In arid places like Tilcara, in the Quebrada de Humahuaca, Jujuy, groundwater resserves play a crucial role. Credit: Juan Moseinco/IPS

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Oct 10 2013 (IPS)

Half of Argentina is supplied with water by invisible underground aquifers, which are crucial in the country’s arid and semi-arid regions, experts say. But Tierramérica discovered that nobody – not even the government – has any accurate scientific data on these groundwater reserves.

Beyond the Guaraní Aquifer, the vast underground body of fresh water shared by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, little is known about the groundwater reserves of this country with a wealth of highly visible water resources, including the rivers of the Rio de la Plata Basin, Iguazú Falls, and the majestic glaciers of Patagonia.

The Guaraní Aquifer became well known due to a monitoring plan funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF), “but in Argentina there are other aquifers that are exploited much more intensively” and support regional economies, said Ofelia Tujchneider, a geologist from the National University of the Littoral.

In terms of the quantity and quality of its water, the most important is the Puelches aquifer, which lies beneath part of the province of Buenos Aires, in eastern Argentina, Córdoba in the centre of the country, and Santa Fe in the northeast.

According to the Environmental Atlas of Buenos Aires, the depth of the Puelches aquifer ranges from 40 to 120 metres, and it supplies 9,900 cubic metres of water a day. It is located between the Pampeano aquifer, which is closer to the surface, and the deeper Paraná aquifer, whose water is salty and used primarily by industry.

In the eastern region of the country are the Ituzaingó, Salto and Salto Chico aquifers. And in the province of Neuquén, in the western part of the southern region of Patagonia, groundwater reserves provide water for the oil, gas and mining industries, explained Mario Hernández, a hydrogeologist from the National University of La Plata.

There are also aquifers in the southern province of Santa Cruz. And in the northwest, an arid region with little rainfall, these groundwater deposits are recharged by river water.

In the western provinces of Mendoza and San Juan, water is supplied primarily by underground reserves. As a result, the aquifers here are studied and protected, and subject to regular monitoring, because the local wine industry depends on the water they provide.

“Groundwater resources play a key role in arid and semi-arid regions. If it weren’t for the aquifers, massive engineering works would be needed to supply water for irrigation or residential use,” Tujchneider told Tierramérica.

Groundwater is abundant, of good quality, tends to be better protected from pollution, and can be found in large volumes even beneath arid, desertified or desert areas.

The Rio de la Plata Basin encompasses 85 percent of the country’s surface water resources, according to the book “Agua: Panorama general en Argentina” (Water: A general overview in Argentina), published by the non-governmental organisation Green Cross. But this network of rivers only extends to 33 percent of the country, in the northeast, and flows into the large estuary that gives the basin its name and empties into the Atlantic Ocean.

Much of the rest of the country is arid or semi-arid, with areas where the available water supply is less than 1,000 cubic metres per person per year, the measure used to define water scarcity by the United Nations Development Programme.

In 2010, 82.6 percent of the population, currently estimated at 41 million, was served by the drinking water supply system.

According to Hernández, half of the country is supplied with water by aquifers, which provide water for the irrigation of cereal and grain crops as well as the industrial and mining sectors and a large share of household consumption.

However, he stressed to Tierramérica, there are no accurate measurements or statistics on Argentina’s groundwater reserves.

The only available data is from a 2000 World Bank report, which estimated that groundwater resources account for 35 percent of the water used for irrigation, livestock farming, industry and household consumption.

Tujchneider believes that the current level of groundwater use is “quite a lot higher than 35 percent,” particularly because of an increase in irrigation and in rice production in recent years.

However, because of the lack of recognition of the immense value of this resource, there is a danger that groundwater reserves can become contaminated with agrochemicals, industrial waste or wastewater, or that they will be exploited beyond their recharge capacity.

The water stored in an aquifer may have been there for a very long time. If it is extracted without limits, it could run out, as is already happening in Mendoza, warned Tujchneider.

Hernández noted that aquifers are “more protected from contamination than surface water” but they are also “more fragile, and once they are contaminated, they are much more difficult to clean up than rivers.”

“There is a lack of knowledge. They are not valued, and they don’t teach about them in schools. Children think that water comes from a tap,” he commented.

The Federal National Groundwater Plan aims to put an end to this lack of visibility, said its coordinator, Jorge Santa Cruz, who has a PhD in natural sciences and headed up the studies on the Guaraní Aquifer. The first step will be the organisation of diagnostic workshops in the country’s different provinces, he told Tierramérica.

The objectives of the plan, which is being overseen by the Undersecretariat of Water Resources, include the development of a database of hydrogeological data so that aquifers are viewed as reserves of a resource that is “known, predictable and reliable,” even if it cannot be seen.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Import restrictions to strengthen national industry have brought the Argentine government problems in international relations. Credit: Marcela Valente/IPS

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Sep 16 2013 (IPS)

To maintain its trade surplus, Argentina continues to control imports – a strategy that has bolstered its national industry but is questioned by importers, partners in the Mercosur trade bloc, and rich countries.

“What we have in Argentina today is a war to protect employment, which is why trade has to be managed,” textile businessman Marco Meloni told IPS by phone from Italy, where he was selling his shirts under the “Premium” trademark.

“It’s not that we aren’t importing; quite the opposite. We’re much better clients for the world than we were 10 years ago. But we have to be careful with Asia’s global super-production,” he said.

He said that in his travels abroad to sell his products, he constantly runs into shirts manufactured at very low cost in Asia.

“My shirts are competitive in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Portugal and Spain,” Meloni said.

But in many of those countries he does not compete with local industry but with the flood of low-cost merchandise from China or Bangladesh.

“Shirts made with slave labour cost less than half,” he complained.

Meloni, who is president of the textile association Fundación Pro Tejer, added that a worker in a textile factory in Argentina earns around 1,400 dollars a month and costs the company 1,800 with the payments to social security, etc. In other countries the cost can be 40 times lower, he said.

A lack of access to international financing since the late 2001 massive debt default and the loss of monetary reserves led the centre-left government of Cristina Fernández to adopt measures designed to maintain a favourable balance of trade.

Argentina’s foreign reserves shrank from 52.6 billion dollars in January 2011 – a historical peak – to just over 36 billion today, according to the Central Bank.

When Néstor Kirchner – President Fernández’s husband and predecessor, who died in 2010 – first took office in May 2003, foreign reserves stood at less than 12 billion dollars.

So far Fernández has managed to maintain a positive trade balance by restricting imports and the sale of dollars.

Argentina’s trade surplus reached five billion dollars in the first half of the year, according to Argentina’s Chamber of Commerce. But this was 26 percent below the level reached in the first half of 2012.

For some importers, the alternative accepted by the authorities is to compensate imports with exports. That is how growing agreements between producers were reached to, for example, export wine in exchange for importing motorcycle parts.

Argentina’s efforts to maintain the balance between exports and imports have drawn complaints from the EU. On Sep. 2, the European Commission – the EU executive – issued a report putting Argentina in first place among emerging economies in terms of protectionist policies.

Protests have also come from the United States and from Argentina’s partners in the Mercosur (Southern Common Market) trade bloc, especially Uruguay and Brazil.

In its latest edition of Latin America and the Caribbean in the World Economy, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) also said Argentina was experiencing its most active period in terms of trade disputes with the United States, the EU and Japan.

Argentina has responded to such complaints with similar protests against barriers to its sales of beef and lemons to the United States and hurdles to its biodiesel exports to the EU.

Argentina’s exports have risen sharply over the last decade, as have imports, despite the regulations. Imports increased from 13.8 billion dollars in 2003 to 68.5 billion dollars in 2012.

But the Fernández administration’s trade policies have drawn complaints both within and outside Argentina.

Importers complain about the red tape involved in filling out a mandatory “anticipated sworn declaration of imports”, which must be approved by the government.

“Without access to external finance, and without a significant influx of foreign investment, Argentina needs a strong trade surplus, which translates into strict import controls,” economist Mauricio Claveri, coordinator of foreign trade in the Abeceb consultancy, told IPS.

In the past, trade restrictions focused on sensitive sectors, in order to boost reindustrialisation. But this policy now has “a double role to play,” he said.

On one hand, it protects certain industries. But it regulates imports, above all, he said. This country has to meet debt service payments in dollars and is not allowed to issue new bonds, due to the late 2001 default.

The regulations are good for companies that produce for the domestic market, said Claveri. But they do not help attract investment from multinational corporations, which worry about being unable to import inputs, he added.

This policy, which the Foreign Trade Secretariat itself describes as temporary because of Argentina’s obligations under the World Trade Organisation, generates uncertainty. “A lot of thought goes into any decision to increase scale of production,” Claveri said.

But it also benefits sectors that are protected from cheap imports, such as the toy, footwear, textile, machinery and tool industries, he acknowledged.

Meloni admitted that there were difficulties in purchasing machinery abroad, and said exporters were forced to compensate for the purchases with exports. But he stressed that the number of workers in his textile company has grown from 30 in 2002 to 120 today.

Economist Ariel Schale, an adviser to the Fundación Pro Tejer, explained to IPS that, thanks to Argentina’s trade policies, the local textile industry saw its exports grow fourfold over the past decade.

Schale noted that production doubled in the last 10 years, and that the total number of people employed by the industry rose from 240,000 in 2002 to the current 400,000. “And we have done that by importing fabric and machinery, because the entry of merchandise is not blocked,” he said.

Another sector that has grown in these conditions is the motorcycle industry. In 2002, some 30,000 motorcycles were sold in Argentina, many of them imported, compared to 800,000 sold this year, all manufactured here.

“They are assembled in this country, but they contain only 30 percent nationally-made parts,” the executive director of the Argentine chamber of motorcycles, Daniel Tigani, told IPS.

Tigani, who defends the protective measures, said business representatives meet every three months with authorities from the Foreign Trade Secretariat to establish what can be imported. He added that other government agencies also take part in these decisions, to keep domestic prices from skyrocketing.

“Imports don’t generate jobs; local production does,” he underlined. “And that doesn’t mean we don’t import, because most of the motorcycle parts are purchased abroad. In 2012, more than 650,000 were sold, and this year the number will grow 20 percent.”

Tigani also pointed out that in 2003 there was virtually no local manufacturing of bicycles. But safety standards similar to those of developed countries were adopted, so this aspect can no longer be cited as a hurdle to trade.

“That revived the industry,” he said. “Today one million bicycles are sold in this country, and only two percent of them are imports.”

Some 3,000 direct jobs were created in the bicycle industry, he said. And if the parts market is included, the benefits reach around 15,000 families engaged in small businesses, he added.

Nothing is for sale at this street market in Plaza Italia, in the Palermo district of Buenos Aires. Credit: Juan Moseinco/IPS

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Sep 8 2013 (IPS)

Disillusioned with an economy that promotes individualism and ruthless consumption, thousands of people in Argentina are giving things away in street markets, organising car pools with strangers or offering free accommodation to travellers from abroad.

These are early trends in this South American country, but they are expanding, based on Web 2.0 platforms. Users share a concern for the environment and a rejection of consumerism. But they also have a desire to strengthen a sense of community and trust.

“We need much less than we consume. The basis of our street markets is detachment, the need to free ourselves from the concept of private ownership,” said Ariel Rodríguez, the creator of La Gratiferia (The Free Market) which operates under the slogan: “Bring what you want (or nothing), take what you want (or nothing).”

Launched in 2010, the first market was in Rodríguez’s home, in the Buenos Aires district of Liniers. Rodríguez offered friends and neighbours books, CDs, clothes, furniture and other goods that he had accumulated and didn’t need. He offered food and beverages as well.

In time, people began to follow his lead. He recalls that the 13th market “went out on the street and exploded” with dissemination on social networks. “This breaks with traditional mindsets,” Rodríguez said. Visitors are initially incredulous, in doubt about whether or not they can really take things without leaving something else in exchange.

People can come to a gratiferia with the stuff they wish to get rid of, and they do not have to worry about whether someone will take it. The idea is that someone will be interested in extending items’ useful life, instead of buying new goods.

“It’s a reorganisation of material objects that also generates an interesting kind of socialisation, by creating a sense of community,” Rodríguez said.

Gratiferias have spread to cities in some of the provinces, as well as to Chile, Mexico and other countries, he said.

This free give-and-take, according to Rodríguez, did not arise during a situation of crisis, like the bartering systems that were so popular during the 2001-2002 economic and social meltdown. “This is an attempt to respond to a much longer crisis in our relationship with material goods,” he said.

The practice has caught on in other areas. At the University of Buenos Aires engineering department, a group of students is offering lecture notes and study materials at a free fair this month.

“The idea is in the spirit of the gratiferias, and it should be a wider movement involving other departments, but for the moment we are trying to establish it in engineering,” Santiago Trejo, one of the students organising the fair, told Tierramérica*.

These are original forms of “collaborative consumption”, an expression coined in the United States to describe mechanisms for sharing or exchanging electrical appliances, books, clothes, shoes, instruments, furniture, bicycles and even cars.

In 2011, Time magazine named collaborative consumption one of the 10 ideas capable of changing the world.

Similar ideas have emerged among people who regard travel as not just going to another part of the world, but having a human and social experience with people who live in a different country.

“When I went to Europe I stayed at hostels, and when I came home I realised I hadn’t much idea of how people lived in those countries, or what they thought of ours,” 24-year-old Aranzazú Dobantón, who is working and studying film, told Tierramérica.

Four years ago, she uploaded her profile on Couchsurfing, an international platform that puts people willing to host foreign visitors in touch with would-be travellers. The exchange involves no money: just sharing a roof, and the experience.

The local group has 5,000 registered users.

“So far I have hosted about 15 people from different parts of the world, many of them from Denmark, and also from Mexico, the Philippines, France, and a Turkish person who lived in Germany,” Dobantón said.

As the hostess, she sets the conditions. She and the potential guest correspond by e-mail, and once the visitor is in Buenos Aires they meet first in a public place.

“The visitors are very willing. Sometimes I cook for them, sometimes they prepare the food. They realise it’s not easy to look after guests when I’m working. But they are ordinary people, with the same concerns that I have, although the reality of where they live is different,” she said.

The visitors later write on the website about how they felt staying at her home, and these comments encourage other people to make the same trip – or not. Dobantón, in turn, can use the network to stay at someone’s home when she wants to travel. So far she has only tried out the system in neighbouring Uruguay.

Collaborative consumption is growing so big in the United States that the brokerage and financial services firm ConvergEx wrote an article claiming it could have “catastrophic” ripple effects on the economy.

Carpooling has grown the most in Argentina. With the aim of saving money and cutting down on pollution and traffic congestion, a number of platforms exist to connect people willing to share a car, the journey and the expenses.

“Vayamos juntos” and “En Camello” are two of the Argentine networks where interested parties publish their offer or requirements for point-to-point journeys. Some just want to share rides from home to work, while others wish to travel from one province to another, or go to a concert or football match.

In other countries, like Mexico, there are different forms of shared transport, such as multi-user cars which provide access to a vehicle when needed for an hourly rate, or a monthly or annual subscription. As with public bicycles, cars are picked up in one parking lot and left in another.

In Argentina, each of the options already has thousands of registered users.

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Excerpt:

This shantytown in Guatemala City reflects the poverty and inequality that persists in Latin America. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Sep 4 2013 (IPS)

Latin America’s cash transfer programmes are a more effective weapon against poverty and social inequality than economic growth alone, according to a study by two Argentine economists.

In 2010, these social programmes operated in 18 countries, reaching 19 percent of the region’s approximately 600 million people and achieving “a substantial reduction in extreme poverty and a significant fall in inequality,” according to the study published by the Centre for Distributive, Labour and Social Studies (CEDLAS) of the National University of La Plata.

The report, “Políticas sociales para la reducción de la desigualdad y la pobreza en América Latina y el Caribe” (Social policies to reduce inequality and poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean), by Leonardo Gasparini and Guillermo Cruces, reviews regional programmes for income transfer to the poorest of the poor and recommends expanding them in order to eradicate extreme poverty.

Gasparini and Cruces, CEDLAS’ director and deputy director, respectively, say that non-contributory programmes “were the main innovation” in social policies in the region over the last decade.

“Cash transfer plans are very useful instruments as part of an overall strategy for reducing poverty and inequality,” Gasparini told IPS. “They are relatively easy to implement, administer and monitor, and they have a direct impact on the beneficiaries’ quality of life.”

Gasparini highlighted the advantages of the conditions attached to the payments, which provide “an incentive for certain behaviours, such as encouraging school attendance by children and teenagers, and more regular health checks.” While they “are not a complete solution to the serious problem of income distribution, their importance should not be underrated,” he said.

According to the study, published in March, even in a scenario of sustained economic growth, programmes like Argentina’s universal child allowance (Asignación Universal por Hijo) and Brazil’s family allowance programme (Bolsa Família) “play an essential role in achieving improved distribution.”

“The region cannot depend solely on economic growth, even if there is full employment, because social protection is also needed,” the study says.

The plans, which different in format, aim to provide a monthly transfer from state coffers to low-income families or elderly people who worked in the informal economy and do not draw pensions. The family plans usually require school attendance and health checks for children under 18.

Ecuador’s human development voucher (Bono de Desarrollo Humano) has the widest coverage, benefiting 44 percent of the country’s total population. But Brazil’s family allowance is the largest programme in absolute terms, covering 52 million of the country’s 198 million people.

Other programmes are Oportunidades in Mexico, Bono Juancito Pinto in Bolivia, Chile Solidario, Familias en Acción in Colombia, Avancemos in Costa Rica, Red Solidaria in El Salvador, Mi Familia Progresa in Guatemala, Programa de Asignación Familiar in Honduras and Red Oportunidades in Panamá.

The list continues with Tekoporâ/ProPaís II in Paraguay, Juntos in Peru, Solidaridad in the Dominican Republic, Plan Equidad and Asignaciones Familiares in Uruguay, and similar plans in Nicaragua and Venezuela.

The least effective plan appears to be Mexico’s Oportunidades, judging by the rise in poverty, which affected 53.3 million of the country’s 118 million people at the end of 2012, according to the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL). Given these results, the government is reviewing the programme.

“The basic weakness is the concept that the problem of poverty is due to a lack of skills, and that the main focus must be on funding capacity building,” said Clara Jusidman, honorary president of Incide Social, an NGO in Mexico.

