is still too early to say who will pick up the baton as a new reference point for Latin America’s left, while Boersner says there are still “two lefts” in the region.

“One would fit with social democracy, with a capitalist economy but with a social redistribution of income, as in the case of Brazil and Uruguay, and the other was represented by Chávez, the heir to the bureaucratic collectivism that failed,” said Boersner.

The image or even silhouette of Chávez, who was prone to hours-long, vigorous speeches in favour of the poor and against imperialism and the elites, are increasingly visible all over, on posters, t-shirts and on-line social networks, as symbols of the Latin American left.

Rafael Correa celebrates his re-election at the Palacio de Carondelet, in Quito, cheered by a crowd of supporters. Credit: Martín Sánchez/IPS

By Leisa Sánchez and Ángela Meléndez
QUITO, Feb 18 2013 (IPS)

Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa secured yesterday his third term in office by a landslide, after vowing to radically deepen his project of citizens’ revolution by making the changes achieved thus far “irreversible”, fully achieving the goals of eradicating poverty, transforming the model of production and consolidating the “rule of the people”.

Initial data from the National Electoral Council give the centre-left candidate 56.7 percent of the votes in the national elections held this Sunday, Feb. 17, putting him well ahead of his greatest challenger, right-wing candidate Guillermo Lasso, with 23.3 percent.

This ample margin means Correa can begin his third consecutive term since 2007 without the need for the runoff required under the constitution unless the leading candidate obtains either 50 percent of the valid vote or 40 percent with a 10-point advantage over the nearest contender.

While Correa maintains that his government will continue to focus on social transformation, he noted that a change in the model of production and job creation would be the priorities this term.

This strategy is reflected in his choice of running mate, as the profile of vice president-elect Jorge Glas is more technical than political, and in Correa’s agenda, which involves promoting change through projects in the fields of oil production, energy resources, water, electricity and information and telecommunication technologies.

This transformation, which had already begun with restrictions on imports of consumer goods and higher tariffs for luxury items, will demand more value added on national products and strengthening popular and solidarity economy schemes, but without excluding private capital involvement.

Oil, Ecuador’s largest source of foreign revenue, with a record 98 dollars per 159-litre barrel in 2012, will continue to underpin the government’s investment in social programmes, which last year absorbed 15.3 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and are projected to require 16.6 percent in 2013.

According to the National Planning and Development Secretariat, public investment grew six-fold in the last six years, standing at 6.29 billion dollars in 2012.

Speaking to the press following his second re-election, the leader of the governing Alianza País (AP) party said that the chief goal for the next four years would be to make “irreversible the shift in power relations in favour of the people and the great majorities” through the implementation of “solid economic policies, prioritising the ‘social debt’ (over debt to foreign creditors), but without neglecting efficiency”.

Correa stressed that “the challenge is to move more quickly but in the same direction”, adding that the people have confirmed at the polls their desire to “bury once and for all the ‘partocracy’ that has inflicted so much damage” on the country, in reference to the monopoly of power held by political parties.

Correa is confident that the massive support he received from voters will give him a large majority in parliament, which will thus be able to pass key bills on issues such as communications, water, land and criminal code reform, which had been stalled until now.

On Feb. 17, Ecuadorians also elected 137 members of the National Legislative Assembly and five Andean Parliament representatives.

Legislator Virgilio Hernández, re-elected under the AP ticket, told IPS that one of the great tasks ahead is to “build a post-oil Ecuador, going beyond a commodity-based economy”, while “making major changes to achieve energy sovereignty, continue developing the country’s road system and implementing large infrastructure works”.

He also spoke of the need to advance towards “a true and radical agrarian revolution” and implement credit and technology policies that will guarantee food sovereignty and security.

Hernández noted that significant progress has already been made, but social welfare, health and education are permanent issues on the government’s agenda. Work is needed to “ensure the full enjoyment of rights and social welfare” by all Ecuadorians, and achieve greater wealth distribution, with “more equality and social justice”.

Nonetheless, economic performance will be decisive in determining whether the Correa administration will retain its level of popularity, Hernán Ramos, a political and economic analyst, told IPS.

Ramos believes that one of the key factors of the president’s stability is the steady growth of GDP, fuelled by favourable oil prices, increasing government revenue and a high level of domestic consumption.

The government’s “project would suffer if the economy’s stability were to waver” for any reason, even an international crisis, Ramos cautioned.

In terms of politics, the analyst observed that Correa’s three victories at the polls had succeeded in dealing a mortal blow to a political leadership that was “historically responsible for the crises that dragged the country down”, as with this new win “the opposition has been broken”.

Unlike in 2007, when he took office for the first time, Correa now has several advantages. Firstly, the political experience gained after six years at the country’s helm; secondly, the strength gathered by his movement; and thirdly, ironclad media protection (in the form of a media regulatory body created in a 2011 referendum to stop media excesses), Ramos explained.

The president had promised that this would be the last time he ran, as he considered it in the country’s “best interest”. However, his movement lacks a figure strong enough to replace him after this term, a political weakness that could be overcome by AP if “it succeeds in grooming new leaders that can at least consolidate its political leadership in the country”, Ramos said.

Counting elections and referendums, Correa achieved his ninth victory at the polls on Sunday and holds an indisputable leadership after six years in which, in his own words, he “re-founded the nation” with a new constitution in 2008 that launched an era of good living and turned the state into the leading economic and political agent.

When his third term is up in 2017, Correa will have completed a decade in power.

By Leonardo Padura
HAVANA, Feb 13 2013 (IPS)

Early this month, Cubans went to the polls to elect delegates nominated by municipal and provincial assemblies to the island’s parliament, the highest government body where citizens’ votes carry decisive weight. The turnout, as usual, was over 90 percent, and all the municipal candidates, as usual, were voted in.

The people of Cuba voted as they have always done, as a matter of routine, says Padura. Credit: Leonardo Padura

The people of the island voted as they have always done, as a matter of routine, perhaps not realising the momentous changes these elections are ushering in.

On Feb. 24, at the first session of the new legislature, the 612 elected members of the National Assembly will elect from among their number the leaders who will constitutionally direct the country’s affairs for the next five years.

The most prominent news about the new legislature is the official confirmation that Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada will cease to serve as head of the National Assembly, a post he has held for the last 20 years.

According to public statements, Alarcón explained his departure from the position with the affirmation that 20 years is “too long”, and “there must be change, there must be change”.

But the prospect that is hardly talked about, yet which has implications of immense potential political and historical importance for Cuba, is that after the National Assembly has elected Raúl Castro as president of the Council of State (an outcome no one doubts), the countdown will begin: after 1,823 days, his term of office will end, as will the terms of at least five of the six current vice presidents, all of whom took office in February 2008 when it became evident that Fidel Castro would not be able to resume power and his brother was elected president of the Council of State.

It was Raúl Castro himself, during sessions of the Congress of the ruling Cuban Communist Party in 2011, who proposed that no political office should be exercised for more than two five-year terms – including his own, as president.

The proposal was approved by the party Congress, although it has not yet been incorporated into the constitution, which must also include reforms forged in the country’s new economic model that has been inspired, advocated and promoted by Raúl Castro.

This new situation — unprecedented in a country like Cuba, where political, state and government posts were exercised without limits for five decades – opens a scenario of expectations when it comes to the changes that will happen in the next five years, and what the future will look like in February 2018.

For over five years — first at a slow pace, with changes of vocabulary, and then with concrete economic and social measures for the short, medium and long term (like the migration reform that allows most Cubans to travel freely from January this year, after nearly 50 years of being unable to do so) — army general Raúl Castro has set in motion the machinery of Cuban socialist structures in search of what the country most needs: an institutional environment, financial control, higher productivity, economic efficiency, self-sufficiency in production of certain items, changes in employment policy and changes in property law, among others.

But these urgent matters lead irrevocably to other transformations that have been announced by President Castro himself, in a process that must develop to its fullest during the five-year term beginning Feb. 24 and, indeed, be reflected in the constitution, as it will be reflected in society and its actors.

What changes will take place within the Cuban model? Will there be deeper modifications to the economic structure of the country, which so far has only seen changes that, while significant, are not macroeconomically decisive, and have not been able to guarantee certain goals, such as food production?

What opportunities will there be for foreign investment, in a country that needs capital to renew its ageing infrastructure?

What other freedoms will be approved for citizens in coming years, after the key move of lifting travel restrictions? What kind of Cuba will the so-called “historic generation”, now in their 80s, after half a century at the helm of the island’s government, leave to future leaders who will be groomed and prepared in these decisive years? What economic, and even social, role may old and new emigrés have in the country?

Cuba is entering a phase of transformation, and the critical period for the resulting changes is the next five years: a long time in the life of a human being, but only a heartbeat in the timeline of history.

(END)

Excerpt:

Last week’s dramatic and very public display of deep fissures among the leading politicians of Iran has left many here wondering if the conflict will escalate into an all-out war among various political factions in the run-up to the presidential election in June.

President Ahmadinejad (left) and Ayatollah Khamenei. Credit: Mehr News Agency

While everyone considers Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to be the only official powerful enough to prevent such infighting from getting out of hand, confidence that he will indeed do so has been shaken.

Politics in the Islamic Republic has always been raucous and full of surprises, but what happened last week was in many ways unprecedented.

The spark was the parliament’s decision to impeach the minister of cooperatives, labour, and social welfare, Abdolreza Sheikholeslami, for his failure to dismiss former judge and Tehran prosecutor-general Saeed Mortazavi from his post as the director of the Social Security Organisation (SSO), an agency under the ministry’s authority.

Lawmakers were concerned that, under Mortazavi’s leadership, the SSO, Iran’s largest pension fund and one of its largest economic organisations, has been selling off major public assets to individuals and companies close to the government.

The Court of Administrative Justice had ruled previously that Mortazavi should be removed both because he lacked the necessary qualifications for his post and because of his suspension as a judge as a result of a number of pending indictments against him.

The executive branch, however, frustrated the ruling – first, by changing the name of the SSO and then by transferring the new organisation from the ministry’s authority to that of the first vice president’s office. It also removed Mortazavi as director only to re-appoint him as its caretaker pending the appointment of a new one.

The parliament was aghast at this deliberate defiance, but, constitutionally unable to impeach the first vice president, it chose instead move against Sheikholeslami.

But the impeachment process, which was broadcast live on radio, took an extraordinary turn when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, purportedly appearing in defence of his minister, instead played a secretly taped conversation between Mortazavi and a younger brother of the powerful Speaker of the Parliament, Ali Larijani and Judiciary chief Sadeq Amoli Larijani.

The tape’s content suggested that Larijani’s brother, Fazel, was trying to tout his influence with his brothers in order to receive profitable contracts from Mortazavi.

After allowing the tape to be played, Speaker Larijani denounced the president for his conduct. Among other charges, Larijani claimed that he had been told before the session that if he did not stop the impeachment proceeding, the tape would be played.

He then detailed alleged legal violations by the executive branch, and recalling the words of Ahmadinejad’s own brother, suggested that some members of the president’s close circle may be in contact with opposition groups outside of Iran.

At the session’s end, the parliament, in what was widely seen as a de facto referendum on Ahmadinejad’s performance, voted to remove Sheikholeslami by the largest margin recorded against any cabinet official.

Initial amusement at the fireworks and folly of politicians, however, has now given way to genuine bewilderment as to where this open acrimony among powerful factions is leading.

Ahmadinejad’s penchant for using the threat of revelations regarding the corrupt conduct of various past or present officials has been on display since his 2009 presidential re-election, when he accused key figures of the Islamic Republic, including former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and former Parliament Speaker and presidential candidate Ali Akbar Nateq Nouri, of extensive corruption.

But his attack on the Larijani family, which includes the heads of the judicial and legislative branches of government, was unprecedented in its use of a secretly taped conversation played before an official and very public forum.

Mortazavi’s immediate arrest by the judiciary on charges of taping a conversation without legal authorisation calmed some nerves and suggested that Ahmadinejad was finally being reined in. It also pleased much of the Iranian press, for which Mortazavi’s career when he was a judge is best remembered for his imprisonment of numerous journalists and banning of many reformist newspapers.

“On top of satisfying a sense of revenge many people had towards Mortazavi,” one political analyst told IPS, “this arrest also signaled to many people that Leader Khamenei was now serious in addressing the blatant legal abuses committed by Ahmadinejad and his cronies.”

But Mortazavi’s release from prison the next day created new uncertainty, renewing concern about Khamenei’s willingness or ability to put an end to the attacks by Ahmadinejad and his loyal supporters against other officials of the Islamic Republic.

This concern was confirmed when, on the anniversary of the revolution Sunday, Speaker Larijani’s speech was disrupted when objects were hurled at him in an event in the holy city of Qom which he represents in the Parliament.

The well-known cleric Mohammad Javad Hojjati Kermani expressed this concern last Thursday in the daily Ettela’at, whose chief editor is appointed by Khamenei.

Noting his own disagreements with the Leader, Kermani wrote that he prays for Khamenei’s wellbeing every day since “in case of his death I do not know what will happen to this country and the nation… and what these abusive and slandering, fiery (men) will do to the people.”

This concern is not without foundation. The day after Mortazavi’s release, the Iran Daily, which is run by Ahmadinejad supporters, described the revelations against the Larijani brothers as a “soft document”. According to a journalist who did not want to be identified, “the term soft document suggests that more concrete and important evidence of their corruption will be revealed if necessary.”

Most observers believe that the Leader does indeed have the power to put an end to Ahmadinejad’s aggressive behaviour and are befuddled why he does not use it.

One university professor believes that the Leader, whose strategy since mid-2011 – when attacks by the president against his former conservative allies broke into the open – he describes as intended to gradually and peacefully weaken Ahmadinejad’s influence while letting him serve out his term, has been genuinely “taken aback” by Ahmadinejad’s “sudden game”.

In this view, Khamenei has been “temporarily thrown off-balance and doesn’t know what to do”.

But another close observer of Iranian politics sees the issue as more than temporary. This political science professor thinks that the Leader and people surrounding him are undecided about what to do for two reasons.

“Fears that Ahmadinejad may reveal more about the corruption of high-ranking officials, including Khamenei’s own children, or even the details of electoral manipulations that may have occurred in the contested 2009 presidential election and fear of admitting that he (Khamenei) was wrong in his full-fledged support of Ahmadinejad after the 2009 election,” the professor says.

What lies behind the Leader’s inaction and passivity has become a puzzle. Perhaps this is why in his last speech, which mostly focused on Iran’s foreign relations, he promised to speak soon on last week’s stunning turn of events.

The country awaits his words and wonders whether he can prevent the heat generated last week from turning into a firestorm.

Governments of countries in the Americas are relying on the passage of time and a relatively peaceful political atmosphere to sort out the unprecedented institutional situation in Venezuela, whose ailing president Hugo Chávez is out of the country, while the executive team tasked with carrying out his former mandate continues in office.

The attitude of these states apparently explains their prompt acceptance of the premise that Chávez’s government is a continuation of his previous term of office, which has been backed by a Supreme Court decision. However, some countries have hinted that it would be better if new elections were called to legitimise the new order.

“Criticisms from the opposition in Venezuela and from a large number of legal experts, contending that the steps taken are contrary to the constitution, have not been echoed by any country,” Carlos Romero, a professor of postgraduate studies in political science and international relations at several Venezuelan universities, told IPS.

Elsa Cardozo, head of the School of Liberal Studies at the Metropolitan University in Caracas, held similar views. The countries of the hemisphere “are witnessing a situation that is obviously not normal, but they prefer to wait and let time pass, while saying that it is not up to them to interpret the Venezuelan constitution,” she told IPS.

The first aspect of the situation, said Cardozo, is that the re-elected president is seriously ill and is undergoing treatment for cancer. He is convalescing in Havana from his fourth surgery since June 2011.

Chávez was re-elected in October to his fourth term of office, and was due to be sworn in on Jan. 10. Instead, Nicolás Maduro, the vice president (who, in Venezuela, is appointed by the president rather than elected by popular vote), inaugurated the six-year term with the tacit blessing of the Supreme Court, accompanied by the previous cabinet of ministers, while the single-chamber legislature declined to declare the president absent.

If the legislature had declared the president absent, the speaker of the Venezuelan parliament, Diosdado Cabello, would have taken over as interim president and new presidential elections would have been called immediately.

In contrast, according to the ruling of the Supreme Court and the view of parliament, there is no deadline for Chávez’s swearing-in as president for the 2013-2019 term.

Cardozo said, “Foreign countries do not buy the idea that there is no deadline. Spokespersons from Brazil, Colombia and the United States have said that as soon as advisable, if President Chávez is unable to return to his post, elections should be called.”

In her view, the United States particularly will maintain “a low profile” with respect to Venezuela, because “it clearly understands that for a number of (reasons), its words could well be counterproductive.”

Romero agrees with Cardozo that “with the start of new government terms in the United States and Venezuela”, Washington’s priorities are aimed rather at reestablishing diplomatic relations at ambassador level and “a climate of normality, so that U.S. capital can participate in the oil industry and the countries can work together against drug trafficking.”

As for Latin America and the Caribbean, the experts concur that there is no uniform position with respect to the situation in Venezuela.

Romero divides countries into three groups. The first is made up of the closest political allies, like Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador and Uruguay “that explicitly support continuity and the consolidation of Chávez’s policies, and believe there should be no going back on the changes effected so far.”

“A second group – the majority – whose most visible exponents are Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Peru, do not necessarily support Chavist domestic and international policies, but they do not want any kind of disorder, nor for the president’s absence to cause political instability or military unrest,” he said.

Street protests against the government formula led by Maduro have been few and far between, mounted almost exclusively by groups of students, while armed forces commanders have stated that they will not only obey, but will also enforce, the decisions of parliament and the Supreme Court.

According to Romero, the third group is comprised of “countries that wash their hands” of the whole business. “They do not have marked affinity or common interests with the Chávez administration, but they prefer to keep quiet rather than act, and this group includes Guatemala, Panama, Mexico and Chile,” he said.

Attending a mass rally held Jan. 10 in front of the presidential palace, presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Desiré Delano Bouterse of Suriname and José Mujica of Uruguay, along with high-level representatives of Argentina, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Haiti and St. Vincent and the Grenadines showed their support for the continuity of the mandate and for Maduro’s leadership.

Later on, messages acknowledging the Venezuelan government leadership formula arrived from all over the continent. The official line, without there ever having been an official medical bulletin about his state of health, is that Chávez, convalescing in Havana, continues “in the full exercise of his functions” as president, while his reinauguration for a new term of office is pending.

Meanwhile, Maduro is in practice the head of government, but although he receives recognition as such, he refuses to be called the acting or interim president.

A kind of collegial government is operating, with consultations and joint public appearances by Maduro, Cabello, Rafael Ramírez, president of the state oil company PDVSA, and Elías Jaua, foreign minister and former vice president.

Completing the political scenario, the leaders closest to Chávez, especially those in public office, travel continually to Havana where, according to their reports, they visit the ailing president, and also meet with historic Cuban leader Fidel Castro, his brother Cuban president Raúl Castro, and several ministers.

Among those who have travelled to Havana in order to gain first-hand information about the situation in Venezuela are Argentine president Cristina Fernández, Peruvian president Ollanta Humala, and Marco Aurélio García, the influential foreign policy adviser to Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff.

Brazilian officials told the press that the Rousseff administration has suggested that Venezuelan leaders hold elections “as soon as possible” if Chávez dies or becomes incapable of carrying out his presidential functions.

On Jan. 17, Brazilian foreign minister Antonio Patriota said: “We trust the situation in Venezuela, whatever the outcome, will evolve according to the institutions with minimal shock, so that Venezuelan society can reorganise itself as quickly as possible.”

Outgoing U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met with Colombian Foreign Minister María Ángela Holguín in Washington on Jan. 15, and they concluded that “a political transition of any kind needs to happen in accordance with the Venezuelan constitution and needs to be democratic”, according to the state department spokeswoman.

A few days later, Holguín came to Caracas for talks with Maduro and Jaua about joint programmes for the development of border areas, she said, and to wish Chávez a speedy recovery, but she did not refer to any “transition” in Venezuela.

Maduro and Jaua will be able to gauge regional perceptions of the Venezuelan situation more directly and privately when they attend the summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the European Union-CELAC summit, to be held in Santiago de Chile Jan. 25-27.

(END)

Venezuela has entered a political transition marked by uncertainty over President Hugo Chávez's future. Credit: Ukberri.Net/CC-BY-2.0

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Jan 9 2013 (IPS)

While Hugo Chávez is being treated for serious illness in Havana, the premise of government “continuity” is winning out in his home country, along with plans to postpone his swearing-in ceremony for a new term as president of Venezuela, due to take place on Thursday Jan. 10.

Venezuela has entered a sort of political transition marked by uncertainty over Chávez’s future, with tension, fencing and occasional bluffing between his civilian and military supporters, his opponents and the interests of his international allies.

Appearing jointly before supporters, Vice President Nicolás Maduro and Diosdado Cabello, the president of the single-chamber legislature, maintained that Chávez would continue to serve as president of Venezuela despite the “formality” of the date set for his swearing-in for the 2013-2019 six-year term.

Their insistence that Chávez is “fully exercising” his presidential office can be explained, according to analysts, by their loyalty and also by the need to buy time so that his political heirs can successfully take up the reins of the country.

Chávez, who was diagnosed with cancer of the pelvic region in June 2011 and has been recovering since Dec. 11 from his fourth surgery, has a “lung infection” and “severe respiratory insufficiency,” according to government announcements.

“The plan is to buy time while Maduro is groomed as a second Chávez,” in case new presidential elections are called this year, political commentator Eduardo Semtei told IPS.

Maduro, Cabello and other close collaborators of Chávez met in private in Havana in the closing days of 2012 and the first few days of this year, where they presumably discussed the strategy to be followed while the re-elected president remains on his sick-bed.

The Brazilian presidential adviser on foreign policy, Marco Aurélio Garcia, after meeting Maduro, historic Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Cuban President Raúl Castro on Dec. 31 in Havana, said he had received assurances that, should Chávez remain absent, “there is constitutional provision” and “there will not be political instability in Venezuela”.

Article 231 of the constitution stipulates: “The candidate elected shall take office as President of the Republic on January 10 of the first year of his constitutional term, by taking an oath before the National Assembly (parliament).

“If for any supervening reason, the person elected President of the Republic cannot be sworn in before the National Assembly, he shall take the oath of office before the Supreme Tribunal of Justice (Supreme Court),” the constitution says.

Maduro and Cabello’s proposal is that if Chávez cannot be sworn into office before parliament on Thursday Jan. 10, he can do so later on before the Supreme Court.

In this case “the constitution does not say when or where” he should do this. “This means the re-elected president is in possession of his office; he has express permission from parliament to receive treatment for his health, and when he is able to do so he will take the oath when he is already functioning as president,” Maduro explained.

Cabello, for his part, told a rally of supporters: “Chávez is still the president and he will continue to be beyond Jan. 10. Anyone who opposes this will be met by the people in the streets and they will rue the day they were born, because we will be here knee to the ground, our rifles to our shoulders and bayonets fixed.”

According to the constitution, in the case of “absolute absence” of the president-elect – expert lawyers consider that this includes failure to be sworn in, although others disagree – the president of parliament (Cabello) must take over as head of the executive branch and new elections need to be called within 30 days.

When Chávez left for Cuba on Dec. 8, he said, “As the constitution says, if there is any supervening circumstance that prevents me from carrying on, Nicolás Maduro must not only serve out this period (2007-2013) but when new presidential elections have to be called, my irrevocable opinion is that you should elect Nicolas Maduro as the president.”

In the view of Enrique Sánchez, a professor of constitutional law at the Central University of Venezuela, “swearing-in is an essential requirement for taking possession of the office” of president.

“Chávez will cease to be president at the end of the 2007-2013 period, and he must take office for the following term. It can hardly be said to be a formality, when the constitution dictates the starting date of the term of office,” he said.

“If Vice President Maduro remains in his post after Jan. 10, without an express order from Chávez, we would have a situation of usurpation of presidential functions, that is, a coup d’état,” Sánchez told IPS.

The opposition coalition Mesa de Unidad Democrática (MUD, Coalition for Democratic Unity) said “the premise of continuity violates the constitution.” They said an independent medical panel should review and certify Chávez’s state of health and accused Cabello and Maduro of “trying to cover up his infirmity with the virulence of their discourse.”

MUD coordinator Ramón Guillermo Aveledo wrote to the secretary general of the Organisation of American States, José Miguel Insulza, warning that “continuity” would violate the constitution and the Inter-American Democratic Charter.

Meanwhile, Catholic bishop Diego Padrón, the president of the Venezuelan episcopal conference, said after a meeting of the bishops that the constitution is clear that one presidential term ends and another begins on Jan. 10. “Altering the constitution to achieve a political goal is morally unacceptable,” the bishops said in a statement. “The nation’s political and social stability is at serious risk.”

While opposition groups discuss tactics in the face of the alleged violation of the constitution, the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) remains unyielding, and its leaders have rejected calls for dialogue to formulate solutions in concert with opposition lawmakers.

If it comes to the crunch, the Supreme Court is expected to rule in favour of Maduro’s administration. A good number of its judges are politically identified with the governing party and will back the executive branch in their decisions.

As for the armed forces, their commanders have reiterated their loyalty to Chávez’s leadership, programme and decisions. Dozens of active and retired members of the military have high office in public administration and 11 were elected governors only three weeks ago as PSUV candidates.

Analysts linked to the opposition maintain that the Maduro-Cabello duo represent the main groups, civil and military respectively, competing for power. They say their show of unity, with the leaders constantly hugging each other in public, is maintained at present only in order to prevent the party ranks from becoming demoralised.

Cabello has called for a mass rally to be held in front of the government palace on Thursday Jan. 10, which will be attended by allies of Chávez in order to lend support to Maduro. Uruguayan President José Mujica will be the first to arrive in Caracas on Wednesday Jan. 9, followed by Bolivian President Evo Morales.

(END)

China’s ruling Communist Party has launched its national congress, a pivotal event that ushers in a new set of top leaders for the next decade.

More than 2,200 delegates gathered at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on Thursday for the start of the week-long session that will install Vice President Xi Jinping as the party’s new general-secretary.

The meeting is the start of a carefully choreographed but still fraught power transfer in which President Hu Jintao and most of the senior leadership begin to relinquish office to younger leaders.

Addressing the gathering, Hu said that corruption threatened the party and the state, and promised political reform.

“If we fail to handle this issue (corruption) well, it could prove fatal to the party, and even cause the collapse of the party and the fall of the state,” Hu said in an opening speech.

“Reform of the political structure is an important part of China’s overall reform. We must continue to make both active and prudent efforts to carry out the reform of the political structure and make people’s democracy more extensive, fuller in scope and sounder in practice.”

Patrick Chovanec, an economics professor at Tsinghua University, told Al Jazeera that he doubted China would implement major reforms.

“When we hear the words political reform, we tend to think elections and independent judiciary. Those things are not really what they mean,” he said.

“They mean perhaps having two party members running for an office, instead of one party member.”

“I don’t think that necessarily we may see big steps. But maybe we will because with the rising middle class in China, there is a lot of pressure for people to have a greater say in the decisions that affect them.”

Economic reform

Al Jazeera’s Mike Hanna, reporting from Beijing, said that his speech also emphasised economic development and improving the country’s education system.

He said that Hu’s speech noticed “the importance of spreading education as widely as possible. He says education is the engine by which developments within China can continue”.

“And it has been ten years of rule which has seen massive changes in China in economic development, unprecedented since perhaps the British industrial revolution way back in the 18th century,” he added.

Hu will give up his role as party chief to anointed successor Vice President Xi Jinping. Xi then takes over state duties at the annual meeting of parliament in March.

Xi, 59, has been second in command to Hu since 2008.

Along with the rest of the future leadership, he will take the helm amid growing pressure for the party to reform to curb rising corruption and encourage economic growth, which recently slowed to its lowest quarterly rate since 2009.

The congress is a public gathering of 2,268 delegates drawn from the 82 million-member party where the real deal-making is done by a few dozen power-brokers behind the scenes.

Eight out of 10 Chinese want political reform, according to a survey published on Wednesday by a state-run newspaper.

The poll, published by the Global Times newspaper, found that 81 per cent of people in seven major cities said they supported political reform, with 66 per cent feeling the government should face greater public scrutiny.

The Global Times is linked to the People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party, and the decision to publish the survey appeared to indicate the party wanted to be seen to be acknowledging the calls.

But while party leaders routinely express vague lip service to some form of future political reform, the Communists retain iron-clad control of Chinese power and multi-party democracy is firmly off the agenda.

Preparations for the congress have been rocked by the months-long controversy over former senior leader Bo Xilai.

Bo, the former party boss in the central city of Chongqing, was once seen as a candidate for promotion to the party’s top ranks. But he was brought down earlier this year by murder allegations against his wife.