“Oportunidades is a typical programme that views the supply side of the problem, seeing individuals as falling short when it comes to joining the labour market and taking part in development,” she told IPS.

Created in the late 1990s, Oportunidades, which took on its current form in 2002, has a 2013 budget of over five billion dollars and aims to benefit 5.8 million families. The family allowance is conditional on children and teenagers staying in school and attending health checks.

According to Jusidman, “under this plan, human rights have been violated and people have been excluded, and the state takes a paternalistic attitude, because beneficiaries are transformed into subordinates who must wait on the decisions of governments and officials.”

Gasparini and Cruces pointed out that in the 1990s, the region’s economic growth was associated with greater inequality. In contrast, since the turn of the century, cash transfer programmes have contributed to an acceleration of the reduction of poverty, and especially extreme poverty.

The proportion of people living on less than 2.50 dollars a day shrank from 27.8 percent of the population of Latin America in 1992 to 24.9 percent in 2003, 16.3 percent in 2009 and 14.2 percent in 2010, the study says. It recommends expanding coverage to bolster the impact of the programmes over a shorter timespan.

“In several countries, the beneficiary base is still small and in others the amounts involved are trifling. There is room to expand these programmes,” Gasparini said. However, he did not think universal coverage was necessary. “It makes no sense to extend the programmes to the non-vulnerable population,” he said.

The study observes that, with slower growth, fighting poverty takes longer. For instance, if per capita GDP grows at an average of two percent a year, 5.5 percent of the population will be living in extreme poverty in 2025, while if growth stands at four percent, less than three percent of the population will be extremely poor by that year.

In contrast, with an “additional fiscal effort of 0.5 percent” of GDP for these social programmes, the region would achieve the same poverty reduction 10 years earlier, in 2015.

Based on the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC’s) figures for 2010, the region spent an average of 0.4 percent of GDP on cash transfer programmes. According to the authors, some countries could increase their efforts, in line with the study’s recommendations, while others may have to take out external loans.

The countries that will need most aid are those where a high proportion of the population is in the informal economy and therefore lacks health and retirement coverage – such as Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay and Peru.

“Bolivia, Nicaragua and Guatemala need foreign assistance for programmes to cover the proportion of their population living in extreme poverty,” Gasparini said. The other countries have the resources to finance these programmes, and even to expand them, he said.

The head of CEDLAS said the current average expenditure seemed relatively small compared with other subsidies that benefit the middle and upper classes. He added that while these programmes are sometimes criticised, “there is broad social support in most countries and very few candidates to elected posts in the region openly call for their elimination.”

Gasparini said, however, that support for the programmes “does not negate the fact they may have undesirable features, such as slowing down the rate of formalisation of the economy, or effects on the supply of labour, which need more serious work.”

With additional reporting by Emilio Godoy in Mexico City.

The prevailing impunity has made it impossible to gauge the true dimension of the phenomenon of baby theft in Spain, but even the most conservative estimates put the numbers in the tens of thousands. Credit: Bigstock

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Sep 3 2013 (IPS)

The mystery still surrounding the massive business of stealing and buying babies, practised for decades in Spain by the regime of Francisco Franco (1939-1975), could start to be clarified in courtrooms in Argentina.

“In my country, most of the cases have been shelved, which is why we decided to bring legal action in Argentina,” Soledad Luque from Spain told IPS. Her parents were told that her twin brother Francisco had died shortly after birth, in 1965. But they were never shown his body.

Luque testified as part of a collective lawsuit Monday Sept. 2 before Argentine Judge María Romilda Servini.

Under the principle of universal jurisdiction, Servini is investigating crimes against humanity allegedly committed during Spain’s 1936-1939 civil war and the Franco era.

Luque and her brother were born in the Maternidad Provincial de O’Donnell maternity hospital in Madrid. Francisco was put in an incubator. But a few days later, the parents were told that he had suddenly died of meningitis.

The family asked for his body, but were told that he had been cremated. However, they were not given his ashes either, Luque said.

Forty-five years later, similar cases began to come to light, and Luque started to investigate what might have happened to her brother. She filed a lawsuit in Madrid in 2010. But in less than a year she was told the case had been shelved because there was no evidence that a crime had been committed.

People in a similar situation, who had received the same message, began to hook up over the social networking sites.

Information gathered from the official records by associations of people affected by the phenomenon of baby theft indicates that between 1960 and 1990 some two million babies were adopted in Spain. And in many cases, payment was involved.

It is difficult to gauge the magnitude of the phenomenon. But legal experts estimate that 15 percent – some 300,000 – of the cases could have involved newborns who were stolen and old to adoptive parents.

The lawsuit in Argentina is focusing on the cases of babies and toddlers seized from women who had taken part in the civil war on the Republican side and were imprisoned under the Franco regime.

According to Luque, around 30,000 babies were stolen up to 1952. “After that, the phenomenon became more difficult to measure,” she said.

The evidence indicates that after that year, the strategy shifted – with the direct participation of institutions of the state and of the powerful Catholic Church – to a focus on poor families with many children, and single mothers.

“Those numbers scare me, but they might actually be underestimates,” Luque told IPS, referring to the estimate of 300,000 stolen babies. “We don’t know, because we have asked the prosecution service to give us the information, but they have not done so.”

In her search for Francisco, Luque created the Asociación Todos los Niños Robados Son También Mis Niños (the “all stolen children are also my children” association). On Monday, she testified in representation of her organisation and eight others that are seeking information about hundreds of missing babies.

There are many other associations of families affected by the phenomenon in Spain, but not all of them agree that the cases fit in the category of human rights crimes attributed to the Franco regime, Luque said. Many see the theft of babies as common crimes, she explained.

“We belong to the case against Franquismo because we were also its victims,” said the activist, who flew to Buenos Aires with other relatives of missing babies and their attorneys, who include Carlos Slepoy, a human rights lawyer from Argentina who has lived in Madrid for years.

Thousands of lawsuits were filed in Spain, but only one went to trial, against an elderly Catholic nun, María Gómez. She was charged with stealing babies in two maternity hospitals in Madrid, the Santa Cristina and San Ramón. But she died early this year at the age of 87 while the trial was still ongoing.

Slepoy told IPS that the purpose of the visit to Buenos Aires was to “revitalise the original case” against Franco regime crimes, which he said had suffered some setbacks, largely because of the Spanish government’s lack of political will.

The lawsuit in the Argentine capital began to be put together in 2010, when relatives of two victims summarily executed by the Spanish dictatorship filed charges, invoking the principle of universal jurisdiction, and the case began to grow as additional families joined as plaintiffs.

Under the principle of universal jurisdiction, crimes against humanity, genocide and terrorism, which are not subject to statutes of limitation or amnesties, can be tried at any time in any place.

The strategy was a response by human rights organisations in Argentina and Spain to the disbarring of internationally renowned Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón on charges that he overstepped his jurisdiction when he began to investigate Franco-era human rights crimes.

Garzón had decided to investigate what happened to at least 113,000 victims forcibly disappeared during the civil war and the early years of the Franco regime.

Servini asked the Spanish courts for information. When she was informed that no trials on the human rights crimes were moving forward in Spain, she scheduled a trip to Madrid. But Argentina’s Supreme Court did not approve the expenses involved, so she decided instead to take depositions via videoconference.

Witnesses and plaintiffs were going to give their testimony in the Argentine embassy in Madrid, while the judge questioned them from Buenos Aires.

But a complaint from Spain’s foreign ministry brought the hearings to a halt.

Despite the hurdles, “the lawsuit has made strides,” Slepoy said. “It exists, it has support, and it is the only one in the world investigating Franco-era crimes. That is why it has awakened such high expectations.”

The Spanish delegation received a warm welcome and a wave of support in Buenos Aires.

On Wednesday Aug. 28, the lower house of Congress issued a “strong condemnation of the crimes against humanity committed in Spain by the Franco dictatorship, and of the impunity enjoyed by those responsible.” The statement also expressed support for the legal action in Argentina.

Luque met with the president of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, Estela Barnes de Carlotto. Her organisation has tracked down nearly one-quarter of the roughly 400 children who were kidnapped as babies along with their parents or born into captivity to political prisoners and stolen during Argentina’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship.

But Luque said it was important to understand the differences between the baby theft in Argentina and in Spain. In Argentina, she noted, many of the stolen children were raised by military couples or other families with links to the dictatorship.

In Spain, meanwhile, “the adoptive families may have committed the crime of paying, but we don’t know if they knew the children had been stolen.”

For that reason, she said, the legal charges do not target the adoptive families, but the network of doctors, priests, nuns, public notaries and judges who allegedly stole babies in clinics and hospitals mainly linked to religious organisations and sold them to couples who could not have children.

The Casa Rosada, the seat of the Argentine government, which is seeking to reopen a debt swap to overcome the legal action brought by “vulture funds”. Credit: Marcela Valente/IPS

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Aug 29 2013 (IPS)

As a sign of Argentina’s willingness to repay its bondholders, President Cristina Fernández introduced a bill for a new swap of the foreign debt held by “holdout” creditors who refused earlier restructurings after the country’s late 2001 default.

This time around, most of the opposition backs the proposal.

In the initiative that the Senate began to discuss on Wednesday Aug. 28, the government seeks authorisation to reopen the debt restructuring process for a second time.

Although 93 percent of bondholders accepted the earlier restructurings, in 2005 and 2010, the remaining seven percent refused the offer of about 35 cents on the dollar, and insisted on full repayment.

Through the restructuring, Argentina renegotiated 90 billion dollars in debt.

The new swap, expected to be approved by Congress, would offer the same conditions as the previous deal. The difference is that it would be open-ended, whereas the earlier exchanges gave bondholders only a few months to swap their debt.

“Equity is a foundation stone of this debt restructuring process,” states the bill, which prohibits offering holdouts who have brought legal action more favourable treatment than those who did not do so.

The government initiative is in response to the Friday Aug. 23 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York – the last step before the Supreme Court – that upheld an earlier decision that Argentina must pay the holdouts in full.

Fausto Spotorno, an economist with the Centre for Economic Studies, told IPS that the bill “is very reasonable.”

“They should never have closed the swap. But opening it now is a good political signal to the justice system and could get some more of the bondholders to agree to an exchange,” he said.

Spotorno said that if the case was accepted by the Supreme Court, a favourable verdict for Argentina was unlikely.

The hedge funds that sued in federal court in New York for full payment of 1.3 billion dollars in Argentine bonds had acquired them in 2008 at 20 to 30 percent of their nominal value.

They are known as “vulture funds” – opportunistic investors who purchase the debt of heavily indebted countries cheap and then sue for full repayment.

The lawsuit in New York is led by hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer’s Elliott Management.

The bill presented by the Argentine government stresses that the holdouts who sued represent only a small portion of the unrestructured debt. It also points out that if they were paid 100 percent of the nominal value, as they are demanding, they would make a profit of 1,300 percent.

The bill also states that “it is common knowledge that our country is the object of ruthless legal attacks and heavy political pressure by these vulture funds.”

When she unveiled the proposal on Monday Aug. 26, centre-left President Fernández said the Aug. 23 U.S. court ruling was “unfair to our country” because it ignored the restructuring agreements reached with 93 percent of the bondholders.

She also said “we are serial payers, not serial debtors.”

Since the restructuring began, Argentina has serviced its debt punctually.

By 2003, the country’s debt represented 150 percent of GDP, the bill presented to the legislature states. The country has not had access to the global credit markets since 2002.

But as the economy began to recover from the 2001-2002 severe economic crisis, the debt situation began to improve as well.

According to the latest report by the Economy Ministry, as of late 2012 Argentina held 83 billion dollars in net debt, equivalent to 18.8 percent of GDP.

And with the payment of restructured bonds scheduled for September, the foreign currency denominated private debt to GDP ratio will drop to just 8.3 percent, Economy Minister Hernán Lorenzino said.

However, the country’s successful reduction of the debt burden is threatened by the small group of litigious hedge funds, which found their first ally in District Judge Thomas Griesa, who handed down the initial sentence in New York, in March.

The Aug. 23 ruling, which will be appealed by Argentina, dealt a blow to the restructuring process that Fernández’s late husband Néstor Kirchner, her predecessor, began while serving as president from 2003 to 2007.

If Argentina was forced to pay 100 percent of what the holdouts are owed in principal and accrued interest, the bondholders who agreed to the 2005 and 2010 restructurings could invoke the “most favoured creditor clause” and demand the same treatment.

Fernández also proposed that the voluntary debt swap invite holders of foreign-law bonds to exchange them for new debt that would be paid under Argentina’s local legislation, in order to evade eventual embargoes in case the Supreme Court upholds the Aug. 23 ruling.

The Radical Civic Union, the main opposition party in both houses of Congress, responded positively to the bill overall. But some of its leaders said the measure came too late, or contained overly critical language when referring to the holdout creditors and the judges.

The right-wing PRO also called the bill “reasonable.”

“Argentina has to do whatever it can to get the Court to open the case and turn around the sentence,” PRO lawmaker Federico Pinedo told IPS.

He said it was necessary to act “responsibly and in a serious manner, and to send out a message that we want to ensure equal conditions for all of the creditors. That is an argument that holds a great deal of weight with the Court.”

Many legislators, including members of the governing Frente para la Victoria, believe it will be difficult to get the vulture funds to agree to any kind of swap. But they say it is necessary to show a willingness to restructure the debt – as long as it is under conditions set by Argentina.

A Metrobus stop on 9 de Julio avenue in Buenos Aires, with the famous Obelisk in the background. Credit: Juan Moseinco/IPS

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Aug 27 2013 (IPS)

A new system of exclusive lanes for bus rapid transit appears to be benefiting public transport passengers and bus drivers in the most congested part of the centre of the Argentine capital.

Although there are as yet no studies on its impact, users interviewed by IPS said the new Metrobus on 9 de Julio Avenue, the second widest thoroughfare in the world at 140 metres and 14 lanes wide, delivers faster journeys, with fewer stops and for the same fare.

Built in just six months, the system of exclusive lanes and stops for 10 bus lines began to operate on Jul. 24. The project was controversial because it involved removing small plazas and transplanting nearly 1,500 trees.

Critics claimed that quick journeys over that stretch were already available on the subway, which meant the Metrobus was redundant.

The bus rapid transit (BRT) corridor is 3.5 km long, stretching from the ground-level railway stations of Retiro, north of the city, and Constitución, to the south, which connect with the subway lines.

But the Government of the City of Buenos Aires, the national Transport Secretariat and the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP, an NGO) stress that different groups of people use each of these systems.

Around 13 million people live in the Greater Buenos Aires metropolitan area.

A survey by the Transport Secretariat found that 89 percent of people who travel in the metropolitan area make their journey as a single stretch. And those who choose the cheapest option say the Metrobus is “all gain.”

They arrive in the city centre by bus, from their urban neighbourhoods or from the suburbs, and remain on board the same vehicle until reaching their destination.

Previously they had to endure a slow, stop-and-start trip across the city centre if they wanted to avoid transferring to the subway for the short journey to the final station, which would make the trip more expensive.

The new Metrobus, on the avenue where the Obelisk monument, a city centre landmark, is located, now concentrates the six bus lines that used to mingle with the cars and taxis on the avenue, and another four lines that used to move at snail’s pace on the narrow streets on either side of 9 de Julio.

Now the 10 bus lines run down the centre of the avenue, carrying around 200,000 passengers a day. The narrow side streets have been cleared of bus traffic and are in the process of being pedestrianised, and air pollution has been reduced.

Braking and acceleration have been minimised, increasing fuel efficiency and generating lower volumes of the greenhouse gases that are responsible for global warming.

When IPS rode one of the bus lines, passengers and drivers agreed that the system inaugurated in July is faster. Some people said their travel times were halved.

“It used to take me an hour to get downtown from my home, and now it takes just over 30 minutes,” said a passenger, pointing out that previously, her bus travelled along the most congested part of the avenue, and now it drives in the fastest lane, “all without a fare increase.”

Bus services are provided by the private sector and subsidised by the state. The minimum bus fare, for the shortest distance, costs 1.50 pesos (25 cents of a dollar), while the subway has a flat fare of 2.50 pesos (45 cents of a dollar).

Two other passengers travelling the full distance from Retiro to Constitución said the trip previously took 45 minutes and now only 15. “But you have to look sharp, because now it doesn’t stop so frequently, it’s like the subway,” one of them said.

In effect, the system is similar to trains. Buses go along a single lane and only stop every 400 or 700 metres, at raised platforms level with the bus floor. If they do not need to stop, they travel freely in their exclusive lane, with no taxis or cars in the way.

“It’s much better for us,” one of the line 67 bus drivers told IPS. “On one occasion it took me an hour and 15 minutes to get from Constitución to Corrientes avenue, but now I always do it in 15 minutes.”

Andrés Fingeret, the head of ITDP Argentina, told IPS that while it is too soon to evaluate the results, so far the response received is that “for the vast majority of the travelling public, it has been positive.”

“Not just for passengers, who save time and have a more enjoyable travel experience, but also for bus drivers and for cars and taxis, who experience relief because the streets are less congested,” he said.

Fingeret emphasised that building bus rapid transit networks costs 10 percent of what it would cost to build equivalent subways. He also said they are very effective and can be set in motion much more quickly. For example, the 9 de Julio system was established in just six months, he said.

“One kilometre of subway costs around 250 million dollars and the same distance of Metrobus costs between eight and 15 million dollars, for a much more sophisticated system than was installed in Buenos Aires,” he said.

BRT systems have spread around the world and can be found in over 150 cities, the Buenos Aires city government reported.

In Latin America, the pioneers were Curitiba in Brazil, and Bogotá in Colombia. With variations, the system has also been introduced in Santiago, Chile and in Mexico City.

In Buenos Aires, the first BRT network was constructed in 2011 on Juan B. Justo avenue, comprising a 12-km corridor between the neighbourhoods of Liniers and Palermo, two public transport hubs for buses and trains.

This bus corridor reduced travel times by 40 percent, according to the city transport under-secretariat. And after the 9 de Julio system was installed, a third network came into operation this month between Constitución and Puente La Noria, in the south of the city, over a distance of 24 km.

“It’s a system that offers a lot of advantages and that could still grow ten-fold in Buenos Aires. In fact, the city government is carrying out feasibility studies on further corridors,” said Fingeret.