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

U.S. President Barack Obama campaigning in Virginia on October 25, 2012. Credit: Watermarked Photography/CC by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Oct 31 2012 (IPS)

With less than a week left in the 2012 election campaign and much of the Northeast recovering from Hurricane Sandy, President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger, former governor Mitt Romney, are running neck and neck in the national popular vote, according to the most recent surveys.

Online bettors and seasoned political analysts, however, appear to agree that by virtue of his edge in about nine key battleground, or “swing” states, the president will most likely emerge victorious after the final ballots are cast on November 6.

Instead of a direct popular vote, the presidency is determined by the electoral college, through which each state is allocated a certain number of votes based on their representation in Congress. Almost all states use a winner-take-all formula, so that the candidate that wins a majority receives all of a state’s electoral votes. With most states either solidly “red” (Republican) or “blue” (Democratic), “purple” swing states are critical.

Residents of those states, which include Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, New Hampshire, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, Colorado and Nevada, are being bombarded around the clock with last-minute radio and television campaign ads as well as robocalls and other telephone exhortations on behalf of not just the presidential contenders but candidates for state and local elected positions as well.

In the critical swing state of Ohio, which nearly all analysts consider a top prize, in part because no modern Republican candidate has won the presidency without it, is also leaning toward Obama, although one top political analyst, Charlie Cook of the “National Journal”, still considers it a “toss-up”.

With one of every eight jobs in that state dependent on the auto industry, the Obama campaign has been pounding away for months at Romney’s opposition during the financial crisis four years ago to the federal bailout of an industry which has since rebounded remarkably well.

Romney may have compounded his problems there this week when his campaign began running ads falsely claiming that Chrysler’s Jeep division was outsourcing U.S. jobs to China. The assertion drew harsh denunciations from Chrysler’s CEO and General Motors.

“You have to think the Jeep/China falsehood could be the nail in the coffin there,” noted Chris Nelson, a well connected political and foreign policy analyst, in his daily Nelson Report Tuesday.

Sandy’s aftermath

While the polls have yet to reflect it, Obama may ironically benefit in the closing days of the race from the hurricane itself, primarily because it enabled him to be shown supervising the federal government’s response, effectively pushing Romney down and, in some cases, even off the news agenda.

The praise showered on the president’s handling of the “Frankenstorm” by two Republican governors, notably Chris Christie of New Jersey, was no doubt poorly received at Romney’s campaign headquarters.

His campaign was just hit Monday with a widely circulated video clip of a debate last year in which the Republican candidate suggested that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) – the national coordinator for relief efforts – be eliminated and its responsibilities off-loaded onto cash-strapped state and local authorities or, better yet, the “private sector.”

A country divided

The closeness of the presidential race is indicative of how deeply and evenly split the country is, despite clear divides along different geographic and demographic lines.

The geographic divisions between blue and red states are the most obvious. With key exceptions in each region, the old South and most of the Midwestern and Rocky Mountain states are firmly in the Romney camp. On the other hand, the Northeast and the three West Coast states are solidly Democratic, as are most of the Rust Belt states of the upper mid-Atlantic and Great Lakes region.

While geographic divisions loom large, demographic differences have also emerged as potentially decisive. In a Washington Post/ABC tracking poll, well over 80 percent of non-white voters said they intended to vote for Obama while over 91 percent of Romney’s backers are white.

Ninety-three percent of African-American voters said they would vote for Obama, and only two percent for Romney, with the rest still undecided, according to a Pew poll released Monday. If their turnout is high, their votes could be decisive in North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida, all three of which went for Obama in 2008 and are considered tossups by Cook and others.

Obama was also favoured by 69 percent of Latinos in an impreMedia-Latino Decisions survey released Monday. A high Latino voter turnout, particularly in the battleground states of Colorado, Nevada, Iowa, Virginia and Florida could also swing those states in Obama’s favour column, ensuring his victory even if he loses Ohio.

Despite repeated efforts by Romney and the Republicans to paint Obama as anti-Israel, Jewish voters appear poised to vote by a solid majority for the president. If that prediction holds, it could make a difference in the two biggest electoral prizes – Ohio and Florida.

Age groups also could play an important role, especially if younger voters (ages 18-29), who historically have been the least likely to vote, turn out at higher rates. Obama leads that age group by more than 20 percentage points, according to the Pew poll, while the numbers are nearly reversed for voters 65 and older.

Similarly, most polls show a gap between men and women voters, although it has narrowed significantly in the past month as Romney moved sharply to the political centre after hewing closely to the positions of his party’s far-right populist core during the primary campaign.

The Pew poll found a seven-percent margin for Romney among male voters, and a six-point margin for Obama among women. Until the last few weeks, the gaps for both genders were more than twice their current sizes.

Overall, the Pew poll, conducted last weekend, found a dead heat between the two men in the popular vote. Other polls released this week have found the same results or one or two percentage points in favour of one or the other – all within the margins of error, however.

Still, most analysts believe Obama is likely to win, given his edge in most of the swing states. At the online betting site, Intrade, Obama’s chances of winning are at about 67 percent, up from 55 percent in mid-October. His odds have also risen about five percent since Monday, when Hurricane Sandy hit land.

Nate Silver, the New York Times’ polling and statistics guru, now puts Obama’s odds at 77.4 percent. Silver predicted Obama will win both the popular vote (by about two percent) and the electoral vote with all swing states except North Carolina and Florida.

When Philippines President Benigno Aquino III delivered his annual state of the union address in July, he appealed to the country’s lawmakers to break a  deadlock on progressive birth control laws in this predominantly Catholic nation.

An estimated 15 Filipina women currently die from pregnancy-related complications every day – up from a daily average of 11 a decade ago – and many of these are teenagers from among the urban and rural poor, according to a government survey.

In the decade after the law was originally proposed, unintended pregnancies have risen by 54 percent, according to the government’s ‘Family Health Survey-2011.’  The bill seeks to addresses this situation by offering contraceptive options, reproductive health care and sex education in schools.

According to the survey, the maternal mortality rate (MMR) reached 221 deaths for every 10,000 live births during the 2006 – 2010 period, marking a 36 percent increase from the 162 deaths during the 2000 – 2005 period.

In early August, the President’s allies in the House of Representatives had occasion to cheer as lawmakers in the Congress voted to end the fractious debate that had trapped ‘The Responsible Parenthood, Reproductive Health and Population Development Act’ in a Lower House parliamentary committee.

But, as the reproductive health (RH) bill makes its way through the Senate and the House for amendments, its sponsors face filibustering by a vocal minority trying to delay passage of the bill before Oct. 15 when the term of the current Congress expires.

“The anti-RH forces know that at the moment the pro-RH forces are likely to have the majority, so their strategy is to prolong the parliamentary process,” Congressman Walden Bello of the Citizens Action Party told IPS in an interview.

“Once we get to mid-October, it will be very difficult to muster quorums to take up legislation since most members of the House will be busy campaigning for reelection (for next May’s election),” Bello said.

According to Bello, the strategy of the vocal minority – about 120 members in the 285-strong Lower House –  is to leverage the political influence that the Catholic Church wields in this archipelago of 96.5 million people.

“The anti-RH forces hope that some of the pro-RH forces will waver and decide against voting for the bill for fear that the Catholic Church hierarchy will tell their Catholic constituents to vote against them,” Bello said.

The clout of the Church is playing out in the  Jesuit-run Ateneo de Manila University where some 190 academics supporting the RH bill have been threatened with heresy proceedings, according to local media.

“The first principle of canon law is that we don’t allow teaching that is against the official teachings of the Church,” Bishop Leonardo Medroso told a local radio station in an interview. “If there is somebody who is giving instructions against the teachings of the Church, then they have to be investigated immediately.”

The Church has also backed street protests against the controversial bill and one “people power” gathering drew an estimated 10,000 people in the capital.

Arguments trotted out against the bill at such meetings include loss of family values in a ‘contraceptive society’ and state interference in what is seen by many as a religious domain.

“The RH bill has become a political question because of the role of the Church in opposing it,” says Harry Roque, professor of constitutional law at the University of the Philippines. “The influence of the Church is ever persuasive.”

“But the reality is that we need this bill,” Roque said in a telephone interview from Manila. “It is important for the President to do what is right. He is deeply committed to supporting this bill.”

To do otherwise would expose the Aquino administration to charges of  being remiss in meeting United Nation’s Millennium Development Goal (MDG)  of slashing by three-quarters the maternal mortality ratio (MMR) by 2015 against what it was in 1990.

Local women’s rights groups and U.N. agencies monitoring the country’s progress in meeting MDG 5 (one of eight goals) relating to maternal health and reducing the MMR hold that the Philippines is likely to miss the target.

“The first RH bill, which was proposed in the Upper and Lower House in 2001, was meant to “respond to the various RH problems in an integrated and rights-based fashion,” says Junice L. Demeterio-Melgar, executive director of Likhaan, a centre for women’s rights and health that is backed by a national network of grassroots activists.

“It specifically wanted to call attention to existing but essentially tabooed issues like adolescent RH, post-abortion care and sex education,” Demetrio-Melgar said.

“A law was needed to mainstream the integrated health and rights-based approach, as well as to override the devolution of the Philippines healthcare system,” she told IPS. “The bill was meant to institutionalise the department of health’s RH programmes.”

The non-passage of the bill has adversely affected lingering poverty in a country  where nearly 20 percent live below the U.N.’s 1.25 dollars-a-day poverty line.

“The richest women want 1.9 children and have two; the poorest women want four children but have six,” says Demeterio-Melgar. “Unintended fertility keeps families poor and families with more than three children have difficulty feeding their children and sending them to school.”

Lugo's supporters demonstrating in Asuncion. Credit: Natalia Ruiz Díaz/IPS

By Natalia Ruiz Diaz
ASUNCIÓN, Jul 6 2012 (IPS)

Paraguyan rights groups are disappointed at being denied access to a delegation of the Organisation of American States (OAS) sent in this week to discover the facts behind the impeachment and removal of President Fernando Lugo on Jun. 22.

The mission, headed by OAS secretary-general José Miguel Insulza, is expected to make public, on Jul. 29, its official report to the permanent council of the 35-member OAS that has its headquarters in Washington.

The country “is peaceful” and the situation “is not serious, although it is delicate,” Insulza said during the delegation’s Jul. 1-3 visit to Paraguay.

While the delegation held consultations with a range of social, economic and political actors, to learn the circumstances leading to  Lugo’s ouster and his replacement by former vice-president Federico Franco, rights groups were kept away from the OAS team.

Representatives of political parties, agricultural producers, business  media, campesinos (peasants), indigenous people and the Catholic church were seen filing in and out of the hotel in downtown Asunción where the OAS delegation held consultations.

Prior to his departure, Insulza said, “We are leaving under the impression that there was openness from everyone to provide us with information on the case.”

He admitted, however, that the delegation “would have liked to have met with some other social sectors.”

Human rights organisations criticised the fact that the mission did not receive them despite their requests, and staged a demonstration at the airport when the OAS representatives left.

“In our capacity as organisations recognised by the OAS itself, as well as by the United Nations, we asked to talk to the OAS observers, but they did not receive us and that is regrettable,” complained Elba Núñez, a member of the Paraguayan Human Rights Coordinating Committee (CODEHUPY).

Núñez, coordinator of the Paraguayan chapter of the Latin-American and Caribbean Committee for the Defence of Women’s Rights (CLADEM), regretted “the biased view the OAS mission is taking away with them, as they have not heard all the voices, nor have they met with all sectors.

“The human rights movement cannot be disregarded in this way in the case of a parliamentary coup d’état such as we have just experienced,” she told IPS.

“We had high hopes of this visit, but now we have low expectations of their conclusions,” she said.

She also said that social activists were being persecuted more than ever since Lugo’s removal, to the point where activists were the targets of threats. “It is reminiscent of the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship (1954-1989).”

Political analyst José Carlos Rodríguez said the main outcome of the OAS mission may be to mitigate the harshness of external sanctions against Paraguay.

“The international community has formed a vacuum around the Franco government,” he told IPS, because the legitimacy of the new leader “has still not been recognised by countries like the United States, Canada and Mexico.”

Neither has Asunción confirmed diplomatic recognition by Germany or Spain – as some international media had reported. Only Taiwan and the Vatican have actually recognised the new government officially.

Paraguay has been suspended from the membership of Mercosur (the Southern Common Market), as also from the 12-nation regional Union of South American Nations (Unasur).

Rodríguez said this is worrying as it means the country cannot defend its interests in any international forum. “At the moment, Paraguay is a pariah state,” he told IPS.

In the view of former Liberal senator Gonzalo Quintana, now one of Franco’s advisors, the OAS visit was “a slap in the face” for ambassadors from countries of the Americas that have diplomatic representation in Paraguay.

“Rather than being seen as under punishment, Paraguay is currently being admired because, although it is such a small country, it has stood up to two giants – Brazil and Argentina,” he told IPS.

The Franco government went on a diplomatic offensive against its neighbours on Tuesday, accusing Venezuelan foreign minister Nicolás Maduro of interfering in the country’s internal affairs.

María Liz García, the new defence minister, claimed that on Jun. 22 Maduro met with commanders of the Paraguayan armed forces and urged them to rally in defence of Lugo.

As evidence, she displayed a video, with no soundtrack, showing Paraguayan military commanders, and shortly afterward Maduro, walking through the corridors at the seat of government, as Unasur foreign ministers flew into Asunción to seek a solution to the crisis.

When the OAS observers arrived in Paraguay they were met by protesters claiming that Lugo was the victim of “a parliamentary coup,” and also by pro-Franco supporters objecting to Paraguay’s Mercosur and Unasur suspensions.

Some 20,000 people demonstrated in support of Lugo on the streets of Asunción and in the provinces last week, mobilised by civil society organisations and leftwing political activists.

Rodríguez estimates that pro-Lugo demonstrators represent 20 percent of the electorate but lack cohesion as a group. “They are progressive sectors that lack structure, and so they are like leaves that can be blown by the wind in any direction,” he said.

On the other hand, the movement backing Franco lacks enthusiasm, he said. He cited a demonstration in support of the new government that was cancelled at a short notice with no explanation offered.

Coverage of the crisis by the Paraguayan media has been harshly criticised by Lugo supporters.

Rodríguez said privately-owned media clearly favoured the dismissal of Lugo, a former Catholic bishop. “The media supported the trial and are betting that Franco will stay in power until next year’s elections (due in April 2013). But there is actually no guarantee that he will last that long,” he said.

In contrast, ‘Televisión Pública’, the state channel created by the Lugo government two years ago, has a different slant. Its main offices have become the focal point for the pro-Lugo movement called ‘Resistance to the Coup’.

The channel’s “open microphone” programme has served as an outlet for expressing rejection of the new government ever since the president was deposed.

Núñez said the private media “avoid portrayal of what is really happening in the country; they do not reflect all the views and voices. And this prevents people from getting a clear overall picture.

“Private media are helping to propagate a state of fear in the population. That is why people are not holding mass demonstrations – because of fear,” she said.

Lugo supporters protest on the streets of Asunción. Credit: Natalia Ruiz Díaz/IPS

By Natalia Ruiz Diaz
ASUNCIÓN, Jul 5 2012 (IPS)

Paraguay’s isolation, following the impeachment and ouster of President Fernando Lugo 11 days ago,  has grown thanks to slender recognition for the new government and souring diplomatic relations with the neighbours.  

On Wednesday, Paraguay moved to downgrade diplomatic relations with Venezuela by withdrawing its ambassador in Caracas, citing “serious evidence of intervention by Venezuelan officials in the internal affairs of Paraguay.” 

Venezuela was admitted into Mercosur last week with the leaders of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay taking advantage of the temporary suspension of Paraguay from the trade bloc, citing irregularities in the impeachment of Lugo and “rupture in the democratic order.” 

The Paraguayan parliament has resisted ratification of Venezuela’s  membership since 2006 when the accession protocol was signed by four Mercosur presidents.

Paraguay’s suspension from Mercosur – the Southern Common Market – and Unasur, the 12-member Union of South American Nations, was decided at their consecutive summit meetings in the western Argentine city of Mendoza on Jun. 29. 

“The suspension will cease when full restoration of the democratic order in (Paraguay) is verified,” says the Mercosur declaration, signed by presidents Cristina Fernández of Argentina, Dilma Rousseff of Brazil and José Mujica of Uruguay. The bloc stopped short of imposing economic sanctions.

The government of Franco, the Liberal former vice-president in Lugo’s administration, ran into difficulties soon after he was sworn in as president on Jun. 22. Only the Vatican, Canada, Germany, Spain and Taiwan have officially recognised Franco as the head of the new government.

No Latin American country has recognised Franco’s presidency as  as legitimate.   

At an extraordinary meeting of the permanent council of the Organisation of American States (OAS) in Washington on, Jun. 26, doubts were raised as to whether due process had been followed at Lugo’s impeachment. 

On Jul. 2, OAS secretary-general José Miguel Insulza, leading a fact-finding mission, met Franco and his foreign minister Jose Fernandez Estigarribia. Insulza is expected to submit a report to the permanent council later this week. 

Speculations continue over the decisions taken at the Mercosur and Unasur summits with the fact that economic sanctions were not imposed on Paraguay seen as a relief. 

Paraguay will continue to have access to the Mercosur Structural Convergence Fund, of which it is the main beneficiary. Paraguay is assigned 48 percent of these funds, while Uruguay receives 32 percent and the remaining 20 percent goes to Argentina and Brazil.

Carlos Filizzola, former interior minister in the centre-left Lugo administration, told IPS that the ousted government would prefer that the international community does not impose sanctions on Paraguay. 

“We are not asking for sanctions, but we do want to denounce to the competent multilateral bodies that there has been a rupture of democracy,” Filizzola said.

To shore up his standing and that of the new government, Franco is seeking to strengthen political and business alliances at home. 

By selecting senator Óscar Denis as his vice-president, Franco has put the entire executive branch in the hands of his own political party, the Authentic Radical Liberal Party (PLRA).

In a communiqué, industrialists and business leaders have rejected what they view as an intervention by Mercosur countries in the internal affairs of Paraguay. Lugo’s removal, they stress, did not result in “disturbances of public order or abrogation of the rule of law.”

Economic analyst Ricardo Rodríguez Silvero said business leaders appeared to have underestimated the economic consequences, both direct and indirect, of the country’s suspension from Mercosur that will continue until the general elections due in early 2013.    

“Paraguay will have no representation on any of the bloc’s decision-making bodies, and so runs the risk of suffering negative impacts on trade, customs and diplomacy,” he said.

Lawmaker Justo Cárdenas, of the rightwing Colorado Party, told IPS that the actions of Mercosur were intended, in his view, “to marginalise Paraguay in order to incorporate Venezuela” as a full member of the bloc. 

Franco has asked Congress to approve a bill introducing personal income tax – something Lugo had requested repeatedly without success – as well as appropriation worth 480 million dollars for social assistance programmes. 

Leftwing parties and social movements that swept Lugo into office in 2008 are continuing to demonstrate in different parts of the country, protesting his summary removal from office just nine months before the next general elections.

“We want Lugo to return to his rightful place,” Filizzola told IPS.

Luis Aguayo of the National Coordinating Committee of Peasant Organisations told IPS that his groups “supports not so much Lugo as the democratic process, which cost a great many years of committed struggle and spilled so much Paraguayan blood.”

In contrast, sections supporting Franco accuse the left of deliberately creating disturbances, an argument forwarded to explain the lack of visible public support for the new government.

In Cárdenas’s view, Franco must adhere strictly to the constitution in order to govern. Negotiations are underway for a framework of basic agreements between the two traditional parties, the Colorado Party and the PLRA, a former Lugo ally.

“The Colorado Party has neither sought nor negotiated for positions in the new government, precisely because it is pursuing a return to power via the ballot box,” said Cárdenas whose party ruled Paraguay for six decades, including the 35-year dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989).

Filizzola said the left was nominating candidates for the general elections, but this was separate from the ongoing struggle to restore democratic order.

Some of the country's desaparecidos. / Credit: ha+/CC BY 2.0

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Jun 5 2012 (IPS)

The identification of the remains of victims of forced disappearance of Argentina’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship – whose bodies were buried in secret graves or thrown into the sea – is moving forward, with periodic findings that have a strong impact on the families and on society as a whole.

“It was a very difficult experience to recover my father’s body. It brought mixed feelings, but the overall balance was positive,” Sandra Márquez, the daughter of former provincial senator Damián Márquez, who was seized in 1977, told IPS.

Nearly 35 years after his forced disappearance, his remains and those of 14 other victims were found in the Compañía de Arsenales Miguel de Azcuénaga, a former military arsenal in the northwest province of Tucumán where a clandestine detention centre operated under the de facto regime.

In March, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF), a non-profit scientific organisation created to search for and identify the bodies of the “desaparecidos” or “disappeared”, identified the remains of three of the victims, including the former senator.

They were in one of five graves where bone fragments were also found, along with pieces of clothing and burnt tires.

“There were 15 complete skeletons and thousands of bone fragments that it was clear they tried to burn, which is why it is difficult to extract DNA samples for identification purposes,” the coordinator of the EAAF, Cecilia Ayerdi, told IPS.

The progress made by the forensic anthropologists has been based largely on information gathered in the legal investigation of forced disappearances in Tucumán. The testimony of former gendarme Omar Torres provided key details.

Torres testified that he personally saw general Antonio Domingo Bussi shoot prisoners in Arsenales. He said the former provincial strongman would visit the clandestine torture centre at midnight in combat fatigues, along with other officers.

According to Torres, ditches that were two metres deep and four metres wide were dug at Arsenales, and the prisoners were forced to kneel, blindfolded, next to the graves, and were shot in the head.

The bodies were later burnt, using tires and firewood, he said. The EAAF’s findings coincide with his testimony.

Bussi, who was de facto governor of Tucumán from 1976 to 1978, was cashiered from the army for corruption after the return to democracy, and arrested, tried and sentenced for kidnapping, torture and embezzlement.

But he was let off the hook by the amnesty laws passed in the late 1980s – which were struck down in 2005 – and was elected and served as governor of the province from 1995 to 1999.

He later faced charges of human rights abuses in trials that began in 2003 and was sentenced in 2008 to house arrest for life for crimes against humanity. He died in late 2011.

The remains exhumed in Tucumán were among the most recent discoveries. But the bodies of other victims of the dictatorship – which was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 30,000 people – have also been found in cemeteries and clandestine detention centres in other provinces.

The bodies of some victims have even been found in neighbouring Uruguay, where the corpses of political prisoners thrown into the sea or the Rio de la Plata estuary washed up on the country’s coast during the dictatorship.

Victoria Montenegro’s parents were among the desaparecidos. She was seized as a baby along with her parents, a little over a month before the March 1976 coup that ushered in the dictatorship, and was raised by a military couple.

She recently found out that her father’s remains had been discovered in a grave in Uruguay.

After her biological father, Roque Montenegro, was taken away, his body was dumped into the Rio de la Plata, between Argentina and Uruguay. In May 1976, his remains washed up on the shores of the Uruguayan city of Colonia and were buried in an unnamed grave along with seven other bodies found on the coast.

By comparing DNA from the remains found in Uruguay with samples taken from the adult children of the victims of forced disappearance, the body of Montenegro was identified, 36 years after his death – and Victoria found out who her biological parents were.

For her, the news was both devastating and a relief. “I embrace the miracle that my dad has appeared, even though the terrorist state did everything possible to make sure he never would,” she said.

The EAAF has more than 8,400 DNA samples from relatives of some 4,500 desaparecidos. So far 515 have been identified, and there are 600 other exhumed bodies still pending identification.

Ayerdi explained that there are cases in which no direct family members have survived to search for the missing person. For that reason, the EAAF is seeking permission to carry out exhumations and obtain DNA samples from dead relatives, to help identify the bodies found.

But some people have refused to provide blood samples. “There are people who don’t want to be given bones, or who say their mourning process is over. And there are others who don’t even know that they can search (for their missing family members) this way,” she said.

In fact, the broad media coverage of the Montenegro case prompted a flood of calls from people interested in depositing samples in the blood bank of relatives of missing people.

The bank was created as part of the Latin American Initiative for the Identification of Disappeared Persons, launched in 2007 by the EAAF, which gave a major boost to the work of exhuming and identifying remains.

Up to that point, just 250 bodies had been identified. But in the few years since the blood bank was created, the number has doubled. And bodies continue to be found. Besides the graves in Tucumán, remains were recently discovered in Rosario, a city in the northeast province of Santa Fe.

In October 2011, more than 120 unnamed graves were exhumed in the La Piedad cemetery in Rosario, and 12 people have been identified so far, from the remains of some 300 people.

Ayerdi said that besides the effort to identify the remains already exhumed, the EAAF will continue working in clandestine detention centres like the Campo de Mayo in the eastern province of Buenos Aires and La Perla in the central province of Córdoba.

“What we need are more blood samples,” she said. Despite the media campaign that was launched, there is still resistance to undergoing the test, to build up the databank of DNA samples.

Sandra Márquez told IPS that although she and her brothers had never stopped searching for their father, who was 42 when he became one of the desaparecidos, they did not really believe when they deposited blood samples that it would lead to identification of his body.

But thanks to the EAAF, they were given their father’s remains and held a wake and a burial service.

“It was really tough to be given his bones, but we are very grateful because this is so important for the families. This helps us close a chapter. I hope others can have this experience. My father is no longer a desaparecido,” she said.

Teófila Anchahua raises guinea pigs in Peru’s southern highlands with the help of a microloan. Credit: Julio Angulo/IPS

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, May 11 2012 (IPS)

A new report takes a close look at the territorial distribution of poverty and inequality in Latin America, which has long had a reputation of being the most unequal region in the world.

The Latin American Report on Poverty and Inequality 2011, presented this week by the Latin American Centre for Rural Development (RIMISP), notes that rural areas and indigenous and black populations are hit hardest by inequality.

It also points out that the huge disparities in development levels within the countries of Latin America are one of the aspects of inequality that have received the least attention.

“In Latin America, one’s place of birth or residence is not a minor issue because it determines both socio-economic conditions and opportunities to access the goods that guarantee wellbeing,” the report says.

“This is true of entire countries and areas within them. The region is home to countries that have achieved greater levels of growth, but that growth is concentrated in a limited number of territories,” it adds.

The study also says that some countries with relatively low average levels of development have no areas that are particularly lagging or advanced with respect to the national median, while other countries with relatively high average levels of development have only a few areas with satisfactory results.

The report is based on data from Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru, in six different socioeconomic areas: health, education, economic dynamism and employment, income and poverty, citizen security, and gender equality.

“One of the most consistent findings was that in practically all countries of the region, the same inequalities and the same gaps are repeated in the same kinds of territories,” Ignacia Fernández, who coordinated the study, told IPS.

“The exception is in terms of income inequality and citizen insecurity, which most heavily affect densely populated urban (slum) territories,” added Fernández, who holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of Barcelona in Spain.

The report says that because the average statistics of socioeconomic indicators for each country hide major variations between urban and rural areas, they fail to adequately inform the design and implementation of public policies aimed at reducing poverty and inequality.

As a result, there are public policies that instead of helping to come up with solutions, actually aggravate the problem of inequality.

“What the tyranny of averages does in the end is hide significant differences,” Fernández said. “One case in point is Chile, which in general has a good average with respect to the rest of the region. But it has districts with indicators similar to those of Nigeria, and others that are like Switzerland. There are huge disparities that are normally not seen.”

And public policies and solutions tend to be designed with the averages in mind, she added.

Pablo González, the economist who coordinated the 2010 UNDP National Human Development Report on Chile, called for public policy-makers to keep the needs of different territories in mind, and to generate development-oriented proposals with input from people on their specific needs.

“We are in one of the continents that exhibit the greatest inequality in the world, along with the countries of southern Africa, and that inequality varies, from places in the region that are comparable to the most developed parts of the world, to other places that are at levels comparable to the most backward regions,” the UNDP (U.N. Development Programme) official told IPS.

González said top-down policy-making that fails to take into account the particularities of each specific part of the territory and the population should be avoided. He recommended bottom-up policies and management, focused on specific units of territory, and said there were successful international experiences in this respect.

“The complex policy issues of the future have to be handled this way, and not with a limited sectoral focus. Issues like gender equality, for example, require a multisectoral effort, and the unit that has comparative advantages for doing this is the territory,” he said.

The report mentions three sectoral policies that have had different results in different areas: Chile’s decentralised education policy; rural development programmes in Mexico; and Ecuador’s Human Development Cash Transfer.

Although these initiatives have different purposes and scopes, they all have one thing in common: while the overall results have been positive, “when they are assessed in a spatially disaggregated manner, we find significant inequalities in their results and impacts,” the report says.

In practice, “the problem ends up being aggravated, because the solutions are not tailored to specific, particular problems” that vary from area to area within a country, Fernández said.

For example, “If you look at aggregate statistics from Mexico in the last 20 years, inequality in general, and in urban areas, has declined, while rural inequality has increased, despite resources dedicated to a programme specifically targeting the rural sector,” she said.