However, he thinks the network has room for improvement. “There’s a lot to be done to improve integration with other services, such as the subway, trains or bicycles,” he said.

He also thinks better services could be provided for passengers at the bus stops. The stops have seats, roofs and lighting, but they could also have ticket offices, information, sales of soft drinks or cellphone recharging facilities, Fingeret said.

Participants in Ellas Hacen share their experiences in the programme. Courtesy of Social Income with Work Programme in Morón

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Aug 12 2013 (IPS)

A new social programme launched by the Argentine government to fight hard-core poverty is providing unemployed mothers who are heads of households with education, training, work and an income.

“I told my oldest kids that they have to help me now because every morning I have to go to ‘Ellas Hacen’,” said Isabel Hernández, whose five children range in age from six to 16.

Ellas Hacen is the name of the latest Social Income with Work Programme implemented by the Ministry of Social Development. It specifically targets low-income unemployed women with at least three children, or a disabled child, who live in the poorest neighbourhoods.

Although she is taking part in the programme, Hernández still continues to collect used clothing to dress her children or to sell at low prices in her neighbourhood. But now she only does it on the weekends, because she is busy Monday through Friday in Ellas Hacen.

Up to now Hernández, who lives in a poor section of Don Torcuato, a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, has been doing odd jobs in the informal economy, while drawing the Universal Child Allowance (AUH).

The AUH is a cash transfer to parents who are unemployed or work in the informal sector of the economy. The allowance is conditional on school attendance and keeping up-to-date on vaccines and medical checkups. The programme, introduced by President Cristina Fernández in 2009, expanded the child allowance already received by formal sector workers.

The AUH currently amounts to 460 pesos (83 dollars) a month per child under 18 and 1,500 pesos (272 dollars) per disabled son or daughter of any age. Expectant mothers also receive the allowance, starting in the third month of pregnancy.

But the AUH programme, which now benefits 3.5 million poor children and adolescents in this country of 41 million people, is little more than a palliative in the case of mothers raising several children on their own, with no other source of income and unable to find a job because of a lack of formal education and training.

Ellas Hacen was launched in the middle of this year to reach these women, estimated to number around 100,000 across the country.

The beneficiaries receive 2,000 pesos (363 dollars) a month, on top of the AUH allowance that makes sure their children stay in school.

By registering in Ellas Hacen, the women become part of the social security system and payments are made towards a future pension. In addition, they and their families have the right to medical insurance known as “obra social” – a pay-as-you-go system based on compulsory payments by both employers and employees.

Thanks to the AUH and Ellas Hacen, the Hernández family is now above the poverty line.

The latest figures from the National Statistics and Census Institute indicate that 5.4 percent of the population is living in poverty and 1.5 percent in extreme poverty. But independent sources put the figure higher. The private Catholic University, for instance, estimated the poverty rate at 15.5 percent in July.

In exchange for the new income – Hernández has already received one paycheck – the women must attend daily literacy courses and finish primary or secondary school, depending on each specific case.

The programme also provides training for jobs in urban infrastructure works in shantytowns, the installation of water pipes and tanks, house painting, trash collection and separation, and the care of green spaces.

“We are also organising workshops on gender violence, and we are going to put a strong emphasis on the question of sexual and reproductive health and the care of children,” said Diego Landechea, social-labour director of the Social Income with Work Programme in Morón, another neighbourhood on the outskirts of the capital.

Landechea told IPS that 755 women between the ages of 18 and 62 had registered for Ellas Hacen so far in that neighbourhood, and that 70 percent already receive the AUH.

The others meet different eligibility criteria. For example, over 200 of them are victims of gender violence, while 15 have at least one disabled child, he added.

The group that registered in Morón includes five illiterate women, 80 who did not complete primary school, and 190 who did not finish their secondary studies.

“They never managed to enter the labour market, for different reasons,” said Landechea.

“Without a doubt, raising several children on their own is a fundamental factor in their exclusion from the formal market,” he said, although he also mentioned a lack of formal studies or training.

A census is carried out among the women who register, and commissions are created according to the most pressing needs found.

The first priority is to finish their studies. To that end, courses are offered at different times of day, to make it possible for them to attend class. Attendance is important: if they miss more than a certain number of classes, 350 of the 2,000 pesos (363 dollars) are discounted.

Hernández told IPS that she had finished primary school, and is now starting secondary school, through the programme. She knows she’ll have to get organised, because while she’s gone, the younger children will be left in the care of her 16-year-old son.

“The first thing I did when I got the 2,000 pesos was pay 900 that I owed in the local grocery shop and give my oldest son 300 pesos so he could buy some pants,” she said, adding that the idea was to encourage her son to give her a hand.

Up to now, the Social Income with Work Programme benefited 500,000 people who learned skills and trades and joined cooperatives, where they earn 2,000 pesos a month from the state until the cooperative becomes independent.

But although the programme was not exclusively for men, it has mainly served them because it has failed to take into account specific hurdles faced by mothers who are on their own, raising at least three young children, in slum neighbourhoods.

The social programmes that began to appear after the late Néstor Kirchner (1950-2010) took office in 2003 and that were continued by his widow, President Fernández, have drawn criticism from opposition political and labour leaders.

One of them is Hugo Moyano, the head of the Confederación General del Trabajo, Argentina’s largest trade union confederation, who quipped that the programmes were “take it easy plans” rather than work plans.

Moyano, who represents the faction of the labour movement most critical of the centre-left Fernández administration, made that comment in a July rally, where he called for the elimination of income tax, which affects the middle and upper classes.

The leaders of the Confederación Nacional de Cooperativas de Trabajo (CNCT), the national confederation of workers’ cooperatives, which was created under the Social Income with Work Programme, issued a statement accusing Moyano of slander.

The CNCT pointed out that in the past few years, the programme that has now incorporated women has enabled tens of thousands of people who were out of work to receive training and improve the living conditions in their communities.

The CNCT said the new cooperative members who organised thanks initially to public subsidies are now working in areas like public works, the textile industry, carpentry, transport, gastronomy and communication.

The progress made by Argentina in trials for crimes against humanity committed by the 1976-1983 dictatorship has been tarnished by a growing number of human rights violators escaping from prison.

Human rights organisations are concerned about the rise in the number of escapes from what they consider lax prison conditions.

The number grew from 35 to 40 escapes a year to 54 over the past year, Lorena Balardini, a researcher with the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), a leading human rights group, told IPS.

“The previous number was persistent and steady,” she said. “Some were captured while others escaped…But what caught our attention is that since 2012, the number of fugitives has jumped to 54.”

Argentine victims of forced disappearance. Credit: ha+/CC BY 2.0

According to figures from the public prosecutor’s office, updated this month, 1,049 people are currently facing prosecution in trials for human rights abuses committed during the dictatorship, when up to 30,000 people were killed or disappeared in the country’s “dirty war”.

In addition, 471 have been tried for kidnapping, torture, forced disappearance, extrajudicial executions and other crimes against humanity. Of these, 426 were convicted and 45 acquitted.

Meanwhile, 853 are in custody, either convicted or awaiting trial. More than 60 percent of them are in common prisons, 36 percent are under house arrest, and the rest are in security forces installations or hospitals.

Balardini, head of research at CELS, said there is no clear explanation for the increase in escapes, although she suggested it could be related to “the flexible detention conditions” that some of the human rights violators enjoy, whether due to a decision by the courts or the prison authorities.

The latest case, which gave rise to suspicions of privileged treatment, was the escape of retired army major Jorge Olivera and retired army lieutenant Gustavo de Marchi on Jul. 25.

They were found guilty of human rights abuses Jul. 4 in the western province of San Juan. Olivera was sentenced to life in prison and de Marchi was given a 25-year sentenced.

Olivera and de Marchi had been transferred from the Marcos Paz prison in San Juan to the Cosme Argerich Central Military Hospital in the city of Buenos Aires, 1,300 km away, for appointments in dermatology, kinesthesiology and psychiatry.

The request for the transfer and medical appointments was filed by Olivera’s wife, Marta Ravasi, a psychologist in the military hospital. It was initially rejected by the court where the two men were tried. But another judge, Miguel Ángel Gálvez from San Juan, approved the request.

Shortly after they arrived at the hospital, the two men went missing. Interpol immediately issued an international notice for their arrest, and the justice ministry offered a reward of two million pesos (364,000 dollars) for information leading to their capture.

The government of centre-left President Cristina Fernández sacked military and prison personnel implicated in the escape, and charges were brought against Judge Gálvez.

To prevent future escapes, all transfers of people detained in connection with human rights cases were suspended. And on Jul. 29 the justice, defence and health ministries signed an agreement to review the medical condition of all of the detainees.

According to the agreement, the detainees will no longer be taken to military hospitals, but to the health centre that serves each prison.

In addition, government officials explained, every transfer of prisoners will be based on symptoms or health problems that have been duly certified, rather than on a simple request from the prisoner, as was the case up to now.

The justice ministry’s national programme for the coordinated search for people wanted for crimes against humanity currently has a list of 52 fugitives. Rewards are offered for their capture.

“The most difficult case is that of (Jorge) Vildoza,” said Balardini, referring to the former captain who was one of the heads of the Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA) in 1976 and 1977, when it was the dictatorship’s biggest clandestine centre for torture, killings and forced disappearance.

Vildoza and his wife Ana María Grimaldos moved to Switzerland in 1986, taking with them their illegally adopted son, who was born at ESMA in 1977. Two years later, the Argentine courts issued international warrants for their arrest for kidnapping the boy. But Vildoza was never captured.

In 1998, the boy, by then a young man, presented himself in court in Argentina and underwent DNA testing to verify his identity. He turned out to be Javier Penino Viñas, the son of Hugo Penino and Cecilia Viñas, victims of forced disappearance. Viñas was seven months pregnant when she was seized in 1977. She was last seen at ESMA.

Nevertheless, Javier continued to live with the couple who stole and raised him, until he married.

Grimaldos was arrested a year ago in Argentina, after entering the country on a false passport. She is currently under prosecution for theft of children. She claims her husband died, but the search for him continues.

Theft of the children of political prisoners was one of the crimes of the dictatorship. The babies, or in some cases toddlers, were illegally adopted, often by military families.

Balardini said the escapes from prison have been a problem since the start of the human rights trials in the mid-1980s, which were cut short by amnesty laws passed in 1986 and 1987 that were struck down in 2005, allowing the cases to be reopened.

CELS says the dictatorship’s human rights abusers have their own support networks and sources of financing that make it possible for them to obtain forged documents, hire lawyers, move from one country to another, and survive far beyond the reach of Argentina’s justice system.

The activist said the rewards offered by the government help put the issue on the table and increase its visibility.

But she said the special conditions that the prisoners enjoy, better than those of common criminals, make it easier for them to escape.

She said CELS has been “surprised” by cases of human rights violators who have already been living at large before they are captured, and who, despite requests by prosecutors and the victims’ lawyers, are granted bail by judges and later flee.

Olivera, who was let off the hook by the amnesty laws, was arrested in Italy in 2000 on a warrant from the French justice system. But he went free, thanks to false documents.

Finally, a warrant for him was issued in Argentina in 2007, and a year later he was arrested. But he escaped just three weeks after he was sentenced on Jul. 4.

Margarita Camus, a victim who testified in the trial against Olivera and de Marchi, said she was worried about the escapes. “We know what kind of people they are, how they move around in hiding, and it makes us nervous and uneasy.”

Balardini pointed out that escapes have also occurred in other parts of the country. But she said they only receive attention when they involve better-known figures like Oliveri and de Marchi.

In other cases, suspects have skipped bail. For example, retired army colonel Carlos Arroyo disappeared in May before the start of a trial against him and eight other human rights violators in Bahía Blanca, near the city of Buenos Aires.

At the time, the prosecutor’s unit in Bahía Blanca stated that “the need for all of those charged with crimes against humanity to be held in prison units has been repeated on innumerable occasions, given the concrete and real risk that they will flee since, as it has been seen, those who formed part of the terrorist state still today count on the connivance of different sectors of power who protect this kind of criminal.”

And in the northeastern province of Formosa, a trial against nine suspects charged with kidnapping 74 people is set to begin on Jul. 31. But the main defendant, Ángel Spada, a former army intelligence chief in an infantry battalion, skipped bail in June.

Industry’s share of GDP in Argentina rose from 16.7 percent in 2002 to 18.1 percent in 2010. Credit: Ministry of Industry

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Jul 24 2013 (IPS)

Industry in Argentina has seen a sustained rise in production, exports and employment since 2003. But in order for this trend to become a structural change, greater import substitution is needed, analysts say.

The book “Argentine industry faces new 21st century challenges and opportunities”, published by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), states that knowledge-intensive industry activities have become increasingly dynamic in the last few years in this South American country.

The introduction by ECLAC Executive Secretary Alicia Bárcena says that since 2003, “Argentina has followed a path of growth, technical progress, job creation and poverty reduction without precedent in over half a century.”

But she added that it is necessary “to accelerate the process of structural change”.

In the report compiled by ECLAC economists Giovanni Stumpo and Diego Rivas, various experts make in-depth analyses of the potential and the critical aspects of 11 of the 13 industrial sectors that the Ministry of Industry included in its Strategic Industrial Plan 2020, launched in 2011 by the government of centre-left President Cristina Fernández.

The 11 sectors are the automotive, pharmaceutical, leather and footwear, capital goods, construction materials, dairy, agricultural machinery, software, textile and apparel, poultry and pork industries.

Industry’s share of GDP in Argentina rose from 16.7 percent in 2002 to 18.1 percent in 2010, while manufactured products made up 35 percent of total exports over the last year.

In the period studied, the economy grew by 7.5 percent a year on average, with highs of 10 and 11 percent in some quarters. Unemployment, meanwhile, fell from 19.7 percent to 7.8 percent, and the proportion of unregistered workers dropped from 48 to 33 percent of the total.

“Unlike other Latin American countries, Argentina did not reorient production towards commodities for export,” says the ECLAC report, with respect to the policies implemented since Fernández’s late husband and predecessor, Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007), took office.

Nevertheless, the experts take a cautious stance in the report and point out that commodities – such as soy, Argentina’s leading export – continue to weigh heavily in the economy, which means there are still major pending challenges.

In a conversation with IPS, economist Gabriel Yoel, a researcher at the General Sarmiento National University’s Institute of Industry, said that bringing about “structural change is a challenge” that industry still faces in Argentina.

“The trade deficit must be reduced by means of import substitution,” he said.

Yoel, co-author of the chapter on the automotive industry, said “there was growth as never before since the industry set up shop here in the 1970s.”

But up to the 1990s, no more than 200,000 to 300,000 vehicles were produced annually in Argentina, and no cars were exported, he said.

However, production grew along with exports since the early 1990s, when Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay created the Mercosur (Southern Common Market) trade bloc, which since last year has a fifth full member, Venezuela.

An average of 800,000 vehicles a year are currently produced, 60 percent of which are exported, Yoel said. But despite that increase, he said there is still a shortage of spare parts, which are mainly imported.

“Production by car-makers shot up, but output by parts suppliers still falls short of demand,” he said.

Although the capacity of parts manufacturers has increased in the last few years, it has failed to keep up with growth in the production of vehicles, he added.

Above and beyond the performance of specific industries, Yoel argued that it was necessary to look all the way back to the 1960s to compare the current growth of manufactured products, productivity and industrial employment.

He said progress has been made in terms of organisation, quality, and links with academia and with public institutions.

Argentina has benefited from the current high prices of natural resource-intensive goods, but “no economy can develop without industry,” he said.

For that reason, Yoel concurs with those who warn that if industry – which generates quality jobs – is not developed in Argentina, 10 million of the country’s 40 million people “will be superfluous”.

With respect to the possibilities of competing with industrial goods in the global market, Yoel was optimistic – as long, he said, as the goods are knowledge-intensive. As an example, he cited Martín Churba, a clothing designer who exports exclusive garments to Japan.

Economist Fernando Porta at the National University of Quilmes said industry was undergoing a revival and overall growth, while exports are on the rise, the domestic market is strong, and new jobs are being created.

But he was cautious with regard to the evolution of that trend. “The recovery process does not seem to me to form part of a deeper structural change,” Porta, who was responsible for the chapter on the pharmaceutical industry in the ECLAC report, told IPS.

He said there was still a large technological gap between Argentina and industries in developed countries, and even in some emerging economies. He also said there were “islands of productivity” in industry, with most sectors “showing lower levels of activity”.

“More development is needed across the board – greater homogeneity,” Porta recommended.

What is needed, he said, more than production and trade targets like the ones set by the Strategic Plan, is “an overall development strategy” that addresses the problems of each sector in particular.

The ECLAC book makes this point. In software, for example, an area where Argentina has made great strides, a shortage of skilled human resources is a limiting factor. Around 50 percent of demand is unmet. The state is fomenting development of the sector by offering scholarships, but growth has been slow.

Porta said Argentina has a strong pharmaceutical industry, although it is focused on production rather than research and development of medicines.

“R&D and the development of the active ingredients and their combination for obtaining therapeutic effects continue to be concentrated outside of the country,” he lamented.

This means that, although Argentina produces and exports more and more medication, it continues to depend on the import of medicines, and even has a significant trade deficit – similar to the challenges faced in the automotive industry.

Students at a post-film discussion on human rights. Credit: Universidad Nacional de Avellaneda

By Marcela Valente
Jul 22 2013 (IPS)

Nine of the 47 tuition-free public universities in Argentina were created in the last decade, with the aim of improving access to higher education in low-income areas. But despite the expansion and strategies to provide support for students, the drop-out rate has proven difficult to combat.

One result of this policy of inclusiveness is that “80 percent of new students (in the new universities) are the first generation in their family to attend university,” Martín Gill, secretary of university policies at the Education Ministry, told IPS.

Five of the new universities are located in Avellaneda, José C. Paz, Merlo, Moreno and Florencio Varela, which are among the most populous districts with the highest number of working-class households and the lowest incomes in the poor suburbs surrounding Buenos Aires.

The other four founded in the last 10 years, during the centre-left administrations of the late Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007) and his wife and successor President Cristina Fernández, are in the provinces of Chaco (northeast), Río Negro (south), San Luis (west-central) and Tierra del Fuego (far south), where previously there had been no public universities.

“University education is a right and the state must guarantee it,” said Gill.