In contrast, the study cites two examples of local administration that have successfully managed to fight poverty: the Sierra Sur Project, in Peru’s southern Andean highlands, and the Land of Solidarity initiative in southern Santander, a province in northeastern Colombia.

The Sierra Sur project, which got underway in 2005 with financing from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), supports hundreds of small farmer organisations and networks involved in efforts to improve the quality of production of natural resources and strengthen rural business initiatives, through transparent, local programmes based on community participation.

The Land of Solidarity programme, meanwhile, covers 52 municipalities in the province of Santander, where a solidarity economy has grown up on the basis of a strong social, cultural and economic tradition of cooperatives, which began to emerge in the 1960s under the influence of Catholic Church social outreach efforts.

González said “both models are interesting to study.” In his opinion, it is a matter of “going beyond approaches that emphasise unidimensional questions, such as income, efficiency, or even the way poverty is traditionally measured.”

“It is necessary to ask people what they care about, and what results they want to see,” in order to “give new legitimacy to political action and public policies,” he said.

A demonstration at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Credit: Jillian Kestler-D’Amours/IPS A demonstration at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Credit: Jillian Kestler-D’Amours/IPS

By Jillian Kestler-D'Amours
JERUSALEM, May 11 2012 (IPS)

With more than 1,500 Palestinian prisoners weeks into an open-ended hunger strike in protest against worsening conditions in Israeli jails, including two that have gone without food for 72 days, human rights groups say many lives are in danger and are calling for urgent intervention.

“At that stage of a hunger strike, death can happen abruptly. Something can happen to the heart and this is the fear now,” said Hadas Ziv, public outreach coordinator at Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-I).

“If the political authorities will decide not to do anything and not to release them on grounds of medical condition,” she added, “eventually death may occur, if nothing happens in the really, really near future.”

Ziv said that the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) has placed every possible obstacle in the way of PHR-I doctors who are trying to examine the hunger strikers. The organisation has now been forced to appeal to Israeli courts in order to gain access to the prisoners.

On May 7, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Bilal Diab and Thaer Halahleh, Palestinian prisoners who by Wednesday had entered their 72nd day on hunger strike. The two men were challenging the fact that they are being held under Israeli administrative detention orders without charge or trial.

With no intervention by Israel’s highest court, Diab and Halahleh’s conditions are only worsening by the day, Ziv said.

“So many of (the prisoners’) rights are being violated out of the wrong perception that if Israel isolates them, it can win the struggle and it can break the hunger strike,” she explained. “I think that this is such a short-sighted and horrendous policy and I think that if independent doctors, lawyers and family visits would have been enabled, one would have seen a resolution that could have saved lives.”

It is estimated that Israel has arrested and detained over 750,000 Palestinians since it began occupying the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem in 1967.

According to PHR-I, between 1,500-2,000 Palestinian prisoners are currently participating in the hunger strike, which was launched on Apr. 17. It is the latest in a string of large-scale hunger strikes that began in late 2011 to draw attention to worsening conditions in Israeli prisons, including the widespread use of solitary confinement, the denial of family visits, and Israel’s use of administrative detention.

“Administrative detention actually is arresting someone without any charges and without fair trial procedures. It’s based on secret information that is not offered to the detainee and his lawyer and the detainee definitely doesn’t know the reasons behind his arrest,” explained Sahar Francis, director of Addameer, a Palestinian prisoner solidarity organisation.

“The other problem with administrative detention is that it is not limited in time, which means that they can renew the order, and means that people can spend years upon years in administrative detention.”

Recently, Palestinian prisoner Khader Adnan spent 66 days on hunger strike in protest against his imprisonment under an Israeli administrative detention order before being released in April. Another prisoner, Hana al-Shalabi, also spent weeks on hunger before being released and forcibly transferred to the Gaza Strip.

“The way Israel is using administrative detention is very arbitrary. It’s used against a very wide group. It can include any Palestinian and it’s not limited in time and this is why it’s a very harsh tool and this is why it makes it a very draconian way of arrest,” Francis added.

Demonstrations have been organised throughout Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and in cities around the world, in solidarity with the hunger strikers, and many more are expected as the prisoners’ protest continues.

On Tuesday May 8, for example, a group of 50 mainly Palestinian students protested in front of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

“The oppression has different forms and political arrest and detention is one of them. It’s an integral part (of the Palestinian struggle) for everyone here. We feel that it’s our duty to at least demonstrate,” Hadeel Badarni, a law student who participated in the protest in Jerusalem told IPS.

Badarni explained that the students – many of whom were tied together with makeshift handcuffs, and held photos of Palestinian prisoners and Palestinian flags – were trying to raise both public awareness and media attention to the plight of the hunger strikers.

“On a personal level we’re all worried about Bilal Diab and Thaer Halahleh and the rest of the prisoners that are on hunger strike. Behind each number and file, there (are) features, there is a face, there is a person that is in pain and has gone through a lot to get to this point where he is prepared to put his life on the line and die for this cause,” Badarni said.

“I’m ashamed, as a human being, that this can go and pass by with no real attention. If this can pass by, how low can we really get?”

A double-barrelled ‘coup de théâtre’ – advanced, then postponed, elections within days – has disoriented a polity accustomed to grappling passively with their Prime Minister’s backstage intrigues. But the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ played outwardly by the “virtuoso of Israeli politics” conceals a deep need for stability.

The man who, behind the scene, orchestrated the demise of his own government made another abrupt about-face.

In darkness, literally hours before the final reading of the law scheduled on Tuesday to enact the dissolution of the Knesset parliament and to set early elections in motion, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had a sudden change of heart.

At dawn, he reached a surprise agreement with Shaul Mofaz, head of the opposition as freshly-nominated chairman of the centre-right Kadima party, formed a national unity government, and simply re-scheduled the general election to its original date, October 2013.

Under the agreement, the 28-seat party, the largest of the current parliament, joined forces with Netanyahu’s Likud-led coalition and committed to supporting its policies through the end of its full four- year term. Mofaz was anointed deputy premier in the new 32-tentacle government.

A former chief of staff and defence minister during the second Intifadah uprising (2000-2005), Mofaz will also serve in the inner security cabinet that devises strategic policies; Kadima legislators will chair the Foreign Affairs and Defence, and Economics committees.

Twice in days, Israel’s polity was shaken to its very core. Last week, out of the blue by all accounts, general elections were advanced.

Coalition partners and opponents alike found it hard to decipher the motive which prompted Netanyahu’s decision – but jumped on the electioneering bandwagon without asking questions.

Caught in the frenzy of campaigning for their political survival, politicians of all persuasions didn’t bother reflecting on the necessity of advanced elections. After all, Netanyahu’s government radiated strength and stability; polls uniformly predicted the would-be incumbent’s hand-down victory.

A posteriori justifying the new turn of events, pundits then raised a flurry of legitimate assumptions.

A law allowing the exemption from military service of ultra-orthodox students was deemed unconstitutional by the High Court. With Jewish religious parties keen on preserving their constituency’s privileges, the abrogation of the Tal Law risked setting off a coalition crisis.

Then, there are the very public threats by Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak of a unilateral strike on Iran’s suspicious nuclear facilities, possibly to prod the U.S.-led international community to act more forcefully.

The confirmation of Netanyahu at the helm for four more years in a landslide victory would have added credibility to the threat, especially during the Sep. 4-Nov. 6 interim period between the would-be elections and the U.S. elections.

But no one took into account the incredibly dynamic versatility of politics.

On Sunday, without uttering the “Sep. 4” buzzword, Netanyahu convened the Likud Central Committee. He was seeking endorsement by the often disobedient assembly of his position as party chairman.

The usually symbolic position would empower him with influence over the crucial selection of party candidates on the Likud electoral list. In Israel’s system of pure proportional representation, the prominence of members depends on the proportion of the vote received by their party.

Netanyahu wanted to reserve a slot high on the Likud list to Barak, former chairman of the Labour party and head of the ‘Independence’ party.

Netanyahu had already in 2011 orchestrated a rupture within Labour, then a coalition partner highly critical of no-peace policy. Barak broke away, created ‘Independence’ and remained in the coalition; Labour joined the opposition.

But recent polls showed that Barak would stand almost no chance of being elected.

The Defence Minister is Netanyahu’s closest ally in trying to shore up international support for a military action against Iran. The Likud Central Committee’s refusal to include an outsider in the prospective list compelled Netanyahu to postpone the vote on his nomination as party chairman.

That’s when Mofaz entered the limelight.

A fortnight ago, he succeeded Tzippi Livni as party head following primaries in Kadima. Though both contestants rose from within Likud (Kadima itself is an offshoot of both Labour and Likud), Livni is more liberal than Mofaz.

Mofaz has long been tainted as being Netanyahu’s ‘Trojan Horse’. Desperately trying to desist from the obstinate suspicion, just days before the latest national unity twist, he called Netanyahu a “liar”.

Yet he faced another hurdle. Also not taking off in the polls, with only four months to organise (were elections to be advanced), he was less than a convincing alternative to Netanyahu.

With or without elections, a new enlistment law (the former is expected to expire in August) and tackling Iran’s nuclear quest both remain on the agenda. Both issues serve to promote Netanyahu’s declared quest for “stability” – this, after having destabilised the country.

Besides, the new government has pledged to enact a reform of the unruly electoral system.

With a 94-member coalition, the largest in Israel’s political annals, Netanyahu has a re-affirmed one-and- a-half year lifeline (before the restored election deadline) to prove that he indeed means business.

His centrist-oriented coalition will now be less dependent on its extreme right fringes. The question is whether Netanyahu will now seek to advance meaningful negotiations with President Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority.

With only 26 legislators in the 120-members Knesset, the now Labour-led heteroclite opposition of liberal, leftist and Arab parties is reduced to virtually nothing. Shelli Yechimovitch, the self-proclaimed new leader of the opposition bemoaned “the most ridiculous zigzag in the history of Israeli politics.” But the Netanyahu government is more immutable than ever.

During a joint press conference with Netanyahu, Mofaz recalled that, days before the June 1967 war, as Arab countries massed troops on Israel’s borders, a national unity government was formed in order to face the “existential threat”. The Six-Day war eventually changed the face of the Middle East.

Stressing the Iranian threat, the Iranian-born Mofaz, a dove regarding unilaterally deterring the Ayatollah regime from pursuing its nuclear programme, seemed to imply that the rest is not yet history.

On May 18, some 800 women in Sri Lanka’s northern region will hold Hindu religious ceremonies for the welfare of thier husbands who disappeared or surrendered to the military as it moved in to mop up nearly three decades of armed Tamil separatism.

“These women continue to live in hope even though many of those Tamil men may have died in the last days of the fighting,” says Shreen Abdul Saroor, a prominent rights activist working with conflict-affected women in northern Sri Lanka.

“On the other hand, even if they do acknowledge that their men have died, they don’t want to be known as widows as that could result in them being seen in a negative light in the community,” Saroor explained to IPS. “They prefer to be known as single women or as women heading households.”

Traditionally, Hindus consider widows to be inauspicious and the religion does not favour remarriage. Tamils, who form 12 percent of Sri Lanka’s 20 million population, mostly follow Hinduism while Sinhalese, who make up 74 percent of the population, are predominantly Buddhist.

According to government estimates, the ethnic conflict has widowed 59,000 women, the bulk of them in the Tamil-dominated north and east.

With rehabilitation tardy and options to earn money few, many women have been compelled to resort to sex work to earn a livelihood and provide for their families.

“We try to wean them away from sex work but they say they have no choice,” says an activist asking not to be named for fear of reprisal. “We provide the women with condoms and give advice on contraception as protection.”

The government is selective about permitting non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to work in the north. Only NGOs involved in development work – housing, livelihood development and infrastructure – are allowed in, while those that raise awareness on issues like peace, trauma or women’s rights are discouraged.

“The moment you say you are from an NGO, there are issues,” says Saroor who is founder of the Northern Mannar Women’s Development Federation and the Mannar Women for Human Rights and Democracy.

Saroor, one of four winners of the first ‘N-PEACE’ award, instituted by the United Nations Development Programme last year, says abuse of girl children is now a major problem in the north and with 26 cases recorded in the last three months alone. Many more cases go unreported.

The N-PEACE (Engage for Peace, Equality, Access, Community and Empowerment) strategy supports women in leading community recovery and peace building in the networked countries of Nepal, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Timor-Leste.

There is concern that the atmosphere of uncertainty, caused by lack of resources, broken families and the absence of responsible males, has impacted the security of young girls.

“In one case, a nine-year-old was abused. Women say they are scared to leave their homes fearing for the safety of their children. So how do we provide them a livelihood?” Saroor asked.

The problems of women in northern Sri Lanka are enormous with their inability to speak out a major hurdle in the post-conflict healing process.

“They have no opportunity to tell their stories,” says Shanthi Sachithanandam, executive director of the Viluthu Centre for Human Resource Development that works with conflict-affected women. “There is an urgent need for counselling.”

The government has repeatedly denied charges by Western countries and international human rights groups that large numbers of civilians were killed in crossfire and aerial bombing in the months leading to May 2009.

Journalists were not permitted into the war zone and NGOs and humanitarian agencies asked to leave, with the result that there are no independent versions of what may have happened in the killing fields of the north.

In March, the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Council passed a United States-proposed resolution calling for implementation of recommendations made by Sri Lanka’s Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) as a measure of accountability.

The LLRC, appointed by the government to look into issues relating to the conflict from February 2002 to May 2009, called for a probe into allegations of deliberate attacks on civilians and the prosecution of those responsible.

Rights groups working with war widows and mothers who lost their loved ones, fear repercussions if they dare to speak out publicly on sensitive issues.

When Seela (not her real name) spoke to reporters some weeks ago about a northern village where women have turned to sex work en masse, she and other members of her organisation received threats.

“These women are very vulnerable. We are very concerned about their plight and want to help them liberate themselves from this trap but there is not much we can do without support from the state,” she told IPS.

Seela said the lack of awareness of birth control methods has led to illegitimate babies being born and reports of spread of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.

Visaka Dharmadasa, founder and chair of the association of war affected women and parents of soldiers missing in action, said a clearer picture would emerge when a survey being conducted by her organisation is completed in June.

“No comprehensive study has been done on the software issues (fate of the missing and trauma) in the north and the east. Only the hardware (infrastructure and development) is being addressed,” she said.

“Widows of (government) soldiers are better off economically than widows in the north and the east, but in both cases social and psychosocial issues have not been tackled. These are major challenges,” Dharmadasa said.

According to Sachithanandam rehabilitation in the north has been difficult with loans for livelihood development and empowerment failing to reach the intended beneficiaries.

“Multilateral agencies say women are key to post-war reconstruction. But the women are confined to the house because of young children,” said Sachithanandam. “Small loans given for goat-rearing or poultry-raising vanish when the animals die and the women are back to square one.”

That, says Saroor, is the point when women look at sex work as an option.

The LLRC report drew attention to the plight of Tamil widows. “Their lives are often lonely and insecure, and they are treated as a symbol of bad omen in their own social circles.”

Problems start with the definition of widowhood. While widows elsewhere in the country have marriage certificates to prove marital status, women in the north are unable to produce documents because of the destruction of official records during the war.

Military spokesman Brig. Ruwan Wanigasooriya told IPS that of 11,995 suspected rebel cadres who surrendered in May 2009, with 10,874 have been rehabilitated and reintegrated into civilian life.

Another 852 are in detention with investigations continuing or undergoing rehabilitation ahead of release while 13 had died of natural causes, the spokesman said.

An expert body of the United Nations has warned the Spanish government that the severe budget cutbacks it is applying must not undermine its commitment to upholding the economic, social and cultural rights of the country’s people.

Demonstrators in southern Spanish city of Málaga protesting cuts in health and education. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

Austerity measures imposed by the government of centre-right Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy could have “a negative and disproportionate impact on the enjoyment of those rights,” said the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR).

Committee Chairperson Ariranga Govindasamy Pillay, a native of Mauritius, said these concerns will definitely appear in the final conclusions of its review of Spain’s compliance with the provisions of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, to be released on May 18.

The Committee, made up of 18 independent experts from different regions of the world, monitors observance of the Covenant by the 160 states that have ratified it since its adoption in 1966 and its entry into force in 1976.

Two particular events mark the case of Spain, which was discussed this week, said expert Jaime Marchán of Ecuador, the Committee’s rapporteur on the report presented by Spain.

One was the elections in November last year, won by the People’s Party, which replaced the government of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) led by former prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, in power since 2004.

The second feature mentioned by Marchán was “the persistence of a very severe economic crisis whose direct negative and devastating impacts have often interfered with maintenance of basic levels of protection for economic, social and cultural rights.”

In his assessment of Spain’s compliance, the rapporteur recalled that since 2004 the country has taken measures to promote economic, social and cultural rights, adopting many of the recommendations issued by the U.N. Committee in their review of Spain that year. Marchán mentioned the action plan for development of the Roma, or gypsy, population in 2010-2012 and the new 2012-2020 strategy for integration of Roma communities.

However, lawyer Carlos Villán, president of the Spanish Society for International Human Rights Law (AEDIDH), told IPS that in his country, gypsies “continue to be victims of racism and rejection by a segment of the majority population.”

A member of the Spanish government delegation told the Committee that 52 percent of respondents in a survey said they had “no or little” empathy for the Roma population. “We have a lot of work to do,” the delegate admitted.

On the positive side, Marchán noted that Spain had passed legislation on effective equality between men and women and comprehensive protection measures against gender-based violence, and had adopted measures to fight trafficking in persons.

But any favourable impression was undermined by the Spanish government’s responses to questions from Committee experts, and the latest available data.

“The measures adopted so far (by the present government) seem insufficient in the context of the economic crisis to adequately address the provisions of the Covenant for protecting economic, social and cultural rights, particularly for the most vulnerable groups,” the rapporteur said.

Even more worrying was the finding that, as a result of the severe fiscal austerity policies, many of the affirmative measures previously adopted in Spain “have been reduced or completely eliminated,” Marchán said.

This has led to backsliding in the protection measures concerning the areas covered by the Covenant, he said.

The U.N. Committee experts expressed disappointment at the reduction of the Spanish government’s official development assistance, and the rise in unemployment to the unprecedented level of over 24 percent, with youth unemployment at 55 percent.

They also noted the insufficiency of the minimum salary, coupled with cuts in health, education, and social security that have left some groups, such as undocumented immigrants, without any social coverage.

In addition, immigrants are subject to “xenophobic discourse exacerbated by the crisis,” said Villán.

Marchán pointed to the lack of a specific national plan to combat “rising levels of poverty, which already affects 22 percent of Spanish households.”

The rapporteur referred in his report to the pernicious effects of the housing bubble, which has increased the number of homeless people.

Villán told IPS that gypsies and immigrants seeking access to housing face many hurdles.

Another expert, Álvaro Tirado from Colombia, referring to the economic and financial crisis rocking Spain and other European countries, complained that when there is an economic bonanza, distribution favours the rich, while in a crisis the burden falls disproportionately on the poor.

Spain is one of the most unequal countries in the European Union in terms of income distribution, he said.

In response to these criticisms, Rafael Barberá of the Spanish employment and social security ministry said his government does not believe the poor should pay for the crisis.

“No one intends that they should bear the burden of the adjustment policies,” he said, going on to defend Rajoy’s economic measures on the grounds that “fiscal consolidation is neither a whim nor an obsession; it is the way forward to ensure that in the near future Spain can begin the process of recovery.”

“Spain does not want the poor to pay the cost of economic adjustment, nor does it want to limit anyone’s economic, social and cultural rights. On the contrary, we are convinced that those rights are an important element of development and have a positive long-term impact on growth,” Barberá said.

Committee experts expressed regret that the Rajoy government did not consult Spain’s ombudsman when drawing up the report it presented at the current session.

Tirado said they had heard the same complaint from representatives of Spanish NGOs. The NGO representatives said they were confident that the Committee would make stringent recommendations to the Spanish government.

Although Mexico has signed several multilateral anti-corruption agreements, so far these instruments have yielded few concrete results in combating the rampant bribery, extortion and embezzlement, according to experts.

“We have the necessary legal instruments, but they are rarely used. More laws will not reduce the risk of corruption,” Eduardo Bojórquez, head of Transparencia Mexicana, the national chapter of the Berlin-based watchdog Transparency International, told IPS.

“We are concerned that there are companies that are larger and more powerful than many nation states, which confront governments at different levels of institutional development,” Bojórquez said.

The most notorious recent scandal in Mexico involves U.S. retail giant Walmart, which has been under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) since December 2011.

Walmart’s Mexico branch was the subject of a report published in April by The New York Times, which alleged the company paid 24 million dollars in bribes to facilitate the construction of new stores, in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

The report said that the company had engaged in widespread and systematic bribery in this country. But the Mexican Attorney-General’s Office only opened an investigation after it was published.

Mexico has ratified the United Nations Convention against Corruption and the Inter-American Convention against Corruption, as well as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions (Anti-Bribery Convention).

It is also a member of the U.N. Global Compact (UNGC), the world’s largest corporate responsibility initiative. Launched in 2000, the UNGC has over 8,000 participants, most of them businesses, in more than 135 countries, and local networks in over 90 nations. The 10 universal principles it upholds relate to human rights, labour law, environmental standards and the fight against corruption.

The UNGC is a voluntary agreement which in Mexico has 302 members, counting companies, NGOs, foundations and academic institutions.

“It is important to use these mechanisms to expose human rights violations committed by companies, and to demonstrate that regulations need to be stricter,” Valeria Scorza, head of the Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Project (ProDESC), a Mexican NGO, told IPS.

But “we criticise the lack of mechanisms to sanction member companies for non-compliance, or to secure reparations for damage. The principles should be reformulated to pack more punch, although this is a fairly difficult collective process and companies usually have no interest in it,” she said.

ProDESC has persistently denounced violations of labour rights at Walmart, which was founded in the United States in 1962 and entered the Mexican market in 1991, originally in alliance with a local company.

But Walmart is not the only company to have been involved in corruption scandals. Various studies in the past few years have revealed the tangled web that is debilitating Mexico with enormous economic and social costs.

Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index for 2011 ranks Mexico in 100th place out of 183 countries – the worst result among the 34 member countries of the OECD, known as the “rich nations club”.

The index is based on 17 surveys covering topics like enforcement of anti-corruption laws, access to information and conflicts of interest. Countries are assigned a numerical index of perceived levels of corruption on a scale from 10 (very clean) to 0 (highly corrupt). Mexico was given a grade of 3 in 2011.

The 2011 Bribe Payers Index, also produced by Transparency International, found a particularly strong culture of bribery and illegal commissions in Mexico, China and Russia.

Based on a survey of 3,000 members of the business community in industrialised and developing countries, the index ranks 28 of the world’s largest exporting countries according to the likelihood of firms from these countries using bribes to obtain commissions and contracts when doing business abroad.

In order to compile an independent report on the implementation of the Inter-American Convention against Corruption in Mexico, in December 2011 Transparencia Mexicana asked for information from the comptroller’s offices of the 32 Mexican states, and only 10 replied.

“The institutional capacity of anti-corruption bodies is vital for controlling corruption, so that further analysis of the capabilities of these bodies at sub-national level in federal countries such as Mexico is essential,” says the report, released in January.

Due to the proliferation of free trade agreements in the past two decades, like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Canada, the United States and Mexico, dozens of foreign companies have ventured into new markets, coming into contact with the institutional weaknesses they may find there.

Paradoxically, the most serious cases of corruption linked to Mexico have come to light as a result of investigations by authorities in the United States, as companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges are required to meet stringent accounting and reporting provisions designed to prevent concealment of improper transactions.

In late April, the Mexican Congress approved the Federal Anti-Corruption Law, which created a special prosecution service and established fines for businesses found guilty of wrongfully procuring a contract. The fines can total up to 35 percent of the value of the contract. Reduced punishments were approved for persons cooperating with investigations.

“We have reached the point where corruption can no longer be covered up or overlooked as a minor problem. What we need to see now is how to articulate the national oversight and regulatory system with internal and external public administration bodies, the judicial branch and state parliaments,” said Bojórquez.

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, May 10 2012 (IPS)

Under a new law that recognises a broad range of rights for transvestites, transsexuals and transgender persons in Argentina, they will have the right to modify their legal documents to match their gender identity.

Activists say the law, which was passed by the Senate late Wednesday, breaks new ground in the world because it allows transgender people to change their legal identity without first having to undergo sex change surgery or hormone therapy.

But if they do decide to undergo physical changes, the new legislation guarantees them access to surgery or hormone treatment in both the public and private health care systems.

“This is a historic moment,” transvestite activist Lohana Berkins told IPS. “For the first time, the state has recognised the rights of one of society’s most marginalised, persecuted and excluded groups,” she added, visibly moved.

The gender identity law, which was approved by a vote of 55-0, with one abstention, and had already made it through the lower house of Congress, was based on a bill presented by organisations and independent activists, who criticised earlier draft laws.

They argued that the previously introduced bills stigmatised them by requiring people seeking authorisation for a change in gender on their identity cards to submit to often degrading examinations by psychologists, psychiatrists, medical doctors and judges.

“I have a knot in my stomach, thinking about compañeras who are no longer with us. I can’t believe that we will not be at the mercy of the arbitrary prejudices of a judge or psychiatrist,” said Berkins.

The new law states that any person over the age of 18 can apply for the “rectification of their name, sex or image in all public registries where such information is kept, when their personal data does not coincide with their self-perceived gender.”

That means transgender persons can apply for the modification of their identity card, passport, and even birth certificate. In the case of their birth certificate, the original can be destroyed five years after the change has been made.

The discrepancy between gender presentation and documentation is an enormous hurdle to access by transgender people to formal education, employment, housing or healthcare, unless they hide their transgender identity.

To illustrate the kind of problems and humiliation they face, Valeria Ramírez, the head of the transgender section of the Buenos Aires AIDS Foundation (FBAS), told IPS in a December 2011 interview that “When we travel, they look at us as if we were criminals, studying our identity document or passport, and making us wait. Finally they let us go on, but everyone stares at us as if we were terrorists.”

The law clarifies that no “proof of genital reassignment surgery, hormone therapy or psycho-medical treatment” is needed to apply for the modification of documents, a procedure that will be carried out by the civil registry.

But if the individual decides to undergo any of these treatments, they must be provided, at no extra charge, by private or public health service providers.

Berkins stressed, however, that the guarantee of access to these health services is not “because we are sick, but because we want to receive treatment, just like anyone else.”

Emiliano Litardo, a lawyer who helped draft the bill and is a legal adviser with the National Front for the Gender Identity Law (FNLIG), told IPS that it took more than nine months to prepare, drawing – and improving – on laws in force in different European countries.

“We avoided the weak points in the laws approved in Sweden and Spain, which require psycho-diagnostic studies or the opinion of bioethics committees – something that we reject,” Litardo said.

He said the organisations demanded that the new law be based on four non-negotiable principles: the depathologisation”, dejudicialisation”, “de-stigmatisation” and “decriminalisation” of the question of trans identities.

“My task was to translate into legal terms the political demands of the trans organisations, on the basis of those four essential concepts,” he explained. “Now they are also subjects with rights.”

Berkins underlined that the new law “does not represent a cosmetic change, but true amends.”

“We have been living in a kind of apartheid situation that is very difficult and painful. This enormous change was unthinkable 10 years ago,” she said.

Addressing Congress during Wednesday’s session, Senator Nito Artaza of the Radical Civil Union opposition party apologised to the members of sexual minorities for how long they had to wait for the legislature to finally take measures to put an end to the discrimination.

“The state understood that it had to remedy this error, and they will no longer be able to segregate us,” said Berkins. “We will have access to healthcare, education, work and housing – and without depending on anyone’s authorisation for us to get our documents.”

She said the law will also make the lives of trans children easier. “They will grow up in a different context, because now there is a state that will protect them, and they will not have to build their identities in an environment of segregation and exclusion.”

In its original form, the bill drafted by the FNLIG established that trans persons could apply for the modification of their documents at the age of 16.

But while the legislators raised the age to 18, they took into account the needs of adolescents. The law stipulates that children between the ages of 14 and 18 can apply for a change of name with authorisation from their parents or guardians.

For the past two decades, transgender people have been fighting against persecution and against violations of their right to healthcare, education and loans, and for the right to have identity documents that match their physical appearance.

For many years, their main demand was that the police stop harassing and abusing transgender persons involved in prostitution, which is often the only occupation open to this marginalised segment of the population.

But in recent years, the courts began to authorise the change of name on identity documents without requiring proof that the trans individual in question had undergone sex-change surgery.

However, this was done on a case-by-case basis, and each individual had to wait months or even years for a resolution that depended on the discretion of a judge or administrative official.

Earlier, the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community won the right to same-sex marriage in Argentina. The 2010 law was the first of its kind in Latin America.

Reporters say journalism is "not more fun" in the Philippines. Credit: Keith Bacongco/CC-BY-2.0

By Dennis Engbarth
MANILA, May 10 2012 (IPS)

Reporters working in the Philippines, the world’s third most dangerous nation for journalists, are having difficulty identifying with the “It’s More Fun in the Philippines” tourism promotion campaign launched by the Liberal Party-led government of President Benigno Aquino III.