The government is offering more living expenses scholarships to complement this policy, Gill said. “Although our public universities are free, for too long only better-off students who lived close by could benefit,” he said.

The total number of state scholarships for students from low-income families increased from 2,000 in 2003 to 47,000 in 2013, and half of them currently go to students who have chosen one of 200 scientific and technological degrees prioritised by Argentina’s development programme.

Proximity and quality

Gill said the new universities on the outskirts of Buenos Aires “are small, flexible units” that have a strong local identity while maintaining high standards of educational quality.

He mentioned, for example, the Biotechnology Centre at San Martín National University, “the largest of its kind in Latin America;” the petroleum engineering programme at the new Arturo Jauretche National University in Florencio Varela; and the economics department established at the Moreno National University.

He also highlighted research work at Quilmes National University, created before 2003 but part of the educational expansion plan. Scientists there, working with researchers at other schools in Argentina and in Cuba, have developed a therapeutic vaccine for lung cancer, which will be available from this July to treat patients in addition to radiotherapy and chemotherapy.

Gill said that when the policy was launched to open public universities in the poor suburbs known as the “Conurbano”, the idea was to decentralise the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), founded in the capital city in 1821.

While UBA has maintained its enrolment of over 300,000 students because of its high national and international prestige, the new universities and campuses on the outskirts of the city enrolled 67,000 young people this year. “It’s a policy that generates pronounced upward social mobility,” Gill said.

According to the Education Ministry, student enrolment at the country’s universities rose 28 percent in the last 10 years, while the number of students graduating climbed 68 percent. Public spending on higher education increased from 0.5 to 1.02 percent of GDP in the same period, and between 2001 and 2010, while the population grew 10 percent, the number of people with higher education rose by 54 percent.

This South American country of more than 40 million people devotes 6.5 percent of GDP to education, the highest proportion alongside Brazil in Latin America after Cuba, which spends over 12 percent of GDP on education, according to data from 2010 published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

Drop-out rate, a tough nut to crack

Jorge Calzoni, an engineer who is president of Avellaneda National University, told IPS that over 6,000 students have enrolled since the university was created in 2009, including some 300 foreigners.

The university offers two-year programmes, vocational-technical studies, bachelor’s degrees and graduate studies in 25 different subject areas. “We were not created to compete with the large universities, but to complement them,” Calzoni said.

As a result, instead of offering medical studies, which are taught at nearby universities, Avellaneda National University offers vocational studies and undergraduate degrees in nursing, for instance. It also has courses in tourism, sports and recreation, computer engineering and design, among others.

But Calzoni said drop-out rates remained high, in spite of the three catch-up seminars taught to new students “to bring them up to an acceptable level to prevent failure in the first year.” Students are also given support by tutors and teaching assistants.

“Even so, 47 percent drop out,” he said. “Half of the students who enrol do not come back for the second semester.” He said, however, that some of them change subjects or universities, while others return later.

Avellaneda University’s entrance course includes a survey which found that 84 percent of new students are from families where the parents did not attend university – in other words, they are the first generation to attain higher education.

Calzoni said the new university was located in an area with unmet demand, as shown by the age of the students. The first year it opened, the average age was 34.

“These students had not been able to access higher education previously, and now they saw an opportunity, perhaps because of location.” The average age declined gradually to 28, and now to 24, he said.

Gill also emphasised that the policy of inclusion allowed the hearing impaired and other people with disabilities to become students, along with large numbers of young people from other Latin American countries.

“They come from Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru,” he said. “Argentina has a model of higher education with unparalleled access.

“Eighty percent of university students in the country are at public universities,” said Gill.

But he noted that there are also 49 private universities around the country, which offer a great variety of courses.

Critics of GM crops are opposed to monoculture in Argentina. Credit: Bigstock

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Jul 11 2013 (IPS)

The debate over the reform of Argentina’s seed law has pitted transnational corporations that make transgenic seeds against social and rural organisations and academics opposed to the expansion of monoculture in defence of biodiversity and food security.

Over a year ago, the agriculture ministry said it would present a bill to overhaul a 1973 law on seeds that was modified several times to accommodate the expansion of monoculture and genetically modified seeds since the 1990s. GM soy is now Argentina’s chief export.

But the ministry has not yet introduced a bill, although it has two drafts. Argentina’s seeds association, which represents biotech companies, supports the ministry’s efforts to draw up a new law.

However, the proposed reform has drawn criticism from those who see it as an attempt to restrict farmers from saving or selling their own seeds for further planting.

The companies argue that the world requires higher crop yields per hectare to meet the growing demand for food. They also say a law to regulate and control the market for seeds would guarantee the recovery of the investment made in research and development of GM seeds.

But those opposed to the expansion of GM crops say they undermine biodiversity, increase agriculture’s vulnerability to climate change, and threaten the survival of rural families, who carry out the important task of selecting and storing the best seeds for replanting.

In Argentina, the world’s third-largest producer of soy, around 98 percent of the crop is Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soy, which is resistant to the company’s own glyphosate herbicide.

In addition, 80 percent of the maize grown in Argentina is transgenic.

The U.S. biotech giant plans to build a new plant to produce GM maize seed in the central Argentine province of Córdoba in 2014, which will produce 60,000 tons of seed a year.

The idea, the company says on its web site, is to contribute to the goal of doubling food production by 2050. But alongside that pledge, Monsanto plans to step up control over the seeds it produces.

Carlos Carballo, professor of food sovereignty in the Agronomy Faculty of the University of Buenos Aires, said the expansion of GM seeds threatens the diversity of native seeds that are adapted to the soil and climate conditions of each region.

“Seeds aren’t merchandise; they are part of humanity’s heritage,” Carballo told IPS.

The Argentine government’s plan for bolstering food production foresees the continued expansion of GM soy and corn monoculture, which will lead to “a mass expulsion of small farmers” from the countryside, he said.

Land conflicts are already a reality in Argentina. A study by the agriculture ministry and the National University of San Martín reported in 2012 that there were 830 disputes involving 60,000 families, mainly subsistence farmers.

The number of conflicts increased as the agricultural frontier expanded, led by GM crops. The problem is that many poor families do not have legal title to their land, even though it may have been in the family for generations.

Companies force farmers to sign contracts

Carballo pointed out that in 2012, Monsanto announced that it would not sell any more seeds to producers who had not signed contracts allowing the firm to oversee their use.

Just a few months after that announcement, Monsanto reported that between 70 and 80 percent of soy producers had signed the contract.

Under the agreement, producers not only pay royalties for planting the seeds but also promise not to save Roundup Ready seeds to replant, under threat of legal action.

Monsanto, the biggest producer of GM crops in Argentina, was largely behind the expansion of transgenic soy in the 1990s, with its initial strategy of not insisting on the payment of royalties, agronomist Javier Souza, Latin America regional coordinator of the Pesticide Action Network, told IPS.

“That allowed it to expand to all of the countries of the Southern Cone” of Latin America, said the academic. Monsanto is now responsible for 47 percent of the soy and 28 percent of the maize sold worldwide, according to the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA).

The strategy now is to force farmers to sign the contracts. “The producers have no choice, nor can they reuse the seeds,” Souza said.

GM crops threaten native seeds

He also said that in the northern province of Salta, the use of GM soy is spreading in small rural communities, threatening the survival of native seeds.

“We need a law that promotes respect for the production methods of communities that preserve, improve, breed and trade seeds,” he said.

The movement opposed to GM seeds suggests that Argentina could follow the model of the seed laws of Brazil or Bolivia, where GM crops are allowed but native seeds are protected and their use is promoted.

Carballo said that with support from government or from international NGOs, in Bolivia, Colombia, Paraguay and Peru there are “seed guardians” who select and protect seeds in seed banks that are open to the public.

Argentina also has local programmes for seed protection, like the one that has been operating for two decades in the northeastern province of Misiones.

Through the native seeds programme, the provincial and national governments provide technical support and financing for the selection, preservation and breeding of seed varieties.

“High quality seeds are produced there, which the state later purchases and distributes, because maize is the basis of production of proteins for small rural economies that grow barnyard fowl and hogs,” Carballo said.

“This model foments rural employment and improves the quality of food,” he added.

He said the case of Misiones shows that there are low-cost alternatives for preserving native seeds…and for doing so within a legal framework.

Irrigated fields in Argentina. Credit:Patrick Burnett/IPS

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Jul 1 2013 (IPS)

With its abundant natural resources, productive capacity and rising investment, Latin America looks set to become of the main suppliers to meet the growing, diverse and increasingly sophisticated global demand for food.

The challenge is to seize the opportunity, without neglecting the needs of a region where there are still 66 million indigents – 11.4 percent of the population – according to the latest figures from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

Although the international market continues to face difficulties posed by price volatility, speculation and competition for land by biofuels, experts who spoke to IPS were convinced that the region could successfully overcome the challenges.

Rice, grains, oilseeds, fruit, dairy products, meat, cooking oil, wine – it is all produced and exported in large volumes by Latin America, especially in the southern part of the continent, overcoming drought, flooding and other climate change-related meteorological events.

Gino Buzzetti, Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) representative in Argentina, told IPS that for now there is no global food crisis, like the one in 2007-2008.

But, he said, there is “concern about the medium term” because not only is the population growing, but incomes are rising and demand is becoming more sophisticated. “It’s no longer just about producing rice; we’ll have to produce more meat, which requires greater investment,” he said.

“The potential land for meeting the growing demand is in the temperate tropics, but Africa has neither the development nor the technology, which Latin America, on the other hand, does have, especially in the Southern Cone,” he said.

Buzzetti pointed out that Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay produce one billion tons a year of grains on 72 million hectares, which represents 10 percent of the world’s agricultural land.

These countries account for 47 percent of the world’s soy production and 28 percent of maize exports, for example.

The region is also a leading global producer of meat: 21 percent of the world’s beef and 17 percent of chicken are produced by these Southern Cone countries, and the area’s meat exports represent a full one-third of global meat exports, the IICA official said.

And whereas Argentina was the undisputed regional leader in beef production a few decades ago, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay now surpass this country in volume of production.

According to agricultural engineer Fernando Vilella, misguided policies like export controls aimed at lowering domestic prices led to a drastic reduction in Argentina’s cattle herd in recent years, while chicken production grew and the soy frontier expanded.

But with greater investment and a shift to more feed lots, beef production could rise again, said Vilella, head of the agribusiness and food department in the University of Buenos Aires engineering department.

In fact, it has already begun to recover, he noted. He said Argentina should follow the example of neighbouring Uruguay, which regulates domestic prices of certain cuts of beef for the internal market while exporting the rest at international prices.

With respect to the outlook for the future, Vilella told IPS that by 2030, Asia could be producing 75 to 82 percent of its own food, sub-Saharan Africa only 15 percent, and North Africa and the Middle East 85 percent.

“The remaining demand will have to be met by South America, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Ukraine, which will have to feed a market of some three billion people,” he said.

“The role of Argentina and Brazil will be very important,” he said. The biggest challenge will be to boost productivity per hectare, because there is very little room for expansion of the world’s arable land, the expert said.

Vilella said production by direct seeding or zero tillage, which is widely used in soy cultivation in Argentina, is key, because is it the most efficient method, “as long as it is done on the best land” to avoid environmental deterioration.

With respect to competition from biofuels, Buzzetti said conflict occurs when food crops are diverted to the energy market, like what is happening in the United States with maize used to produce ethanol.

“Production has to shift towards second-generation biofuels, which use non-food biomass,” he said.

But besides the practical challenges, Buzzetti said the ethical problem of hunger in a world where more than enough food is produced has to be discussed, and measures of international consensus are needed to address the issue.

“At Rio+20 (2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development), the need to move towards an economic model that ensures better distribution of income was discussed, and the issue was taken up again at the G20 summit (of industrialised and emerging powers) and in World Bank appeals,” he said.

“We have to come up with a capitalist development model that provides for better distribution of income and food, to make the global system more sustainable and balanced,” he said.

To achieve this, there are recommendations that focus on reducing volatility of prices, which have been on the rise in recent years, and to curb financial speculation in food markets – but these processes take time, he said.

The sources consulted concurred that it is inconceivable that there are countries in the region where hunger is still a problem. Some, like Mexico and countries in Central America and the Caribbean, depend on food imports.

“Between 1999 and 2009, the number of net food importer countries in the region grew from 11 to 16,” Antonio Hill, a Colombian expert in agriculture and climate change with Oxfam, told IPS.

Hill said Latin America has a greater responsibility as a food producer because while it must increase productivity, at the same time it must “reduce levels of inequality, food insecurity and the ecological footprint.”

The most sensible thing “would be to increase productivity, expanding support for family agriculture, especially for rural women, to ensure greater availability of food for the poor,” he said.

The native people of Argentina are achieving unprecedented visibility for their demands. However, they are still faced with hurdles to more rapid progress towards their claims.

This week Félix Díaz, leader of the Qom, one of the 160 indigenous communities in the northeastern province of Formosa, was received by Pope Francis at the Vatican where he explained to the pontiff the demands made by his community, composed of 450 families.

The meeting was just one example of the prominence being achieved by native people in this country, where they have traditionally been the object of discrimination. In the past, governments have at best met their demands with paternalism or a handout mentality, but things are changing.

Díaz first came to public notice as a result of a protest carried out by his community in Formosa in 2010. A police clampdown on the protest left one person dead.

Now the demands have a place on the agenda of the national state and the provinces. The Supreme Court receives indigenous leaders to settle land conflicts and the media provide coverage on their historical issues and current problems.

“In 2010, at the bicentennial (of Argentina’s independence), we started to have serious talks with the state. Because 200 years had gone by without an in-depth policy for indigenous peoples and we did not just want a ceremony, we wanted something more significant,” Fidel Colipán, a Mapuche leader, told IPS.

Colipán highlighted the national law enacted in 2006 that suspended evictions of communities from their ancestral homelands. The law laid down a deadline for completing a survey of indigenous lands in order to draw up a detailed map.

But enforcing this law, which has already had to extend the deadline, is turning out to be controversial not only due to the private interests of companies that exploit natural resources in these territories, but also to resistance from the provincial governments.

The most recent census, taken in 2010, indicates that nearly one million people in this country of 41 million consider themselves to be of native descent. The number has increased since the 2004 census, when about 640,000 people claimed indigenous identity.

The latest constitutional reform in 1994 recognised the “pre-existence” of native peoples in the national territory and acknowledged their right to community ownership of land and bilingual education.

In recent years, conflicts have increased in number and visibility. Pushed off their land by the expansion of soy monoculture, mining, fossil fuel exploitation and deforestation, indigenous peoples have raised their voices in protest.

The government’s indigenous affairs institute, INAI, maintains that the 1994 constitution recognised the pre-existence of the indigenous peoples but also gave ownership of natural resources to the provincial authorities, which makes enforcement of territorial policies problematic.

This conspires against conflict resolution, said INAI president Daniel Fernández. However the institute says more progress is being made than ever before on surveying and demarcating indigenous territories.

According to INAI estimates, out of the 12 million hectares claimed as indigenous lands, equivalent to approximately 10 percent of the national territory, 4.5 million hectares have already been recognised and titled.

Conflicts flare up when valuable natural resources are at stake, or when the lands claimed by indigenous groups are in private hands. An estimated 60 percent of the land claimed by native communities is owned by the state and 40 percent by the private sector.

In order to comply with recognition of native peoples’ lands, state authorities in some cases have to expropriate land from private owners.

“In Neuquén, in the south of the country, INAI signed a contract for the survey of indigenous territories and even deposited the funds to pay for it, but the problem is the lack of political will on the part of the provincial government,” said Calipán. “We are very suspicious of those who have always persecuted us.”

In a 2012 report, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, James Anaya, highlighted that Argentina “has taken important steps” toward the recognition of native people’s rights, but also warned that “greater efforts” were needed.

The report on the situation of indigenous peoples in Argentina says that despite legal advances, “a significant gap remains between the established regulatory framework on indigenous issues and its actual implementation.” Anaya wrote his report after visiting several communities in 2011.

But not all indigenous leaders felt represented by this approach. “Anaya, like many who come here from the global North, proposes spectacular solutions that turn out to be very difficult to apply,” said Colipán.

The greater visibility of the demands of native peoples is also a result of the work of a number of human rights organisations.

Díaz, the leader of the Qom, visited the new pope, who is from Argentina, together with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel.

Most of the civil society organisations created in Argentina to fight human rights violations perpetrated by the 1976-1983 dictatorship have recently turned to supporting the demands of native minorities and their struggles for access to land.

In an interview with IPS, Paola García Rey, the coordinator of human rights promotion and protection for the Argentine chapter of Amnesty International, said “we cannot be blind to the progress that has been made,” but there are many pending challenges.

“Any assessment of the indigenous scenario today has to be heterogeneous. No province has rigorously fulfilled the law on land surveys, but some have made progress with a good level of participation, for example Jujuy and Salta,” in the northwest of the country, she said.

García Rey said there has been progress in signing contracts between INAI and the provincial governments for carrying out land surveys, “but later they are blocked,” and in some cases evictions of indigenous communities from their ancestral lands have continued.

She said the idiosyncrasies of indigenous demands have to be understood. On the land question, the logic followed by native peoples is not that of private property but of community ownership. But to have that right, the law requires them to register as an association, which is contrary to their customs.

The Plurinational Indigenous Council (CPI), which represents more than 30 native groups in Argentina, expressed concern about a civil code reform under way which would recognise their right to communal land, but based on private property criteria.

In the view of INAI’s Fernández, far from restricting indigenous rights, the new civil code bill seeks to make them operational and compulsory in order to build up case law and precedents.

The latest railway tragedy in the Argentine capital, the third in less than two years on the same commuter line, brought to light the severe limitations of a hybrid public-private system, despite the changes underway.

Thursday’s collision, which killed three people and injured over 300, occurred when a commuter train on the suburban Sarmiento line crashed into a train that had stopped near the station in Castelar, on the west side of the city of Buenos Aires.

Interior and Transport Minister Florencio Randazzo said the packed train had undergone repairs and had a new brake system. He suggested that the conductor, who was detained pending investigation, may have been speeding.

Last year, the centre-left government of Cristina Fernández launched a plan for investment and greater state involvement in the metropolitan railway network, after two serious accidents on the Sarmiento line, which links the centre of Buenos Aires with the western suburbs, and was previously run autonomously by a private firm.