The Southeast Asian nation’s reputation for press freedom and safety has yet to recover from the notorious Ampatuan Massacre of Nov. 23, 2009 in Maguindanao, Mindanao, in which 58 persons, including 32 reporters, were slaughtered by the private army of a local political clan chief, Andal Ampatuan Sr.

A total of 196 persons have been charged in the massacre, including clan patriarch Andal and his grandson, Anwar Ampatuan Jr, but less than 100 have been arrested and not a single one convicted of any crimes.

While the government attempts to paint over the tragedy with billboards proclaiming the joys of holidaying in the Philippines, media workers are continuing the fight for accountability.

A formal statement issued by the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) to mark World Press Freedom Day on May 3 declared, “There is little reason for celebration since not a single mastermind in any of the 152 murders of journalists since 1986 has been arrested, prosecuted and convicted.”

Most of these killings occurred during the nine years of rule from 2001 to 2010 under former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who is now in detention on charges of electoral sabotage, but at least 12 have occurred in the past two years under the Aquino administration.

“Murders of media workers, just like all other extrajudicial killings, are a matter of State accountability,” declared the NUJP. “If the Philippine press remains free despite all the threats against it, it is not because of the government but because the press insists on being free.”

Nevertheless, the presidential office in the Malacañang Palace publically marked the country’s improved ranking in the annual Freedom of the Press index, published by the Washington-based human rights advocacy group Freedom House on May 1.

The index cited a reduction in violence against journalists, attempts by the government to address impunity and expanded diversity in media ownership among its reasons for the improved rating.

Communications Development Secretary Ramon Carandang acknowledged on May 2 that “more needs to be done”, but stated that the improved ranking had recognised the Philippine government’s attempts to strengthen press freedom.

On the following day, presidential spokesman Edwin Lacierda vowed that the Aquino administration would not tolerate extralegal killings, especially attacks on journalists.

Beneath the façade

NUJP Vice Chair Joseph Alwyn Alburo disputed the presidential spin on press freedom during an interview with IPS.

“After the Ampatuan Massacre, there has been no improvement on the issue of journalist killings or in the overall plight of journalists in our country,” he said.

Alburo told IPS that 124 Filipino journalists have been killed on the job since the end of the former dictatorship of the late Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, but only 10 of those cases have been solved.

“We are one year away from mid-term legislative and local elections next May and, based on our information, the family that perpetrated the (2009) massacre still have relatives in power and are still amassing private armies even as their patriarch and other senior clan members are facing trial,” he added.

“The Philippines has the (unfortunate) distinction of being rated the third most dangerous country for journalists, behind Iraq and Somalia and the only one of the three which is a democracy. Nov. 23 has been designated as the World Day Against Impunity, but the current president (has not even blinked) an eye about the impact of these notorious distinctions on our country.”

“It is with great sadness that I say things are not going to improve because all the factors that give rise to a culture of impunity are still present. Journalists in this country are still very much in danger.”

Another channel for powerful politicians and tycoons to restrict media freedom is through frequent filing of criminal libel charges against journalists, he said. The NUJP and other media unions and associations are currently leading the movement to decriminalise these charges.

Significantly, on Jan. 28, the Geneva-based United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) resolved that the laws in the Philippines that criminalise libel are incompatible with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).

The decision came in response to an appeal by Davao broadcaster Alex Adonis, who was jailed from 2007-2008 for reporting correctly that a leading local politician had been caught in bed with his alleged mistress by the latter’s husband.

Another major concern for reporters is the concentration of media ownership. Alburo confirmed that NUJP is “closely watching” the widely reported drive by First Pacific Group Chief Executive Officer Manuel Pangilinan to acquire the television network ‘GMA 7’ for approximately 1.2 billion dollars.

The businessman already owns one TV network, telecommunication and power utilities and shares in three major newspapers.

“Such a concentration (of the media) often compromises journalist ethics and editorial independence,” Alburo said.

NUJP aims to “jump start” campaigns to stop the killing of journalists, push for the decriminalisation of libel against journalists and promote passage of a robust Freedom of Information Act in May, when the UNHRC is conducting a review of the Philippines’ human rights record under the ICCPR.

The NUJP and other newspaper, television and broadcast journalist unions held a meeting on May 3, which resulted in the ‘Manila Declaration on Media Workers’ Rights and Welfare’, to be used as a platform for future unity and campaigns.

Despite a pervasive mood that there is very little to celebrate, over 40 NUJP members gathered at the fifth consecutive annual ‘Press Jam’ to commemorate World Press Freedom Day at the Skarlet Jazz Club in Quezon City on the evening of May 2.

“It has always been a trait of Filipinos to be able to laugh amidst very serious situations and troubles, so we hold a Press Jam (where) we can sing and be carefree for at least one night,” said Alburo.

Still, the festivities were not completely lighthearted; the event featured drawings by the children of journalists who were murdered in the Ampatuan Massacre and other incidents.

The artwork expressed the fear and sadness that still surrounds the tragedy, such as a drawing with the plaintive question, ‘Why is Daddy sleeping so long?’

On an ironic poster asking ‘Is it more fun in the Philippines to be a journalist?’ one NUJP member wrote, ‘Yes, you feel like a survivor all the time’.

Another pundit had added, ‘With criminal libel, 152 killed since 1986, what more can you ask for?’

A more hopeful note was stuck by one NUJP member, who wrote, ‘Yes, so much to write about, so much to change’.

The U.S. Treasury Department’s claim of a “secret deal” between Iran and Al-Qaeda, which had become a key argument by right-wing activists who support war against Iran, has been discredited by former intelligence officials in the wake of publication of documents from Osama bin Laden’s files revealing a high level of antagonism between Al-Qaeda and Iran.

Three former intelligence officials with experience on Near East and South Asia told IPS they regard Treasury’s claim of a secret agreement between Iran and Al-Qaeda as false and misleading.

That claim was presented in a way that suggested it was supported by intelligence. It now appears, however, to have been merely a propaganda line designed to support the Barack Obama administration’s strategy of diplomatic coercion on Iran.

Under Secretary of Treasury David S. Cohen announced last July that the department was “exposing Iran’s secret deal with Al-Qaeda allowing it to funnel funds and operatives through its territory.” The charge was introduced in connection with the designation of an Al-Qaeda official named Yasin al-Suri as a terrorist subject to financial sanctions.

The Treasury claim has been embraced by the right-wing Weekly Standard and others aligned with hardline Israeli views on Iran, as primary source evidence of an alliance between Iran and Al-Qaeda.

But Paul Pillar, former national intelligence officer for Near East and South Asia, told IPS the allegation of a “secret deal” between Iran and Al-Qaeda “has never been backed up by any evidence that would justify such a term” and that it is “a highly misleading characterisation of interaction between Iran and Al-Qaeda….”

Pillar said the recently released bin Laden documents “not only do not demonstrate any agreement in which Iran condoned or facilitated operations by Al-Qaeda, they contradict the notion that there was any such agreement.”

“I’ve never seen anything that suggests that happened,” said another former intelligence official, referring to an Iran-Al Qaeda agreement. “I’m very sceptical about that.”

A third former intelligence official said Treasury’s “secret deal” claim “doesn’t pass the BS test” and noted that it is perfectly aligned with the Obama administration’s policy of pressure on Iran.

The official said the Treasury Department’s push for its “secret deal” line is emblematic of a larger split in the intelligence community between those for whom intelligence is secondary to their role in “counterterrorism” policy and the rest of the community.

“The counterterrorism types are like used car salesmen,” the former official told IPS. “They are always overselling something. They have to show that they are doing important work.”

The actual text of the Jul. 28, 2011 “designation” of Yasin al-Suri suggests that the claim of such a “secret deal” is merely a political spin on the fact that Iran dealt with al-Suri on the release of prisoners.

It says that Yasin al Suri is an Al-Qaeda facilitator “living and operating in Iran under agreement between Al-Qaeda and the Iranian government”. Iranian authorities, it said, “maintain a relationship with (al-Suri) and have permitted him to operate within Iran’s borders since 2005”.

The designation offers no other evidence of an “agreement” except for the fact that Iran dealt with al-Suri in arranging the releases of Al-Qaeda prisoners from Iranian detention and their transfer to Pakistan.

The official notice of a 10-million-dollar reward for al-Suri on the website of the “Rewards for Justice” programme under the Diplomatic Security office of the State Department also indicates that the only “agreement” between Iran and Al-Qaeda has been to exchange prisoners.

“Working with the Iranian government,” it said, “al-Suri arranges the release of al Qaeda personnel from Iranian prisons. When al Qaeda operatives are released, the Iranian government transfers them to al- Suri, who then facilitates their travel to Pakistan.”

Neither the Treasury Department nor the State Department, which joined the February 2012 press briefing on the reward for finding al- Suri, referred to the fact that Iran had been forced to deal with al- Suri and to release Al-Qaeda detainees in order to obtain the release of the Iranian diplomat kidnapped by Pakistani allies of Al-Qaeda in Peshawar, Pakistan in November 2008.

In one of the documents taken from the Abbottabad compound and published by West Point’s Counter-Terrorism Center last week, a senior Al Qaeda official wrote, “We believe that our efforts, which included escalating a political and media campaign, the threats we made, the kidnapping of their friend the commercial counselor in the Iranian Consulate in Peshawar, and other reasons that scared them based on what they saw (we are capable of), to be among the reasons that led them to expedite (the release of these prisoners).”

In response to the IPS request for clarification of the “secret agreement” claim, John Sullivan, a spokesman for the Treasury Department’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, declined to answer any questions on the subject or to allow IPS to interview Eytan Fisch, the assistant director of the Terrorism and Financial Intelligence office.

In briefing journalists on al-Suri last February, Fisch had again invoked the alleged Iran-Al Qaeda “secret agreement” last February.

Sullivan defended the Treasury Department’s position on the issue, however, against criticism based on the publication of the bin Laden documents. “We based our action on Yasin al-Suri on a broad array of information that far exceeds what was recently made public,” Sullivan said in an e-mail to IPS.

Asked about the hint by the Treasury spokesman that department officials used still-classified material as the basis for the claim of a “secret agreement”, former national intelligence officer Pillar called it “disingenuous”.

The origins of the Treasury Department’s “secret deal” claim indicate that it was intended to generate press stories that would increase political and government support for pressure on Iran through economic sanctions and military threats.

The designation of Yasin al-Suri as a terrorist subject to financial sanctions Jul. 28, 2011 did not have any impact on Al-Qaeda funding. The objective was to allow Treasury to generate press coverage of its charge of a secret Iran-Al Qaeda agreement. The timing of the move coincided with a shift in Obama administration strategy from diplomatic engagement to maximising pressure on Iran.

During the period when neoconservatives were pushing for an explicit policy of support for regime change in Iran during the first George W. Bush administration, U.S. officials frequently talked as though any Al-Qaeda presence in Iran was evidence of Iran’s cooperation with the terrorist organisation.

But as ABC News reported on May 29, 2008, Bush administration officials were acknowledging privately that they were not complaining about Iranian policy toward Al-Qaeda operatives in Iran, because Iran had “kept these al Qaeda operatives under control since 2003, limiting their ability to travel and communicate”.

One official said Al-Qaeda officials under Iranian control, “some of whom are quite important,” were “essentially on ice”.

Israel has continued, however, to use its relations with friendly news media, especially in the UK, to generate disinformation about alleged joint Iranian-Al Qaeda planning for terrorist actions.

Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News carried a story Feb. 15, 2012 citing “intelligence sources” from an unnamed state as suggesting that Iran had been supplying Al-Qaeda with “training in the use of advanced explosives” as well as some funding and a safe haven “as part of a deal first worked out in 2009….”

The report quoted the intelligence sources as saying that Iran wanted to use the threat of Al-Qaeda retaliation against Western targets as “revenge for any military strike against Iran’s nuclear capabilities”.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.

Ghost mining town in Coahuila, Mexico. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, May 10 2012 (IPS)

The controversial concept of degrowth receives little press coverage in a region like Latin America. But the idea of a way of life that is not aimed exclusively at GDP growth does have its proponents in Argentina.

As in other countries of the region, the Argentine perspective on degrowth differs somewhat from that of academics and civil society organisations in the industrialised world, according to sources consulted by Tierramérica.

The threat of a systemic global crisis with various dimensions – environmental, economic, energy-related – will be on the discussion table at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), taking place Jun. 20-22 in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro.

For advocates of degrowth, it has become clear that sustainable development will not succeed in averting environmental collapse or enhancing social justice, the goals set forth 20 years ago at the 1992 Earth Summit, also held in Rio.

Degrowth in the Americas, an international conference taking place in Montreal, Canada on May 13-19, seeks to challenge and move beyond the sustainable development agenda, drawing on previous degrowth conferences in Paris and Barcelona in 2008 and 2010, respectively.

One of the best-known proponents of degrowth, French philosopher and economist Serge Latouche, says that the movement is aimed primarily at promoting a shift away from the pursuit of “growth for growth’s sake”. It would actually be better to speak of “agrowth” instead of degrowth, just as one speaks of atheism, he believes.

Degrowth supporters call for a controlled and rational decrease in consumption and production, in a way that respects the climate, ecosystems and human beings themselves.

Nevertheless, Latouche stresses that degrowth is not a concrete alternative, but rather a matrix of multiple alternatives. Obviously, any concrete proposal or counterproposal is both necessary and problematic, he adds.

In Argentina, “degrowth is not covered by the media, nor does it form part of academic courses in political economy. But it exists, especially now, on the threshold of the Rio+20 conference,” social scientist Julio Gambina told Tierramérica.

In Latin America, “where economic growth was deified in the 1990s, degrowth gets bad press,” added Gambina, a professor of political economy at the National University of Rosario and president of the Social and Policy Research Foundation of Argentina. In his opinion, “it would be better discuss how growth is achieved.”

A number of Latin American countries, he noted, have achieved economic growth on the basis of “an extractivist model of production,” which increases GDP at the cost of the intensive use of natural resources that are gradually being exhausted.

Examples include large-scaling mining, which involves the use of cyanide and causes major environmental impacts, or the expansion of monoculture plantations of soybeans for export, at the expense of diversified rural production.

Gambina pointed to the case of Brazil, where organisations affiliated to the international network Via Campesina challenge this model and call for greater support for peasant agriculture and the productive practices of indigenous and traditional communities, which are less destructive to natural resources. But these groups “have no visibility,” he said.

In the countries of Latin America, there is generally little resistance to the pursuit of growth. “Degrowth is primarily associated with economies that are in crisis, like those of Europe,” he explained.