The first accident happened in September 2011, when a bus crossed the tracks in front of an oncoming train. The barriers were down but the driver presumably thought they were stuck, as they often were. The train, which crashed into the bus, was derailed and was hit by a train approaching from the other direction. The accident left 11 dead and 212 injured.

And in February 2012, a commuter train slammed into a retaining wall at a railway terminus in the Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Once, killing 51 people and leaving over 700 injured.

After that tragedy, the Fernández administration withdrew the concession from the Cometrans consortium, and as an emergency measure created a new management unit with two private operators that were already running the other suburban lines.

The new unit runs the Sarmiento line under supervision and orders from the state, which now has greater decision-making authority and control and can levy fines that are automatically discounted from the private companies in case of infractions or breach of contract.

The centre-right government of Carlos Menem (1989-1999) privatised Argentina’s railways in the early 1990s, awarding the concessions to private companies. The contracts were renegotiated over and over again, while the quality of the railway services took a nosedive due to a lack of investment, maintenance and upgrading.

Nevertheless, the state coffers continue to shell out an average of 3.8 billion dollars a year in subsidies to keep fares down; 25 percent of that total goes to the six commuter lines serving the suburbs of Buenos Aires.

“There have been changes recently. Some things have improved. But Randazzo isn’t a magician, he’s a minister,” Norberto Rosendo, the president of the Comisión Nacional Salvemos al Tren (Save the Train National Commission), told IPS.

Rosendo was an engineer for Ferrocarriles Argentinos, the state-run company that ran the railways up to the 1990s.

“Improvements have been delayed for more than 20 years, since the railways were privatised and systematic maintenance stopped being carried out. And the outsourcing of repairs doesn’t work,” he said.

Rosendo was referring to the system under which the state hands over the parts to be repaired to Emprendimientos Ferroviarios SA, of Cometrans, which was removed as operator of the Sarmiento and Mitre lines after the February 2012 catastrophe in Once.

The owners of Cometrans and roughly two dozen former government officials are facing charges of criminal negligence and fraudulent administration in relation to the accident.

According to Rosendo, the government could have expropriated the Emprendimientos Ferroviarios SA repair workshop, which employs some 400 workers.

Gradually moving back into state hands

“Why isn’t a state-run company directly set up?” he complained. “I believe it’s because it would reduce the opportunities for corruption, since a state-owned firm has to be held accountable, but third parties are more difficult to control.”

The expert clarified that he was not making an accusation against the minister, who he had no reason to believe was part of a network of corruption, but was criticising the system itself.

“They should move towards total nationalisation, with participation by workers and users,” he recommended. “That is the kind of company that is needed, one that is held to account, that has its own repair shops, that doesn’t have to pay others to fix things or commission new carriages from China.”

Randazzo had announced a contract with Chinese companies for the production of carriages that would mean the complete renovation of the trains on the Sarmiento and Mitre lines in 2014.

The trains that are now running are 50 years old and are subject to continuous repairs. “They have to be thrown out as junk,” Rosendo said.

Users of the system also have complaints and suggestions. VIAS (Verificación Informativa y Auditoría Social) is a group of people who use the railway system in Argentina and carry out surveys and post photos to document complaints on Facebook.

In recent months, improvements have been reported, such as the reopening of bathrooms in train stations, more flagmen, and different safety measures.

But trains are still delayed, there are still doors that don’t close, and there are even risks of electrocution.

Carlos de Luca is one of the activists with the Frente de Usuarios Desesperados del Sarmiento, a movement of users of the Sarmiento line that in the years before the accidents was collecting signatures and protesting the often appalling conditions in the trains.

Although the movement’s complaints did not help prevent the tragedies, they did serve as information and evidence in the lawsuit over the February 2012 catastrophe, he told IPS.

“My wife was pregnant, and I used to go meet her at the station because she was scared. One day she fell. Incredible things happened in Sarmiento, like people who would return home barefoot” because they had lost their shoes in the daily crush.

“Today we are in anguish over this new accident, but I believe that something is changing since the state took over responsibility,” he said.

“The thing is, the changes can’t be seen overnight, as you would like, but we see there is a will to improve things,” he said. “What we have always been asking is for the state to take charge.”

Inmates of Villa Devoto prison at the founding meeting of SUTPLA, the prisoners' union, in July 2012. Credit: CTA

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Jun 7 2013 (IPS)

The first prisoners’ union in Argentina, a country with a strong organised labour tradition, fights for the rights of inmates.

“No one had never fought before for anything like this in here,” 33-year-old inmate Gustavo Moreno, serving a 22-year sentence in the Complejo Penitenciario Federal in Buenos Aires, better known as the Villa Devoto prison, told IPS.

Moreno, who has been in prison for three years, works on the cleaning detail. He is also the coordinator of the foundation course at the university education centre there, and is studying Business Administration.

Moreno is the social action secretary for the new prisoners’ union, the Sindicato Único de Trabajadores Privados de la Libertad Ambulatoria (SUTPLA), created in July 2012, which is recognised under an agreement with the Federal Penitentiary Service (SPF).

SUTPLA belongs to the centre-left Central de Trabajadores de la Argentina (CTA) trade union federation, whose leaders said the prisoners’ union is being closely watched by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) as an example that could be followed in other countries.

“We have 700 male and 100 female members, and the basic idea is to defend the rights of people who are in a defenceless and vulnerable state,” Rodrigo Díaz, the secretary-general of SUTPLA, who has been out of prison on early release since April, told IPS.

At present they are seeking legal union status with the help of CTA lawyers. Once this is achieved, they will have to begin collecting union dues, but this is not an important concern for the organisation.

The growing strength of the union fills Díaz with enthusiasm. He has been in prison a number of times – “a total of 12 years in different prisons,” he said. He started studying law behind bars and is now continuing his studies on the outside. He has only one year to go to graduate.

Through his studies and the time he spent in different prison facilities, he has learned about the labour rights of inmates, which are not always respected. “The prison service does not see it as a question of rights but of benefits,” he said.

At present 64 percent of the nearly 10,000 prisoners in the SPF are working. Another 49,000 prisoners are inmates in facilities dependent on provincial governments, where the proportion of inmates doing remunerated work varies.

Argentina’s prison law, which was reformed in 2012, stipulates that prisoners have the right to work and study, as part of their rehabilitation. It also states that their work “must be remunerated.”

The Justice Ministry established that all prisoners who worked would receive the national minimum wage, equivalent to 553 dollars a month, regardless of their actual working hours.

But in practice, most working inmates are paid much less, because the SPF makes a number of controversial deductions. “Someone is keeping the difference, very probably ENCOPE,” Díaz complained.

ENCOPE (Ente de Cooperación Técnica y Financiera del Servicio Penitenciario), an agency for technical and financial cooperation with the prison service, “does not fulfil the functions for which it was created…and actually oversees itself,” the trade unionist said.

Víctor Hortel, the head of SPF, has admitted that in the past there were irregularities in the deductions that were made, which were supposed to be credited to a reserve fund for prisoners when they were released. But he denied that these practices continued, now that anti-corruption bodies are exerting greater control.

With the help of CTA lawyers, the new union lodged various appeals against deductions from imprisoned workers’ pay, except for contributions toward their future pensions.

This year, the fight against deductions and other labour demands led to the first strike by SUTPLA workers, lasting 72 hours.

The union is also demanding that proper clothing and footwear be issued to workers for safety and health reasons, especially when they handle waste or other contaminating materials.

Díaz has met with social security authorities to negotiate payment of six months unemployment benefit for newly released prisoners, just like any other person dismissed from a job.

He himself received wages until April for his work in the Villa Devoto prison, but was left without an income as soon as he was freed, six months before completing his full sentence.

He said the worst situations were found in prisons run by the provincial governments. “In Unit No. 1 in Olmos (in the province of Buenos Aires), inmates are ‘paid’ with just two telephone cards a month,” he said.

In some prisons, inmates work in exchange for benefits such as visitors’ permits on weekdays. But work is not seen as part of rehabilitation, or a right, or something that should be remunerated, Díaz said.

“The idea is not instilled in prisoners that they can learn a trade through working, and also help their families. That is why the recidivism rate is so high,” he said.

Against this backdrop, SUTPLA wants to strengthen trade union activity in the Villa Devoto prison, where the organisation was founded, and then extend the same rights to other men’s and women’s prisons.

The work done in prisons is varied and includes agricultural production – vegetable gardens, nurseries, growing fodder, dairy production – and industrial workshops – printing, sportswear, bicycles, bags and furniture.

Maintenance work is another option, like the cleaning work done by Moreno, the social action secretary of SUTPLA, for which his net monthly income is 385 dollars.

“I’m working for my kids,” he said. He has four children, aged 13, 11, seven and one. “What I do for myself is study. That will give me a tool when I get out,” said Moreno, who is waiting to hear whether his sentence has been reduced.

“Studying is my way of detaching myself from life inside,” he said. He has been in prison before, and managed to finish his secondary schooling. “I had no opportunity of doing that on the outside,” he said.

Poverty no longer explains the high secondary school dropout rate in Argentina, one of the richest countries in Latin America.

Experts say a growing number of adolescents express a lack of interest in education, a phenomenon that can be found across the region.

A recent survey of 13-15 year olds in eight Latin American countries, carried out by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), found that “lack of interest” was the top reason youngsters had left school.

According to Graduate XXI, an IDB initiative to prevent high school dropout in Latin America, nearly one out of every two students in Latin America does not finish secondary school.

Argentina’s Education Ministry has the goal of guaranteeing universal access to and completion of secondary education. Enrolment rose eight percent between the 2001 and 2010 censuses.

But school absenteeism and dropout are still a big challenge.

According to the authorities, 89 percent of adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 are in high school. But the latest statistics show that many of them will not graduate on time.

However, two weeks after requesting precise official figures on school dropout rates, IPS had still not received a response.

A study published this year by the Ibero American Science and Technology Education Consortium (ISTEC) says economic difficulties have been replaced by a lack of interest as the main reason that teenagers are dropping out of school.

The report notes that 30 percent of youngsters who leave secondary school come from the middle and upper classes.

The issue was studied in 18 countries of the region by the Information System on Educational Trends in Latin America (SITEAL), developed by ISTEC and the International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP). The study was coordinated by Argentine experts Lilia Toranzos and Norberto López.

An extract on six countries, including Argentina, was later published.

“The statistics surprised us, because we were used to the traditional arguments explaining school desertion as being related to socioeconomic causes, access to the labour market, or teenage pregnancy. This means we have to rethink education,” Toranzos told IPS.

“In the past, the reasons kids dropped out were not linked to what school offered, but to the families themselves,” she said. But the new reasons mentioned in surveys indicate that schools are not catering properly to youngsters, she adding.

Toranzos said the growing access by adolescents to secondary education in the last few decades led to a much more heterogeneous student body than in the past, which poses new challenges for teachers. “The same old formulas are still followed, even when they don’t work,” she said.

“Forty years ago, the population that made it to secondary school was homogeneous and similar to the model of the urban middle-class student for whom the system was designed,” she said. “Now there is greater diversity, different family backgrounds and different interests, and schools continue to think in terms of a kind of student who is largely a thing of the past.”

In the face of the new diversity, many teachers believe the correct response is to “keep the bar high, because that way they can maintain the prestige of the school or of the teachers themselves. They don’t think that, if half of the students are failing, the strategy must not be working,” Toranzos said.

The director of the Fundación Cimientos, Agustina Cavanagh, concurred. The organisation she runs works with teenagers from poor families, providing support of different kinds, including scholarships, to students who would end up dropping out otherwise.

“They enroll, yes, but they have a hard time staying in school,” she told IPS. “They reach secondary school already behind in skills, and the challenge is just too big. They feel they are on their own, fail and repeat subjects, get frustrated, and start to skip class. They don’t see any reason to stay in school.

“In 1950, only 10 percent of adolescents enrolled in secondary school, compared to 90 or 95 percent today,” Cavanagh said. “But that huge leap was not accompanied by teaching approaches that sufficiently motivate students, which is why a lot of kids feel they can achieve more outside the classroom than in it.

“The contents of the curriculum do not really work to motivate them. They say they want to learn, but they describe school as a place that’s cold, unwelcoming, with broken glass in the windows. The thing is, although a great effort is made, there are schools with very little funding, which are attended by the kids with the greatest needs.”

The experts in Cimientos worked with young people to investigate what motivated them, and what hurdles they faced along the way. “For them, participation is a very important factor, but they say the teacher shouldn’t expect students to always follow the rule of raising their hands, because that complicates matters,” Cavanagh said.

Early parenthood is still a major reason that youngsters drop out of school. In the SITEAL study, the issue is included in the category of “domestic” problems, because teenagers also drop out of school to do housework and take care of younger siblings or elderly members of the family.

These factors account for 10 percent of school dropouts in the countries studied by SITEAL. And 97 percent of those who cite these reasons are female.

By contrast, 20 percent of youngsters leave school to work, and of that group, 70 percent are male.

But 31 percent, cutting across the entire socioeconomic spectrum, said they dropped out because of a lack of motivation or interest. That in fact was the number one reason cited.

Cavanagh said teachers continue to expect a different kind of student than the ones who show up in their classrooms. “It’s hard for them to understand that the educational backgrounds in the students’ homes vary greatly, that many come from poor families whose parents did not go to secondary school and whose families have no notion of what it’s like.”

In 2009, the centre-left government of Cristina Fernández introduced the Universal Child Allowance, a cash transfer to parents who are unemployed or work in the informal sector of the economy or as domestics, pregnant women, and disabled people of any age.

The allowance is 340 pesos (62 dollars) per month per child under 18, to be raised to
460 pesos (88 dollars) in June, and is conditional on school attendance and keeping up-to-date on vaccines and medical checkups. It is received by the families of more than 3.3 million children and adolescents in this country of 41 million people.

Another strong incentive for youngsters to stay in school came in 2010, when the Programa Conectar Igualdad (Connect Equality Programme) was launched.

So far, the programme has distributed 2.5 million laptops to public secondary school students around the country. The youngsters keep the laptops if they graduate, but have to give them back if they drop out.

But even with these measures, school dropout rates remain high.

The challenge, the experts say, is to make school more attractive and interesting, so classes are no longer seen as irrelevant, boring and pointless. “The question of incomes is no longer sufficient to explain this,” Cavanagh underscored.

President Cristina Fernández expanded anti-poverty measures after succeeding her husband Néstor Kirchner. Credit: Presidencia de Argentina

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, May 27 2013 (IPS)

In the 10 years since late president Néstor Kirchner, who was succeeded by his wife Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in 2007, first took office in Argentina, poverty has fallen, employment has climbed and educational coverage has expanded, although there is no agreement on the exact statistics.

Just how much poverty has been reduced is in dispute. But in any case the poverty level has gone down in the past decade of Kirchner governments, say experts and activists who talked to IPS.

“We are closer than ever to zero hunger, although there are still malnourished kids,” said the leader and founder of the Red Solidaria (Solidarity Network), Juan Carr.

Hunger, floods, extreme cold, epidemics, the need for an urgent transplant are some of the social problems addressed by the Red Solidaria, an NGO that has a network of volunteers around the country.

“Poverty makes people in Argentina feel indignant,” Carr said. “But this attitude is a new thing, since about 15 years ago. That wasn’t true before. Only the most progressive people were concerned about poverty. Today everyone is. But the way some people look at it is a little immature. Many get angry.”

In his interview with IPS, Carr was careful to steer clear of the heated dispute between spokespersons of the centre-left Fernández administration and the opposition on whether or not the poverty rate is going down. In his view, the statistics are neither as good nor as bad as the two sides would have people think.

The poverty rate in Argentina had soared to 54 percent in late 2001, when the severe economic crisis triggered massive street protests. A brutal police crackdown on the protests left dozens of demonstrators dead and injured, prompting then president Fernando de la Rúa to step down.

Kirchner, who died in October 2010 at the age of 60, became president on May 25, 2003 after a series of caretaker presidents, and since then the poverty rate has steadily fallen.

According to the latest figure released by the National Statistics and Census Institute (INDEC), from late 2012, 5.4 percent of Argentina’s 40 million people are poor.

But the opposition and some experts have called INDEC’s figures into question since the executive branch increased its involvement in the statistics body in 2007. They argue that INDEC’s numbers are based on an artificially low estimate of the cost of the basic food basket, which purportedly does not take into account the real inflation rate.

For example, studies presented by the private Catholic University of Argentina put the poverty rate at almost 27 percent.

Statistics on unemployment also vary. According to official figures, it plunged from 24 percent in 2002 to 16.3 percent in 2003, and to 7.9 percent today.

But these numbers are also questioned.

Carr said he believes the real poverty rate is “somewhere in the middle.”

“It doesn’t seem to affect 30 percent, but not just five percent either. I think a reasonable assumption would be that one out of five people in Argentina are still poor,” he said.

With respect to the fight against poverty, the activist mentioned “two glorious moments” in the last decade.

One was in 2003, when agriculture began to recover and the government had “very good” social policies. “Food started to really be produced on a large scale then, which led to a major reduction in the deaths of children under six from problems related to malnutrition,” he said.

The second was in 2009, when the Universal Child Allowance (AUH) was introduced by the Fernández administration. “At least 500,000 people were pulled out of extreme poverty in just a few months,” he said.

The AUH, adopted halfway through Fernández’s first term, is a cash transfer to parents who are unemployed or work in the informal sector of the economy. It was later expanded to the children of domestics, pregnant women, low-earning members of cooperatives, and disabled people of any age.

The allowance, which is received by 1.8 million families of more than 3.3 million children and adolescents, is conditional on school attendance and keeping up-to-date on vaccines and medical checkups.

The allowance is 340 pesos (65 dollars) per month per child under 18. But in June it will increase to 460 pesos (88 dollars).

The living conditions of middle-class families who had fallen into poverty also improved over the last decade. In some cases, in fact, their lives made a complete turnaround.

Guillermo Mesa, who is 46 today, had a good job driving his own taxi in the late 1990s. He became one of the victims of the 2001-2002 crisis. “I lost everything,” he told IPS. After he was left without a job, his marriage fell apart in just a few months.

“The wave of car theft began at that time,” he said. “I lost mine, and when the insurance money came in, it wasn’t enough for me to buy anything.”