Statistician María Elena Saludas, national coordinator of ATTAC (the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and Aid to Citizens), commented that “the debate over the impossibility of continuing to pursue limitless economic growth in the framework of a finite planet dates back to the 1960s.”

The conception of sustainable development that began to be heavily promoted at the 1992 Earth Summit does not question the global power structure or the capitalist system, whose leitmotiv is profit, said Saludas.

The same can be said of the so-called “green economy” now being energetically promoted by the United Nations, which is organising Rio+20.

“What we should be discussing,” she said, “is the fact that this economic model cannot be sustained.”

Saludas is critical of the expansion of monoculture production and the heavy dependence of Latin American economies on the export of raw materials. She also warns of the limits of the expansion of the automotive industry, in countries like Argentina and Brazil. “A car for everyone is not sustainable. We need to work towards more efficient and collective transportation,” she said.

In her opinion, the current GDP growth in Latin America is generating “extreme inequality” between rich and poor. Those at the so-called bottom of the pyramid “are barely surviving.” As such, “we cannot tell them that they should be opposed to growth.”

She prefers to highlight experiences like that of Bolivia, where a movement of indigenous peoples advocates the pursuit of “buen vivir” or “living well”, in harmony with nature and not at the cost of natural resources or other members of society.

Saludas said she is enthusiastic about the theory of degrowth, although “not as a proposal for individual changes in behavior, but rather for each community to find a way of experiencing this way of life.”

For his part, Gambina has qualms about a debate which, at least in the way it is currently formulated, is unlikely to gain new supporters.

“Whether the discussion of degrowth will achieve a greater impact remains to be seen. There are groups pushing for a different kind of development, which challenge the prevailing model of production, but they don’t have a favorable cultural environment,” he said.

The pursuit of growth persists as the consensus ideology in the region, which is why the degrowth debate has not gained widespread support, Gambina stressed. He believes the emphasis should not be on “degrowing” but rather on “growing in a different way.” “We need to support family farming, local production and distribution,” as well as challenging the currently prevailing means of measuring development through GDP, he said.

“GDP only counts what is created, and doesn’t subtract what is destroyed,” he explained. “Perhaps there are cases where GDP is lower, as in Cuba or Venezuela, but quality of life or the distribution of wealth improves. Social well-being is not necessarily tied to economic growth,” he said.

*The writer is an IPS correspondent. This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

“It’s tiring,” says 15-year-old Ibrahim*, deep lines running across his forehead. “But there is no alternative.” Only a teenager, Ibrahim has been working full-time for three years already.

The eldest son in a family of ten children, he lives in the Palestinian village Al-Fayasil in the occupied Jordan Valley, and is forced to work in the nearby Israeli settlement Tomer to help support his siblings. “I work from 6 am to 1 pm,” he told IPS. “And I get 70 shekels (18 dollars) per day.”

Al-Fasayil residents say that over a dozen youth from the village, all under the age of 18, are currently working in Israeli settlements in the Jordan Valley. It is estimated that between 500-1,000 minors travel from other villages and cities throughout the West Bank to work in the area.

Most child labourers in the Jordan Valley make between 50-70 NIS per day (13-18 dollars), and are employed to pick, wash and package fruits and vegetables grown in local Israeli agricultural settlements. They work long hours in difficult weather conditions throughout the winter and summer months, and receive no benefits or insurance against injuries.

“There are so few options in the Jordan Valley. Due to Israeli restrictions that are in place on economic and agricultural development, there’s nothing. Palestinians can either stay at home all day or work in a settlement and be able to provide for their families,” explained Christopher Whitman, advocacy coordinator at Ma’an Development Centre, a Palestinian development and empowerment organisation based in Ramallah.

Whitman told IPS that while Israel must apply the same labour laws enforced inside Israel proper to the West Bank territory it occupies, including the Jordan Valley, it fails to ensure that Palestinian labourers working in Israeli settlements get paid the Israeli minimum wage, or receive healthcare, sick days off and other employment rights.

“Israel has to follow the same laws as would apply in Israel. If you had Jewish-Israeli, Ashkenazi children working in settlements doing manual labour, there would be an upheaval in Israel against it,” Whitman said.

“If they’re under 18, they’re only allowed to work a certain amount of hours in certain conditions. They’re not supposed to be doing manual labour. Their rights need to be protected.”

Almost 95 percent of Jordan Valley is designated as Area C, which is under full Israeli military and civil control. Approximately 65,000 Palestinians, 15,000 Palestinian-Bedouin and 9,400 Israeli settlers currently live in Jordan Valley, and the area counts 37 Israeli settlements, including seven outposts that are illegal even under Israeli law.

According to Israeli human rights group BTselem, “Israel has instituted in this area a regime that intensively exploits its resources, to an extent greater than elsewhere in the West Bank, and which demonstrates its intention: de facto annexation of the Jordan Valley and the northern Dead Sea area to the State of Israel.”

A major component of this policy is the restrictions placed on Palestinian construction, as Palestinians can build in only five percent of the Jordan Valley. Homes, schools and virtually all other structures are built without permits, and these structures are therefore nearly all subject to Israeli demolition orders.

Restrictions on building schools have had a particularly devastating impact on child development in Jordan Valley.

“A high number of Palestinian children are denied their basic right to education, or are forced to travel many kilometres by foot over dangerous terrain to attend school,” a Ma’an report, titled ‘Parallel Realities: Israeli Settlements and Palestinian communities in the Jordan Valley’ found.

“Approximately 10,000 children living in Area C started the 2011/12 school year learning in tents, caravans, or tin shacks which lack protection from the heat and cold. Furthermore, nearly a third of Area C schools lack adequate water and sanitation facilities. In addition, at least 23 schools serving 2,250 children in Area C have pending stop-work or demolition orders,” the report continued.

For Al-Fasayil resident Fatima*, the mother of seven children, extreme poverty and few educational and job opportunities have left her concerned for the future of her family.

“My son was smart, but had to stop (school) to help his father,” Fatima told IPS, about her eldest son, 15- year-old Khalid*. Khalid stopped going to school after completing the eighth grade, and was forced into working in a nearby Israeli settlement because his father is elderly and can no longer work to support the family.

“I hope that one day he can learn a trade, and I hope that my younger children can continue studying,” she said. “I’m afraid. It’s difficult.”

*Names have been changed.

On Wednesday, the United States intelligence community unveiled a first-ever assessment of global water-security issues.

The assessment predicts that water in shared basins will increasingly be used as political leverage. Credit: UN Photo/Ky Chung

According to one of the assessment’s lead authors, Major General Richard Engel, water-stressed countries, being forced to focus on pressing internal issues, are increasingly unable to support U.S. policies and strategic interests.

While the assessment does not foresee water being a main instigator of state-to-state violence or state failure in the next decade, beyond that “water in shared basins will increasingly be used as leverage.” In addition, “water shortages and pollution probably will harm the economic performance of important (U.S.) trading partners.”

The Global Water Security assessment is the result of a request made by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2011. Clinton has previously stated that water and sanitation constitute the two most basic of development priorities.

The end result of the intelligence community’s research is not a comprehensive global look at the issue. Rather, it focuses on seven river basins between the Nile and the Mekong for which there is a “clear intersection of risks of availability and U.S. strategic interests”, according to Casimir Yost, the director of the Strategic Futures Group at the National Intelligence Council, which authored the report.

At the public launch of the assessment, Engel admitted, “The intelligence community went into this project reluctantly. When we looked into it, however, we realised that this was a top-level national security issue.”

For the United States, he suggested, one of the opportunities in the coming decades will be to make available to the rest of the world the country’s expertise in water management.

Indeed, doing so has increasingly become a U.S. priority. The assessment comes on the heels of the creation, in March, of the U.S. Water Partnership, a public-private body likewise devoted to mobilising U.S. water-related knowledge.

There is general agreement that the U.S. does have a role to play in, for instance, providing and fostering scientific understanding on global water-related issues, particularly as water-related issues could become increasingly politicised in the future, leaving the data open to manipulation.

Still, there is disagreement about how exactly the United States should engage beyond this role.

Some suggest that the United States needs to get its own house in order before feeling confident in offering too much advice to the rest of the world.

“In the U.S., we have very serious concerns about how we have managed out own river systems,” says Alexandra Cousteau, a filmmaker and advocate associated with National Geographic.

“The U.S. has indeed made significant contributions in these issues in the past,” says Ellen Laipson, president of the Henry L. Stimson Center, a think tank here in Washington.

“But now we have to think global: we have to remember that we’re here to solve the problem, not to accrue influence. We have to make sure that these discussions are not limited to Washington.”

Laipson notes that the U.S. government has long had a tendency to be overly reliant on a world vision that focuses on national governments.

“It’s tricky to write this (assessment) within the U.S. government,” she says, “because officials tend to overlook local-level administration as well as supranational bodies.”

According to both Laipson and Cousteau, supranational bodies – such as those made up of governments and stakeholders from throughout a river basin – have proven to be particularly adept at making decisions that balance national security interests with those of local livelihoods and rights.

Cousteau focuses particular emphasis on lower-level bodies.

“Oftentimes, we don’t give enough credit or support to local communities who are coming up with solutions to water-related problems,” she says. “Collectively, these groups are having an impact on water-security issues in their countries – and they can have an even larger impact if they are empowered.”

She also warns that the new intelligence community assessment puts too little concern on the degradation of rivers as systems, including the ecologies and human communities that depend on the health of the system overall.

“It’s these systems, these wetlands, that act as buffers for many of the larger security issues that we’re discussing,” she says. “These river systems mean prosperity for many people.”

Interestingly, history bears out such a view. Despite the omnipresent importance of freshwater systems through the centuries, the historical record suggests that water issues – including water scarcity – have more often than not been grounds for cooperation rather than conflict, including in the modern age.

In a seminal 1998 paper, researcher Aaron T. Wolf wrote that during the 20th century “only seven minor skirmishes” took place, and “no war has ever been fought over water. In contrast, 145 water-related treaties were signed in the same period.”

“These patterns suggest that the more valuable lesson of international water is as a resources whose characteristics tend to induce cooperation, and incite violence only in the exception.”

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, May 9 2012 (IPS)

U.S. President Barack Obama Wednesday declared his support for same-sex marriage, becoming the first sitting president to do so and thrusting the issue into the centre of his campaign for re-election.

Analysts here described Obama’s new position as politically risky, a point that was underlined by Tuesday’s approval by 60 percent of voters in North Carolina of an amendment to the state constitution affirming that only marriage between a man and a woman is legally recognisable.

North Carolina, a critical swing state in Obama’s victory in the 2008 presidential elections, joined 29 other states, including other key battleground states in November, such as Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Colorado, with constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriages.

At the same time, however, the move could help mobilise Obama’s Democratic base, and the polling during the period of his presidency has shown growing support for gay marriage. A Gallup poll released Tuesday found that 50 percent of respondents favoured legalising same-sex marriage and 48 percent opposed.

“Many political handicappers won’t be able to resist criticising Obama for picking a fight in the culture-war terrain that evangelical-strumming, Karl Rove-types have been trying to tease out for years,” wrote Steve Clemons on his widely read Atlantic blog.

“But President Obama is not prone to emotional leaps of faith and knee jerk shifts in policy. Their polls must show that the nation is ready to have this fight – that most independents and Democrats think same-sex marriage should be a civil right,” he added.

Asked about Obama’s stance, his all-but-certain Republican challenger, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, reaffirmed his opposition to the idea.

“My position is the same on gay marriage as it’s been …from the beginning, and that is that marriage is a relation between a man and a woman,” he told a radio interviewer in Denver. “That’s the posture that I had as governor and I have that today.”

But gay and human rights groups praised Obama for speaking out.

“Today, President Obama made history by boldly stating that gay and lesbian Americans should be fully and equally part of the fabric of American society and that our families deserve nothing less than the equal respect and recognition that comes through marriage,” said Joe Solomonese, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, the most prominent U.S. lobby group for gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans- gender (GLBT) issues.

“Following in the footsteps of predecessors who brought the nation forward on racial equality, this is a signature example of a president leading the people in a direction that is right and inevitable, even though some may not feel ready for it,” said Suzanne Nossel, the executive director of the U.S. chapter of Amnesty International (AIUSA).

Obama, who has long supported equal rights for gays and lesbians and who abolished the Bill Clinton-era “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy that required homosexual U.S. servicemen and women to hide their sexual preferences in order to remain in uniform, announced his position during an interview with ABC’s ‘Good Morning America’ to be aired Thursday. He said that his views about same-sex marriage and LGBT rights in general have evolved over time.

“I’ve always been adamant that gay and lesbian Americans should be treated fairly and equally,” Obama said in the video that was released Wednesday.

“I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbours, when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married,” he said.

Obama was put on the spot on the issue on Sunday, when his vice president, Joe Biden, told the widely watched “Meet the Press” public affairs television programme that he was “absolutely comfortable” with same-sex marriage, a position that was immediately endorsed by Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan.

Same-sex marriages are recognised in six states – including New York and, ironically, Romney’s Massachusetts, which became the first state to grant marriage licenses to LGBT couples in 2004 – and the District of Columbia. The legislatures of both Washington state and Maryland have also approved laws granting same-sex marriage licenses, but they may be challenged by proposed referendums in November.

California legalised same-sex marriages in 2008, but voters in a referendum in November that year overturned the law.

Historically, state governments have determined who may legally marry, although the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967 declared state miscegenation laws – laws prohibiting inter-racial marriages – unconstitutional.

In 1996, conservatives in Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act which, for the first time, defined marriage under federal law as a union between a man and a woman.

The upshot of that law has been the denial by the federal government of a variety of benefits, such as Social Security, health insurance, and even hospital visitation rights, to LGBT couples who, if legally married, would be eligible to receive them. Same-sex “civil unions”, a status short of legal marriage, are recognised by a contract.

In 2010, a federal court in Massachusetts held that the denial of such rights and benefits to same-sex married couples in that state was unconstitutional, a ruling that is currently under appeal and may yet reach the Supreme Court.

In 2008, Obama expressed support for “civil unions” that have been passed by a number of states to provide individuals in longstanding same-sex relationships with the same state benefits and rights that are accorded legally married couples. But federal rights and benefits were still denied them.

In explaining his evolution, Obama stressed the religious roots of his thinking, noting that he had talked with his wife, Michelle, about this “over the years. …(I)n the end, the values that I care most deeply about and she cares most deeply about is how we treat other people, and, you know, we are both practicing Christians, and obviously this position may be considered to put us at odds with the views of others, but …when we think about faith, …what we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the Golden Rule – you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

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