He was referring to the devaluation of the Argentine peso in early 2002.

“For two months I couldn’t find any work. I did some odd jobs here and there. I got some work driving a ‘remis’ (hired car). But the whole situation broke up my marriage. I had a one-year-old daughter and a 12-year-old son,” he said.

In 2003, Mesa decided to complete secondary school. “After that, I started taking plumbing and electrical courses,” he said.

He took the classes at one of the Education Ministry’s vocational training centres, in Buenos Aires. “I eventually had a lot of work and even had to hire a few young guys.”

In 2008, the Central de Trabajadores de Argentina trade union opened skills training centres, and hired him as a teacher. “I took the class to become an instructor, and now I teach electrician classes to people over 16.”

He is happy because he is enrolled in the social security system and receives full labour benefits – paid vacation, annual bonus and medical insurance. He is now studying to become a librarian. “I’ll be done next year, and I want to get a certificate to teach math in high school,” he said.

Mesa has never been able to buy his own home. He never managed to buy another car, either. But he remarried, and his son is in the university. “It was hard, but I was lucky. Now it’s easier to find work, and if you study, that helps a lot,” he said.

Jorge Rafael Videla swears in as the head of the military junta on Mar. 24, 1976. Credit: Public Domain

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, May 17 2013 (IPS)

Thirty-seven years after leading the coup d’etat that ushered in the most brutal dictatorship in the history of Argentina, former army commander Jorge Rafael Videla died in a common prison Friday.

Convicted in several cases for crimes against humanity, the former dictator was found in his cell without a pulse, according to the medical report from the Federal Penitentiary Service. He was 87 years old.

Videla was serving several sentences in the Complejo Penitenciario Federal Número 2 in the city of Marcos Paz in the eastern province of Buenos Aires, in a section of the prison where he was held with dozens of other human rights violators from the 1976-1983 dictatorship.

“I never killed anyone,” Videla stated. In every conviction against him he was found to be the “intellectual author” of crimes against humanity. He himself admitted as much in the book “The Dictator” by journalists María Seoane and Vicente Muleiro. “There was no lack of control. I was above everyone,” he told the writers.

Human rights groups, the families of victims and observers of the fight against impunity for the de facto regime’s crimes said Videla’s death in a common prison was a powerful symbol, but did not represent the end of a cycle and was merely one more landmark in the process.

The executive director of Amnesty International in Argentina, Mariela Belski, told IPS that Videla “will be remembered for the (dictatorship’s) most brutal and appalling excesses.”

“But the most important thing here is that justice was done, Videla was convicted, and he died in prison,” she said, stressing that Argentina “took a major stride forward in bringing these crimes to trial, and became a model for the region and for the global South.”

But Belski warned that the death of the dictator “does not bring the process to a close. This is an ongoing process, which Argentina is spearheading, but which must continue in the country and in the region.”

Videla’s death in prison “is a very important symbolic development,” Víctor Abramovich, executive secretary of the Institute of Public Policies on Human Rights of South America’s Mercosur (Southern Common Market) trade bloc, told IPS.

“Ten years ago this was unthinkable. Today it is the result of a process of regional scope, a process that is moving forward at different speeds, under different laws, but is generating very interesting debates throughout Latin America,” said the representative of the bloc made up of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Abramovich, a former vice president of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, said the fact that the former dictator died in a common jail “reaffirms the principle of equality before the law.”

“This process, which is moving ahead at varying rates, is occurring in Chile, Brazil, Peru, Colombia and Uruguay, as well as Guatemala, where (former dictator José Efraín) Ríos Montt was sentenced to 80 years in prison (on May 10),” he said.

In Argentina, 422 human rights violators, mainly members of the military, have been tried since 1983. Of that total, 378 were convicted and 44 acquitted, according to the prosecution unit for the coordination and monitoring of cases involving human rights violations.

In the last two years, trials have picked up speed, thanks to measures such as the accumulation of cases committed in each torture centre. In 2012, 24 trials ended in 134 convictions and 17 acquittals.

As part of the fight against impunity, the organisation Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo has managed to identify more than 100 sons and daughters of political prisoners who had been kidnapped as children along with their parents or were born in captivity.

Some of those stolen children now hold public posts – as national legislators, city councillors or executive branch officials, like the secretary of human rights, Martín Fresneda.

In 1976, then army chief Videla led the junta made up of the commanders of the three military forces after the coup that overthrew the democratic government of Isabel Perón.

Under his leadership (1976-1981), thousands of people were kidnapped, tortured, killed and forcibly disappeared. Government records that are gradually being updated account for more than 11,000 victims of forced disappearance, while human rights organisations put the total number at 30,000.

When the regime collapsed in 1983, the former junta members were tried. In 1985, Videla was sentenced to life in prison for 66 murders, 306 kidnappings, 93 cases of torture and 26 cases of theft.

He spent five years in a military prison along with other officers, enjoying privileges that were denounced by the media and human rights groups. But in 1990 they were pardoned by then president Carlos Menem (1989-1999).

However, Videla was arrested again in 1998 in connection with the theft of children born to political prisoners – a crime he had never been convicted of and thus was never pardoned for.

But it was the declaration of the presidential pardon and the two late 1980s amnesty laws as unconstitutional that reactivated a number of human rights cases against him over the last decade. In 2010 he was handed a live sentence for crimes committed in the central province of Córdoba and in 2012 he was sentenced to 50 years for the theft of children.

He was also tried for crimes against humanity committed by the regime in the central province of Santa Fe and the northern province of Tucumán.

In the trials, Videla did not recognise the authority of the civilian courts to try him, and complained that he was a “political prisoner.”

He did so once again on Tuesday May 14, in another case related to Operation Condor, a coordinated plan among the military governments that ruled Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay in the 1970s and 1980s, aimed at tracking down, capturing, exchanging and eliminating left-wing opponents.

On his last appearance in court he looked unwell, with difficulty walking and a trembling voice.

But he never repented in public. On the contrary, he said he gave the orders for the crimes committed by his subordinates.

In his last statements to the press, to the Spanish magazine Cambio 16 in March, he urged young officers to rise up against the government of Cristina Fernández “in defence of the institutions of the republic.”

Argentina is one of the countries in Latin America with the highest levels of vaccination coverage. But experts are concerned about the growing campaign by vaccine critics against immunisation.

“Vaccines have saved as many lives as clean water. Risking not giving shots is like playing Russian roulette,” Dr. Carlota Russ, secretary of the Argentine Paediatric Society’s Committee on Infectious Diseases, told IPS.

Russ said that in industrialised countries, immunisation coverage is in decline as the culture of vaccination weakens, creating a risk of re-emergence of diseases that have already been controlled, like measles.

“Fortunately, in Argentina, the anti-vaccine movement is not strong,” she said.

Vaccines are obligatory in Argentina. Credit: Alviseni/CC BY 2.0

However, when a case of refusal to vaccinate reaches the courts, the story has a great impact in the media and produces a wave of uncertainty that reaches even clinics and doctors’ offices, she said.

Well-informed, well-educated parents with small children are drawn in by theories alleging adverse effects from the inoculation of viruses, bacteria or toxic substances.

In 2012, the case of a couple who refused to vaccinate their child reached the Supreme Court, which ordered that the mandatory state immunisation plan be administered, “by force” if necessary, “for the greater good of the child and of public health.”

In an interview with IPS, paediatrician Eduardo Yahbes, of the Argentine Homeopathic Medical Association, said the family “had a poor legal defence,” and endorsed their right to refuse to have their child immunised.

Yahbes is one of the health professionals who contribute to the web site “Libre Vacunación” (Vaccination Freedom), which says that the idea that immunisation is safe and effective, or that it is the only means of preventing diseases, is a myth.

“Vaccines are not effective; the idea that infectious diseases have disappeared thanks to vaccines is a fraud,” said the paediatrician, a practitioner of alternative medicine.

Yahbes quoted a number of research studies that purportedly show the adverse effects of vaccines, and blamed “the hegemony of the dominant medical system that violates people’s human rights” by forcing them to receive medical treatments they do not want.

In Argentina the mandatory vaccination schedule included four vaccines in 1970, and now includes 16. According to the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO), it is one of the most comprehensive protocols on the continent.

In addition to traditional vaccines like BCG (against tuberculosis) or the Sabin anti-polio vaccine, new ones, for example for preventing infection with human papilloma virus, which can cause cervical cancer, have been added in recent years.

Russ said vaccines are “essential to reduce the chances of contracting illnesses and their complications; they are mandatory because the burden of the illness justifies protection.”

She pointed to the re-emergence in Europe and the United States of cases of measles, while in Latin America there are only a few cases imported from other regions of the world.

“We are covered, but we must not lower our guard,” she said.

Russ acknowledged that “there are occasional adverse side effects, as with any medication. But they are so minimal that the use of vaccines is amply justified.”

She referred to the alleged link between autism and vaccines, reported by Yahbes in a 2011 article in the publication Homeopatía para Todos, of the Argentine Homeopathic Medical Association. Yahbes wrote that “vaccinations are regarded as a major factor in the development of this pathology (autism).”

Russ said the theory, which created a scare that was “disastrously harmful,” “was later shown to be untrue.” In 2010, the British scientific journal The Lancet, at the request of the General Medical Council (GMC) of the United Kingdom, retracted a paper by researcher Andrew Wakefield on the presumed link between the two, published in 1998.

Wakefield had postulated a link between the triple viral vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR), autism and gastrointestinal symptoms. After investigating, the GMC ruled that the scientist had acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly” in his research and banned him from practising medicine.

However, the rumours and scares proliferated, and won new converts in the field of alternative medicine. As a result, measles vaccination coverage in developed countries has fallen, leading to the re-emergence of diseases like measles and whooping cough.
In Argentina, the official schedule of vaccinations is legally binding and free of charge. Since 2009 immunisations have been a requirement for receiving the universal child allowance, a direct cash transfer to families with children.

The allowance is paid to families with parents who are unemployed or who work in the informal economy, with children under 18, or disabled dependants of any age, in exchange for regular school attendance, health checks and certified vaccinations.

Despite the enormous distance between the two countries, Argentina has become an increasingly frequent destination for migrants from the Dominican Republic, especially women, who are vulnerable to falling prey to sexual exploitation networks.

The immigration flow to Argentina from the Caribbean island nation is much smaller than the influx of Paraguayans, Bolivians, Peruvians and Uruguayans, who make up 80 percent of the foreign nationals who have come to this South American country since 2004.

But Dominicans stand out because of specific problems when it comes to insertion in the labour market.

Clarisa Rondó of the Association of Dominicans Living in Argentina tells IPS that the women come in search of better employment opportunities, but often fall into prostitution networks due to the difficulty in finding other work.

“Argentina is a country that takes us in, it makes us feel we are taking a step ahead,” she says. “It’s a big, generous country that offers possibilities.”

Rondó was 21 when she came here on her own in 1994. She has since married, had children, got divorced, and earned a teaching certificate in the arts.

“More women than men have always come, because men find it harder to break into the labour market,” she says. She clarifies that it is also difficult for women, but “they get involved in prostitution. Many of them are illiterate, they don’t find any other work, and they don’t have any alternative.”

The presence of Dominican women in Argentina becomes visible when the police raid places where prostitution is practiced, in Buenos Aires or in provinces like Córdoba, Misiones, La Pampa, Tierra del Fuego, Rio Negro or San Luis.

Although there are no official statistics, Rondó estimates that there are some 40,000 Dominicans living in this South American country of 40 million people. Most of them – some 15,000 – live in the capital.

Sociologist Lucía Nuñez Lodwick at the National University of San Martín explains to IPS that Dominicans, who traditionally migrated to the United States or Spain, began to come to Argentina in the mid-1990s.

Argentina’s rigid peg of the peso to the dollar in the 1990s drove the influx of immigrants from the rest of the region, who earned here in pesos and exchanged them for the same amount in dollars, to send back home as remittances, she points out.

That was one of the main reasons that Dominicans began to arrive, along with the common language – Spanish – and the demand in Argentina for people willing to do low-paid, low-skilled work – as domestics, nannies, caregivers for the elderly, hairdressers or restaurant workers, she explains.

According to a study carried out by the Ecumenical Services for the Support and Orientation of Migrants and Refugees (CAREF) and commissioned by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), thousands of Dominicans came to Argentina in the 1990s.

The study, “Migración, Prostitución y Trata de Mujeres Dominicanas en Argentina” (Migration, Prostitution and Trafficking of Dominican Women in Argentina) states that 12,000 to 15,000 immigrants from the Dominican Republic reached Argentina between 1995 and 2002.

In recent years, although the exchange rate is no longer a lure, Dominicans have continued to come. “We have been arriving for years, and some have managed to gain a good position in society,” Rondó says.

The activist explains that in some cases, the women take out a mortgage on their homes to travel, in the hope of finding a job in domestic service. But when they arrive, they find it hard to get a job, start racking up a debt with those who financed part of their journey, and end up falling into the hands of trafficking or prostitution rings, she says.

Nuñez concurs: “They come to Argentina with promises of jobs that don’t turn out to be what they had expected – work that would give them a better standard of living than they had in their country.”

Once here, they find it difficult to get any other kind of work, says the sociologist, who wrote the paper “Construyendo mapas: Cuerpos femeninos, espacio y jerarquización racial en la práctica de la prostitución en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires” on prostitution and racism in Buenos Aires.

Nuñez says that when they leave their countries in search of work abroad, women are aware that prostitution is one of the possibilities, from things they have heard about, but “many think it won’t happen to them.”

The sociologist studied the link between street prostitution and female migration in the Argentine capital, focusing on women from the Dominican Republic, who are highly visible as they are black in a country where there are so few people of African descent they only began to be counted in the 2010 census.

In her study, Nuñez says black women in Argentina are often seen as highly sexual, much more so than white or indigenous women, and this makes them more vulnerable.

One Dominican woman working as a sex worker in Buenos Aires, who was interviewed by Nuñez for her study, said “maybe they like (Dominican women) because we have big breasts.”

Another Dominican immigrant working as a street prostitute told the sociologist that “My mom didn’t want me to come here. She told me what women did when they came here, and I didn’t believe her.”

To combat this phenomenon, the Argentine authorities announced in August 2012 that people from the Dominican Republic would need visas to enter the country. And for those who already live here, the authorities simplified the legalisation process and streamlined the paperwork for gaining temporary residency for three years.

But Rondó believes that requiring visas is not a solution. The same view is shared in CAREF, where IPS spoke with Gabriela Liguori, and in the Dominican Republic Embassy in Buenos Aires. They all agree that the new visa requirement won’t solve the problem.

“This just makes things worse,” says the activist. “Because it will be difficult, but they’ll find other ways to get here on land, illegally, and then the women will be less protected and more exposed to trafficking.”

But the sources who spoke to IPS do believe it is a good idea to cut the red tape needed to regularise the situation of those who came in as tourists and are now living here without the proper documents, because temporary residency status would make it easier for them to find a job.

The programme has assistance from the Dominican consulate, Argentina’s foreign ministry, and the justice ministry’s office to rescue and support victims of trafficking.

Undocumented immigrants from the Dominican Republic were given from January to July to apply for temporary residency permits. By March, 631 permits had been granted, according to the web site of the national migrations office.

“My idea is that people who come should be able to regularise their situation, study or work, because even if some do come for prostitution, they could at least have other alternatives. But without documents, they’re forced to become sex workers,” Rondó says.

Satellite image of San Jorge Gulf, in the Patagonia region of Argentina, where there are huge reserves of shale gas. Credit: IPS/Photostock

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Apr 30 2013 (IPS)

The enthusiasm of the government and oil and gas companies over Argentina’s unconventional fuel potential has come up against fierce opposition from communities living near the country’s shale gas reserves and environmental organisations.

Indigenous communities, other nearby residents, academics and environmentalists are deeply concerned about the risks of disastrous environmental damage entailed by the hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” required to extract the country’s significant reserves of shale gas.

Unlike the gas and oil that can be obtained by merely extracting them from deposits where they are found in a more or less pure state, the gas and oil trapped in shale, slate and tar sands, among other formations, require more costly and contaminating techniques.

To extract the gas, the shale rock is fractured by injecting huge amounts of water and chemicals at extremely high pressure through horizontal perforations up to several kilometres in length.

Fracking is a highly controversial issue in the United States and Canada and has been banned in France and Bulgaria, but is moving forward in Argentina, which is believed to offer enormous shale gas potential.

Diego di Risio of the Oil Observatory of the South told Tierramérica* that “the environmental impact of unconventional technologies is far greater than that of traditional technologies,” for reasons that include the large areas affected and the massive volumes of water used.

Other organisations, such as the Ecosur Foundation and Plataforma 2012, warn of the danger of the expansion of this type of oil and gas drilling without serious debate regarding its risks.

Last year, the Oil Observatory published a study, “Fractura expuesta. Yacimientos no convencionales en Argentina” (Fracture Exposed: Unconventional deposits in Argentina), which describes the use of chemical products during the fracking process that could contaminate groundwater and aquifers.

Moreover, the exploitation of unconventional reserves contributes to further postponing debate on “the need for the diversification of the energy mix” in Argentina, which currently depends on oil and gas for almost 90 percent of its energy needs, and is expanding the hydrocarbon frontier into agricultural areas, the study warns.

The 2013-2017 Strategic Management Plan of YPF, the oil and gas company fully nationalised in 2012 by the government of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, states that Argentina is the country with the third greatest potential for unconventional gas, after China and the United States.

In fact, the first multi-fracture horizontal well in South America was drilled in 2008 in the territory of a Mapuche indigenous community in the southern Argentine province of Neuquén, without the consent of the local inhabitants.

The company heading up the operation is Apache, a U.S.-based corporation that has acquired huge tracts of land in the area. The community of Gelay Ko (“without water”, in the Mapuche language) is located over the Zapala aquifer and is made up of around 40 families. Their homes are surrounded by wells drilled by Apache for shale gas extraction.

In 2012, after filing a legal suit over the company’s failure to consult with the community and prepare an environmental impact assessment, a group of community members occupied Apache’s installations, but their protest was quashed and they were slapped with a countersuit.

The protest was headed up by 30-year-old lonko (traditional chief) Cristina Lincopán, who died a month ago from pulmonary hypertension, reported Leftraru Nawel of the Neuquén Mapuche Confederation.

“On top of the death of animals, which was already happening when there was only conventional drilling, now we are seeing impacts on the health of the population, because they burn gas there, very close to the people’s homes,” Nawel told Tierramérica.

In Gelay Ko as in other Mapuche communities in Neuquén, water is becoming increasingly scarce and saline, to the point where the authorities are now distributing bottled water, he explained. But Apache uses millions of litres of the vital resource for fracking.

“People are worried about the contamination of the Zapala aquifer, which has been declared a natural reserve by the municipality, because the possible extent of contamination is still not known,” said Nawel.

“The problem is not just the amount of water they use – and we don’t know where they get it from. They add chemical products and no one knows what they are because that information is protected under patent,” he said.

“No one knows what they do with the waste water, either. In the United States they re-inject it into inactive wells, without sealing them or anything. In Neuquén there is no technology for the treatment of this type of waste,” he added.

Apache’s operations are located in the vast shale field of Vaca Muerta, which covers two thirds of Neuquén and part of neighbouring provinces, and is considered to contain Argentina’s largest unconventional gas reserves.

In the last two years, fracking technology has also advanced in other regions of the country. In February, the president inaugurated new exploration activities in the southern province of Chubut.

In this province of scarce water resources, attorney Silvia de los Santos, on behalf of local indigenous communities, filed for an injunction against exploration in Aguada Bandera, located 200 kilometres from the city of Comodoro Rivadavia, and in D-129, on the coast of San Jorge Gulf.

De los Santos filed for the injunction on the eve of the initiation of these exploration activities, on the grounds of irregularities in the permit application and environmental impact assessment. But she did not succeed in stopping them.

YPF president Miguel Galuccio announced that San Jorge could represent the most important source of shale gas after Vaca Muerta. In both cases, these are conventional gas fields that also contain unconventional reserves.

In the meantime, areas where there has been no oil and gas industry activity until now are also being eyed as potential sites for exploration and extraction, such as Los Monos in the northwestern province of Salta and another field in the northeastern province of Entre Ríos.

Beneath the soil of Entre Ríos and other provinces on the Argentine coast, as well as part of Uruguay, Paraguay and southern Brazil, lies the Guaraní aquifer, an enormous freshwater reserve that supplies drinking water to a large number of cities in the region.

“Entre Ríos did not form part of Argentina’s oil and gas map, but with this new technology there has been a shift towards this area, and now environmental organisations are calling for some kind of moratorium or prohibition on fracking there,” said Di Risio.

In the southern province of Río Negro, environmentalists and local residents have been meeting to exchange information and take action against the expansion of fracking in the region of Allen, where Apache is also operating.

The drilling is being done very close to fruit tree orchards, say local farmers, who are concerned over the impacts and the lack of control over the disposal of the liquid waste generated by these operations.

In the Río Negro municipality of Cinco Saltos, an ordinance was passed to ban fracking, but this was vetoed a short time later by the municipal government, and the legislative assembly subsequently upheld the veto.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Excerpt:

Comprehensive judicial reforms pushed by the government of Argentina on the argument that they will democratise the justice system are moving ahead in Congress in the midst of staunch resistance by the opposition, heated debate, and threats of future lawsuits challenging them as unconstitutional.

The package of laws presented Apr. 9 by centre-left President Cristina Fernández includes six changes aimed, as she said, at “making the country’s most important branch of power – because it is the last place where the life, freedom and patrimony of Argentina’s 40 million people are decided on – more modern and transparent.”

On Wednesday and Thursday, the Senate approved two changes that will now become law: the creation of three new appellate courts, to ease the backlog of cases that reach the Supreme Court; and regulations of court injunctions, a tool used to prevent irreparable damages to people or entities by a new law.

Another change that was approved by both the lower and upper houses but must return to the Senate for another vote would expand and change the process for the designation of the members of the magistrates’ council, which appoints and removes judges.

Three changes that made it through the Chamber of Deputies and now go to the Senate involve open competitions for jobs in the judicial branch; a requirement that the wealth declarations of judicial, and not just executive and legislative authorities, be published online; and a requirement that all federal court rulings be published online.

The opposition parties in Congress refused to set forth complementary ideas, arguing that the aim of the reforms is to increase government control over the judiciary, and saying they pose a threat to the country’s institutions.

One of the most heavily debated reforms was the one that would regulate and set deadlines for the application of indefinite court injunctions, which often keep laws from going into effect for years. This change became law after incorporating modifications proposed by civil society organisations.

When she presented the reforms, Fernández said that through the “abusive” use of court injunctions, the Grupo Clarín media group had failed to comply with the media law in effect since 2010, by challenging the law in court.

But human rights, environmental and labour groups warned that setting deadlines for injunctions would go against a number of citizen rights, especially the rights of the most vulnerable segments of society.

In response to these criticisms, ruling party lawmakers agreed to create an exception for the setting of deadlines, when “the dignified living conditions, health, or a right that involves food or the environment” of socially vulnerable sectors are under threat.

Also criticised was the proposal to expand the number of members of the magistrates’ council, from 13 to 19, and in particular, the article stating that the members must be elected by popular vote.

“The problem here is that a judge that wants to run for the council would have to campaign alongside political parties,” Álvaro Herrero, a lawyer with the Civil Rights Association, told IPS.

The council is currently made up of one member named by the executive branch, three judges, two representatives of lawyers’ associations, one academic, two senators and two deputies representing the largest party in each house of Congress, and one senator and one deputy representing the second largest party.

Most of the reforms approved by the Chamber of Deputies on Thursday will go back to the Senate.

But the second reform that will become law was the creation of three new appeals courts, to handle administrative, civil and commercial, and labour and social security cases. There is currently only one appeals court at that level.

The idea is to keep so many cases from accumulating before the Supreme Court.

The governing faction, the centre-left Front for Victory in the Justicialista (Peronist) Party, was confident that it could muster the votes needed to quickly pass the six reform bills.

But it ran into resistance by the opposition and criticism by civil society and academic organisations.

The debates thus raged on, with the governing party legislators and their allies incorporating changes and adding clauses suggested by human rights associations, legal experts and academics.

Despite the modifications, the right-wing, centre-right and centre-left opposition, backed by street demonstrations, did not accept any of the proposed reforms.

“The government is attempting the final assault on the judicial branch,” argued Mario Negri of the centrist Radical Civic Union.

Deputy Francisco De Narváez of the right-wing faction of the Peronists warned that “Argentina’s institutions are in a situation of extreme danger.”

Raúl Ferreyra, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Buenos Aires, said “the reform has two faces.”

“I see some good things and some very bad things” in the proposed reforms, he said in an interview with IPS.

“I really don’t like this debate that took place in just a few hours,” he said, although he insisted that there were positive aspects in the proposed reforms.

He was referring to the requirements that wealth declarations and court rulings be published online, and to the open competitions for hiring judicial personnel based on their merits, rather than connections and nepotism.

Ferreyra lamented, however, that the reforms did not resolve the question of better access to the justice system by ordinary citizens. He also said the regulation of the court injunctions, even with the added modifications, “leaves the most vulnerable without protection.”

In addition, the academic questioned the creation of new appeals courts as “unnecessary” and said they would only slow down the handling of cases.

But he agreed with the modifications of the magistrates’ council. “It shouldn’t shock us that in a hyperpresidentialist system, a president would come up with this kind of reform,” he said.

Ferreyra said that, despite the wide criticism, the judicial reforms “are legitimate” because they are backed by a president who was reelected with 54 percent of the vote.

“For the first time in 30 years, they want to discuss a reform of the judiciary, and that’s a good thing,” he said.

But the opposition legislators most vociferously opposed to the reforms said they would challenge their constitutionality, once they are passed into law.

Gated residential communities on the Paraná Delta have sprawled out of control in recent years, and are plugging up the local ecosystem and preventing the natural runoff of water that cushions the impact of floods in a vast area near the Argentine capital.

The problem was particularly highlighted after the tragic flooding in early April in the city of Buenos Aires, and especially in La Plata, the capital of the province of Buenos Aires, where torrential rains caused the death of almost 60 people.

Traditional homes in the Delta del Tigre are built on stilts, coexisting in harmony with the changing water levels. Credit: Javier Vidal/CC BY 2.0

The real estate construction boom, the lack of infrastructure such as storm drains to cope with increasingly frequent and heavy rains, and the lack of contingency plans in response to disasters are now at the centre of debate in Argentina.

The Paraná river delta is an immense wetland covering 17,500 square kilometres in the lower course of the nearly 5,000-kilometre long Paraná river, which divides into a labyrinth of smaller branches before flowing into the Río de la Plata estuary.

Traditional houses on the islands of the delta are built on stilts, have wooden jetties and are surrounded by reed beds. They coexist harmoniously with an ecosystem that is prepared periodically to receive large amounts of floodwater.

It is an area of high biodiversity which also provides many environmental services. The most outstanding are provision of water and the capacity to regulate the river’s floods, which are becoming more frequent and intense due to climate change caused by global warming.

In recent years, however, 229 housing developments of different sizes have been built on the floodplains of the delta, most of them with luxury homes, golf courses, tennis courts, shopping centres, schools and horse-riding centres.

Town planners said that about 90 percent of these developments were built on floodplains subject to overflow from rivers and streams, and 10 percent on silt islands that were artificially levelled or filled in to support the residential complexes.

Daniel Blanco, the head of Fundación Humedales (Wetlands Foundation), told IPS in an interview that the building expansion was “very aggressive.” Now the area is at risk of losing its natural capacity to absorb water, just as storms are becoming more intense.

Experts with the NGO, which works for the conservation and sustainable use of wetlands, say that under the false pretext that the land is unproductive, real estate projects went ahead with levelling, draining and diverting water courses, affecting the natural functions of the wetland.

“They are trying to convert the place into a dryland system,” complain the authors of “Bienes y servicios ecosistémicos de los humedales del Delta del Paraná” (Ecosystem Goods and Services in the Paraná Delta Wetlands), a study that warns of the risk of flooding in adjacent areas.

The study, by Patricia Kandus, Natalia Morandeira and Facundo Schivo of Fundación Humedales, indicates that the delta ecosystem does not prevent flooding, but cushions the rise of the river level, retains part of the volume, filters the water and releases it slowly thanks to its plant cover which acts like a sponge.

Warnings from environmentalists and local residents, added to the severe impact of heavy rains in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area, managed to block some investment projects, and have led to progress in regulating new building on the islands.

One of the projects brought to a halt is Colony Park, which promised “a private island of peace and tranquillity” on 300 hectares of the Delta del Tigre, the lowest-lying section of the wetlands, in the northeast of the province of Buenos Aires. According to its promotional advertising, the building of 1,000 “luxury” dwellings was planned.

Due to the controversy generated by the project, as well as a lawsuit brought by residents, in 2012 the municipality of Tigre with the help and expertise of environmental organisations drew up stricter planning regulations for building on the islands in that district.

Acknowledging the fragility of the delta ecosystem, the new regulations require buildings to be constructed on stilts, forbid the alteration of the natural elevation of the islands – which usually grow by accumulating sediment – and ban artificial filling in of the centre of the islands.

The islands of the delta are normally bowl-shaped, with a hollow in the centre that contributes to retaining excess floodwater. But these hollows were being filled in to raise the elevation and avoid flooding the building site.

In Campana, another municipality of Buenos Aires, a local association, Vecinos del Humedal, got a temporary stay against a residential development planned for 40,000 people on the Luján river, one of the delta tributaries.

Alejandro Fernández, a member of the association, told IPS that local people got together to resist the project in their area, where several gated communities are already causing flooding in the surrounding areas.

In late October a heavy storm caused the level of the Paraná river to rise by nearly five metres, creating severe flooding not only along the riverside but also in the centre of the city of Luján, where the floodwater reached the basilica, an international tourist attraction.

“All along the Luján river, the building of private complexes has been allowed on the floodplains that alter the natural ebb and flow of the river. If they cap a virtually flat area with cement, they create a serious problem,” Fernández said.
“Then when the floods come, political leaders clutch their heads, but they were the ones who signed off on the permits for those real estate projects without proper urban planning,” he said.

The fate of countries with major debt problems is at stake in federal courts in New York, which are to decide in April whether or not they accept Argentina’s proposal to the bondholders who rejected two restructurings of sovereign debt.

Since Argentina defaulted on nearly 100 billion dollars in debt in late 2001, close to 93 percent of the bonds have been restructured at a deep discount, with lower interest rates and at longer terms.

But a group of hedge funds that refused to participate in the 2005 and 2010 restructurings sued for full payment of 1.3 billion dollars in Argentine bonds in federal court in New York.

On Tuesday, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York declined to grant a full-court rehearing of a decision by a three-judge panel that went against Argentina in October, ruling that this country had to deal with all of its debt holders equally.

The suit not only threatens to return Argentina’s debt restructuring process to square one. Experts warn that it could have an impact on the decision-making capacity of other countries that run into severe financial difficulties at times of global crisis.

The government of centre-left President Cristina Fernández has until Friday Mar. 29 to present a solution for making the payments to the hedge funds.

The government says it will offer the holdouts the same conditions as the ones accepted by the rest of the creditors in the 2010 restructuring: discounts, lower interest and longer terms.

But that would involve a new debt swap, which would require congressional approval because a law passed after 2010 banned the reopening of debt restructuring.

Argentina is now financially stable and makes its debt payments on time, despite the fact that it lost access to global credit markets after the December 2001 default, which was announced in the context of an economic and social meltdown.

According to the latest report by the Economy Ministry, as of mid-2012 Argentina holds 183 billion dollars in debt, equivalent to 41.5 percent of GDP, one of the lowest proportions in Latin America. The report did not include the defaulted bonds.

Up to now, the Fernández administration had refused to settle with the hedge funds, referring to them as “vulture funds” – opportunistic investors who purchase the debt of heavily indebted countries cheap and then sue for full repayment.

The lawsuit in New York is led by hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer’s Elliott Management. The hedge funds acquired the Argentine bonds at 20 to 30 percent of their nominal value.

If the courts finally come down on the side of the hedge funds, Argentine assets could be embargoed internationally.

Some experts in Argentina believe the U.S. court will accept the Fernández administration’s proposal, in order to put an end to the dispute and to defend the credibility of global payment systems.

But others are more sceptical.

Fernando Porta, an economist with Centro Redes, a research institute in Buenos Aires, told IPS that if the courts in New York refused to recognise Argentina’s restructuring proposal, “a huge level of uncertainty would be introduced in the system.”

“The potential negative impacts would go beyond Argentina and would throw into question the operation of the international debt restructuring system when countries are having trouble meeting their payments,” he said.

Porta said that with respect to debt restructuring, there are no multilateral agreements setting rules, but merely precedents that give the process predictability.

For that reason, he believes Argentina’s proposal “will be accepted in the end,” although several other obstacles may have to be overcome first.

But analyst Fausto Spotorno with the Orlando Ferreres y Asociados consultancy was less optimistic. “I don’t think this proposal will be accepted by the holdouts,” he said.

In Spotorno’s view, the New York appeals court is unlikely to accept Argentina’s offer if it does not have unanimous support among the creditors. “The holdouts have the first-instance ruling in their favour, which means they aren’t going to accept a proposal with discounts and longer terms now,” he said.

The analyst said it was naive to believe that the court would take into account the impact that its decision could have on future cases of debt restructuring. “New bond issues contain clauses that prevent this problem,” he noted.

He was referring to collective action clauses (CACs), first proposed by Mexico in 2003, which since then have been included in bond issues to facilitate eventual restructuring.

CACs allow a majority of bondholders to agree to a legally binding debt restructuring. By forcing potential holdouts to accept the restructuring if a large majority of other creditors do so, it provides protection against vulture funds.

The clauses were used controversially by Greece in 2010, when it introduced them retroactively to restructure the country’s debt and avoid default, according to “Un ensayo sobre las Cláusulas de Acción Colectiva”, a paper on collective action clauses published in Mexico.

The study, published this year by Mexican economists Alejandro Castañeda and Pablo Newman in the Gaceta de Economía journal, says the new mechanism became widely used as a result of the threat posed by opportunistic creditors in the cases of Argentina and Peru.

The European Union has required the inclusion of CACs in all new eurozone bond issues since January.

But they had already been incorporated by most countries in Latin America and other regions, with varying minimum percentages of support required from bondholders.

In their report, the Mexican academics point out that the bonds issued by Argentina in its debt swaps contain CACs, but older rules requiring unanimous acceptance of new conditions apply to the bonds held by the holdouts.

Under the older rules, if one single bondholder rejects the proposed new financial terms, the process can be blocked by litigation which, if successful, can also benefit the rest of the bondholders – and seriously affect the state issuing the bonds.

But there are still countries with bonds issued in the 1990s that would be affected by a resolution against Argentina.

Indigenous women fetching water from a well near San Cristóbal de las Casas in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Mar 22 2013 (IPS)

The new pope’s choice of the name Francis, to honour the Catholic Church’s patron saint of animals and the environment, has awakened the hopes of ecologists and others who are concerned about rampant consumerism and the deterioration of the planet.

In 1979, then Pope John Paul II proclaimed St. Francis of Assisi (1181/1182-1226) the patron saint of ecologists. In his first mass as pope, on Mar. 19, Jorge Bergoglio said: “Let us be protectors of creation, protectors of God’s plan inscribed in nature, protectors of one another and of the environment.”

”It’s excellent that a world leader is taking up this issue as a priority,” Diego Moreno, director of the Fundación Vida Silvestre, Argentina’s main wildlife advocacy organisation, told IPS. “With the Church’s ability to reach people, the fact that the environment is part of the pope’s discourse is very important, because it will get more people involved.”

In Latin America and Africa, “environmental problems are closely linked to poverty, with the poor living in areas that are the most vulnerable to climate change and the degradation of the soil,” he said.

But there are also other areas in which the pope “could turn out to be an ally,” Moreno added. For example, excessive consumption – “verging on squander” – has a huge impact on natural resources, he said.

Both environmentalists and bishops in Latin America criticise consumerism and urge people to follow a simpler lifestyle.

The pope’s homily was in line with the recommendations set forth in the final document of the 5th General Conference of the Council of Latin American Bishops in Aparecida, Brazil, in 2007.

Bergoglio, who was an Argentine cardinal before he was elected pope on Mar. 13, presided over the committee that drew up the final conclusions.

The document criticises the extractive industries and agribusiness for failing to respect the economic, social and environmental rights of local communities, and questions the introduction of genetically modified organisms because they do not contribute to the fight against hunger or to sustainable rural development.

The final document also stressed the region’s rich flora and faun and social diversity, defended traditional indigenous know-how that has been “illicitly appropriated” by the pharmaceutical industry, and called for the preservation of the Amazon rainforest as part of “the inheritance we received, for free, to protect.”

The call for the preservation of the environment “is a little-known aspect” of the Aparecida final document, Pablo Canziani, a doctor in physical sciences who is in charge of the environmental area of the department of laypersons in the Argentine bishops’ conference, told IPS.

Environmental issues were not traditionally a concern of the Catholic Church, until they took on importance because of their links with human development, said Canziani, a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“It is the poor who suffer the most from climate change, desertification, or the waste of food,” said the scientist, who has served as an adviser to several Vatican delegations to United Nations conferences on poverty, the environment and food.

In Aparecida, the bishops stressed that in Latin America and the Caribbean, nature “is fragile and defenceless in the face of the economic and technological powers.” And they said “the interests of economic groups that irrationally destroy the sources of life” should not be predominant over natural resources.

The final document also called for educating people to live a simple, austere lifestyle based on solidarity, for expanding the pastoral presence in communities threatened by activities that destroy the environment, and for seeking “an alternative development model, based on an ethics that includes ecology.”

John Paul II (1978-2005) was the first to put these issues on the Church agenda, said Luis Scozzina, a priest who is the director of the Franciscan Centre of Studies and Regional Development.

The Centre was created in Argentina’s Catholic University “to contribute to information and research on questions related to the environment,” its web site says.

“Protecting creation” is one of the central focuses of Franciscans, Scozzina told IPS. And he said Bergoglio is “the most Franciscan Jesuit we have ever known,” because besides his intellectual leanings, characteristic of the Jesuits, he leads an austere lifestyle with close ties to the poor, as Franciscans do.

“Francis will put the ecological crisis high up on the agenda. He already indicated that in his mass, when he spoke of protecting three dimensions: ourselves, one another, and creation. By ‘one another’ he meant the poor, who are hurt the most by the consequences of environmental deterioration.”

Father Scozzina added that “even the most optimistic warn that we are moving towards steady destruction, and in response to that, we in the Church are calling for an ethics of austerity, a change in lifestyle that leaves behind this frenzied consumption.”

In Aparecida, he noted, the bishops signalled the need for a change in the production model. “In Latin America, this merits reflection. Are we going to continue with the model of extraction of our natural resources?” he said.

Argentine archbishop Jorge Bergoglio was selected as pope at a time when the Roman Catholic Church in this South American country is facing a rebellion by priests and laypersons who reject the role of the church leadership during the 1976-1983 dictatorship and the lack of reparations for past omissions and complicities.

The accusations against Bergoglio for his alleged ties to the dictatorship, which made headlines around the world when his appointment as pope was announced by the Vatican, are just the tip of the iceberg of a controversy that has raged for decades without a solution and which is coming to light as the regime’s human rights violators have been brought to trial since the amnesty laws were scrapped.

Groups like Curas en la Opción por los Pobres (Priests with an Option for the Poor), Cristianos por el Tercer Milenio (Christians for the Third Millennium) or Colectivo Teología de la Liberación (Liberation Theology Collective) have voiced increasingly harsh criticism against the Argentine bishops’ conference’s shortcomings in terms of self-criticism, in spite of an apology and pledge to investigate issued a few months ago.

Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio in Buenos Aires in 2008. Credit: 3.0 CC BY-SA

“It’s good that this debate is happening, that we work to clarify what happened, so that the truth will come to light. That would be very healthy,” Claudia Touris, a researcher at the University of Buenos Aires and the coordinator of Relig-Ar Grupo de Trabajo en Religión y Sociedad de Argentina (Relig-Ar: Working Group on Religion and Society in Contemporary Argentina), told IPS.

The debate that has divided Catholics in Argentina broke out as a result of a statement issued in November 2012 by the Argentine bishops’ conference, in which they apologise “to those we let down or failed to support as we should have” during the dictatorship.

They also promised to carry out “a more thorough study,” to find out the truth.

The statement was issued as a “Letter to the People of God” and was titled “Faith in Jesus Christ leads us to truth, justice and peace.” It condemns the crimes committed as a result of “state terrorism” but adds that “We also know of the death and devastation caused by the violence of the guerrillas”.

Opponents of the regime criticise that interpretation.

Cristianos por el Tercer Milenio described the statement as falling short because it denies the connivance between some prelates and the dictatorship. According to the group, made up of laypersons, those who served as military chaplains should be demanded to provide information, and “scandalous situations that confuse and weaken the faithful should be brought to an end.”

For their part, Curas en Opción por los Pobres said they were “scandalised by so many stances running counter to the Gospels” and by the fact that priest Christian von Wernich, who was sentenced for human rights violations, “was not expelled from the priesthood,” and unrepentant former dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, found guilty of crimes against humanity, continues to receive communion.

On the eve of Bergoglio’s appointment as pope, Curas en Opción por los Pobres, priests who live and work in Argentina’s slums, loudly protested because the bishops had taken reprisals against one of the priests who had criticised the statement released by the bishops’ conference.

Bishop Francisco Polti of the northern province of Santiago del Estero transferred Father Roberto Burell, one of the signatories of the letter that the Curas en Opción por los Pobres sent to the bishops, from his parish.

“We aren’t going to call you ‘estimados’ (esteemed – the formal form of address in a letter in Spanish) because we do not esteem cowards,” says the letter sent by the priests.

The priests also told the bishops that when they are no longer bishops “only the powerful will be sorry, because the poor, the peasants and indigenous people will celebrate.”

That was the climate among Catholics in Argentina when Cardinal Bergoglio was elected Wednesday Mar. 13 as the first pope from Latin America.

Touris said the bishops’ conference statement was considered overly timid by many Catholics, although it was a fairly novel call for those who have information on forced disappearances or the theft of the children of political prisoners – two human rights abuses widely committed by the dictatorship – to come forward.

“We’ll have to see if this continues, and if it goes deeper,” she added.

She said there was no single, unanimous Church position with respect to the regime, which is why some bishops were ideologically in line with the military and helped “sweep out alleged communist infiltrators,” while other priests and bishops supported the victims of persecuation.

As examples of the former, Touris mentioned Cardinal Raúl Primatesta, army vicar Victorio Bonamín, and archbishops Adolfo Tortolo and Antonio Plaza – all of whom are dead – who witnesses said they had seen in clandestine detention centres.

But, Touris said, there were also bishops who stood alongside the victims of the regime, such as Jaime de Nevares, Jorge Novak or Miguel Hesayne, as well as dozens of priests, nuns, seminary students and laypersons who were kidnapped, “disappeared”, murdered, or forced to flee into exile.

Two bishops are considered martyrs for their opposition to the regime.

The first is Enrique Angelelli of the diocese of the northern province of La Rioja, who was killed in 1976 in a purported car accident which is suspected to have been a murder. The other is Carlos Ponce de León, bishop of the Buenos Aires district of San Nicolás, who also died in a suspicious car crash in 1977.

At the time, Bergoglio was the Jesuit Provincial (elected leader of the order). Two Jesuit priests who worked in poor neighbourhoods were abducted. Some accuse the new pope of turning them over, but others say that on the contrary, his influence saved them.

Touris said the superior general of the Society of Jesus was Spanish priest Pedro Arrupe, who urged the priests to assume a political and social commitment. As a result, more Jesuits were persecuted, tortured and forcibly disappeared in Latin America in the 1970s than priests from any other order.

In Argentina, under Bergoglio’s leadership, the order assumed a more traditional position, the professor noted. He urged the more socially committed priests to abandon their social activism in order to avoid repression, as he himself stated in his defence.

Argentine human rights activist and 1980 Nobel Peace Prize-winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, an active believer, said this week that “the Catholic Church did not take a homogeneous stance” with respect to the regime, and “there were bishops who were complicit in the dictatorship…but not Bergoglio.”

“I believe he lacked the courage to support our struggle for human rights at the most difficult times,” Esquivel said in a statement issued by his organisation, Servicio de Paz y Justicia (Peace and Justice Service) in Argentina.

The selection of a Latin American pope, who is known for his austere lifestyle and his work with the poor, has created a stir among Catholics in the region, who are confident that Pope Francis will help bolster the Vatican’s tarnished reputation.

To the surprise even of Argentine cardinals, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Bergoglio, was elected the new pontiff Wednesday, and his first actions as he greeted crowds of faithful from the balcony over St. Peter’s Square thrilled those clamouring for a leader to demonstrate a clear preferential option for the poor.

Sources consulted by IPS say Pope Francis is conservative in doctrine, but his lifestyle, they all agree, testifies to his unassuming modesty and closeness to the poor, the homeless, the sick, the elderly, prisoners, immigrants, victims of human trafficking for sexual exploitation and forced labour, and to parish priests.

Pope Francis on his first appearance in St. Peter’s Square. Credit: The Vatican

The hope is that his personal qualities will help to restore the credibility of the Catholic Church and the Vatican, rocked by paedophilia and corruption scandals. For deeper changes, those in the know recommend waiting for the first appointments to his entourage and his future designations of cardinals.

“The bishops of northwest Argentina were all very happy,” Pedro Olmedo, the bishop of Humahuaca in the province of Jujuy, who was meeting with about ten other bishops of the region, the poorest in the country, when the news broke, told IPS. “There were tears, because we know him well, he always helped us and was there for us.

“Having a Latin American pope has been an aspiration of the region for many years. The Vatican has opened itself to a church from the New World, in a choice made by cardinals, the majority of whom are European. I hope this will give the Vatican a Latin American imprint, even in its structures,” said Olmedo.

Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff, a founder of Liberation Theology, a social justice-oriented current that stresses a ”preferential option for the poor” and has been heavily criticised by the Vatican, was also optimistic about Pope Francis’s first gestures of humility, beginning with his selection of the name of Francis of Assisi, the 12th century friar who devoted his life completely to the poor.

At the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean, held in May 2007 in Aparecida, Brazil, Bergoglio was elected by the bishops to draft the concluding document. It sets out the regional church’s position on a wide array of issues.

The document recognises the Church’s concern that in Latin America, home to 43 percent of the world’s Catholics, the growth of new members is lower than the rate of population growth. And it expresses regret for “the weakness of our option for the poor.

“The preferential option for the poor is one of the most characteristic facets of the Latin American and Caribbean Church,” says the text, which also laments “the significant number of Catholics who leave the Church in order to join other religious groups.”

Bergoglio appears to have lived in accordance with this commitment. He gave up the archbishop’s palace and chauffeur-driven car, to live in a room adjacent to the Cathedral in Buenos Aires. He travelled by bus or metro, cooked his own meals and avoided social events and the press.

Those close to him say he visited HIV/AIDS patients at the Muñiz Hospital for infectious diseases. He was also a frequent visitor to homeless shelters and soup kitchens, personally cared for elderly and ailing priests, and could be seen at bus stops when he went home in the early hours of the morning.

Organisations working against labour and sexual exploitation in Buenos Aires counted him as an ally. He often visited victims of trafficking, was moved by their testimonies and denounced those responsible for these forms of slavery in his homilies.

He would often visit penitentiaries, another issue raised in the concluding document from Aparecida, which calls for strengthening pastoral work in prisons.

The greatest stain on Bergoglio’s past is his alleged complicity with the 1976-1983 military dictatorship, when he was the provincial superior of the Jesuit order. He was accused of failing to protect priests and catechists who were subsequently abducted, and in some cases were forcibly disappeared.

He was called to testify as a witness in a case investigating these crimes, and in another investigation of the illegal appropriation of the young daughter of disappeared parents. Bergoglio stated he only found out about the theft of the babies of political prisoners after the end of the dictatorship.

Argentine theologian María Alicia Brunero, a retired university professor who has written several books on ethics, told IPS that “the important thing about the designation is not so much that it has fallen on an Argentine or a Latin American, but on someone from the periphery, outside of Europe.

“The cardinals are hoping for solutions to arrive from outside, from someone with a different profile, who is less contaminated and removed from the Vatican’s pomp and bureaucracy, and in that sense Bergoglio fulfils the expectations, because he is an austere man, who travels on buses and is close to the people,” she said.

Brunero, who knows Bergoglio personally, said that he is also someone who “knows how to command and delegate,” and that “he is not exempt from the aspiration to power, which is not necessarily a bad thing. He knows how to build networks and does it well, without trampling on anyone,” she said.

“He gives me hope,” she said.

On the other hand, no great changes in doctrine can be expected from him, Brunero said. As archbishop, he was an uncompromising critic of Argentina’s law on same-sex marriages and of any attempt to decriminalise abortion.

But she did predict he might bring a breath of fresh air to other issues.

“Ninety percent of theologians believe that women can exercise the priesthood, and the majority also want priests to be able to marry. It is possible that steps in this direction may be taken during his papacy,” she said.

Brunero said the priesthood is the Church institution facing the deepest crisis at present. Half of the priests ordained in recent years have left the priesthood, not because of loss of faith, but “because they fell in love, or came into conflict with Church structures because of its rigidity on the issue,” she said.

She pointed out that the first Vatican Council, in 1869, focused on the figure of the pope. The second, in 1959, focused on the bishops. “Perhaps there will now be a third council focused on priests,” she said.

In contrast with the conservatism of his other positions, in Buenos Aires Bergoglio reprimanded priests who refused to baptise the children of single mothers. He also accepted non-Catholic godparents for baptism candidates, Gustavo Vera, an activist for the rights of victims of labour and sex trafficking, told IPS.

The pope is open to inter-faith dialogue, and has had frequent contacts with representatives of the Jewish religion in Argentina.

In search of a more transparent and agile justice system that is less authoritarian and bureaucratic, judges, prosecutors, defence lawyers and legal experts in Argentina are pressing for reforms to modernise the judicial branch and make it more democratic.

A coalition of members of the judicial branch, the attorney general’s office and NGOs, named Justicia Legítima (Legitimate Justice), held a series of debates on Feb. 27-28 which gave rise to proposals for modernisation that will be published in a forthcoming document.

“This is a debt owed to democracy. We have a mediaeval judicial branch that needs to be changed,” academic Andrés Harfuch, coordinator of the programme for trial by jury and citizen participation at the Institute for Comparative Studies in Criminal and Social Sciences (INECIP), told IPS.

Harfuch, a member of the Justicia Legítima coalition, said the Argentine judicial branch is “hierarchical, pyramidal and authoritarian; it only allows professional judges, although the constitution stipulates that juries must be a part of the system, something that would introduce major changes in the entire structure.”

The system still operates by written arguments, and lacks transparency, Harfuch said. “It’s a Precambrian system, which hardly any advanced country uses any more. In some courts they still use typewriters and court employees spend their time stitching records together,” he complained.

In the last 25 years, INECIP experts have worked on judicial reform in nearly every Latin American country, “from Mexico on down,” Harfuch said. But “the hard core of resistance is still Argentina’s federal justice system,” he said. “The judges cling to their privileges and power.”

The internal debate acquired public notoriety in December, when three groups of judges and officials expressed their concern over “the use of pressure mechanisms against judges” by the executive branch, “affecting their independence.”

Hundreds of judges, prosecutors, public defenders, justice employees and academics replied in another publication, titled “Una justicia legítima” (Legitimate justice), questioning the criticism voiced by the judges in December and giving birth to the new coalition.

The signatories said they did not feel represented by the complaints of the three associations. They said they were trying to reconcile the justice system with the citizenry, and that independence should not only be understood in relation to other branches of state, but also to the business community and the media.

The background to the dispute is the clash between the government and the Clarín media group which is being settled in the courts. The company is in breach of the law against concentration of the media which forces it to shed some of its radio and television licences, a measure that has been postponed by court injunctions since 2010.

The government recused two judges who were to rule on another postponement in October 2012, and Justice Minister Julio Alak stated that if the judges decided against the media law they would be guilty of rebellion.

The accusation provoked a harsh reaction from the opposition. “The independence (of judges) is clearly being affected,” said the Radical Civic Union (UCR) party, while Civic Coalition lawmaker Elisa Carrió said democratic order was under attack with “justice being trampled on and judges being intimidated.”

In this context, President Cristina Fernández announced in her speech opening Congress Mar. 1 a series of bills to democratise the judicial branch, and described the contents of some of them.

She said they would include filling positions by competition, the creation of courts of third instance, publicising the progress of investigation of cases, and electing by popular vote members of the council that designates judges, instead of having them selected by legislators, lawyers and judges.

Fernández said she did not intend to eliminate tax exemptions on judges’ earnings, because when she herself was a Congresswoman she promoted a bill to that end that was dismissed by the Supreme Court.

However, she invited the Supreme Court to review the tax exemption, which she said is inequitable compared with what other taxpayers pay. She also called for the sworn declarations of assets by judges to be made public, as is already the case for members of the executive branch.

In an interview with IPS, María Laura Garrigós, presiding judge of the National Criminal and Correctional Court of Appeals, said Fernández’s proposals are aimed, in general, at legislative modifications.

But there are other changes that can be made without the need for new laws, she said.

“For instance, those of us who participated in the Justicia Legítima meetings were practically unanimous in thinking that entry to the judicial branch should be by competition, and in the Court of Appeals that I preside we have already instituted this,” she said.

Garrigós said that previously, when there was a vacancy, it would likely be filled by acquaintances, relatives or friends. “Holding an open competition means that people who do not know any judges will be able to apply and take the exam to join the judicial service,” she said.

“This means the composition of the staff will gradually change towards one that is more open to society and more heterogeneous,” said Garrigós. Justicia Legítima arose partly because judges are increasingly appointed through competitions, not for political reasons, and that alters the composition of the judicial branch, she said.

She stressed that the changes “are not being made because the executive branch demands them, but because of the vocation of many of us who believe the judicial branch should be more democratic, when previously it has been a rather pyramidal and hierarchical system.

“They are happening now partly because the political context encourages debate; however, they are not a question of party politics, but of macropolitics,” she said.

In line with the ongoing debate, Garrigós also recommended that court employees drop the honorific titles they used to address judges by. In her jurisdiction, “judges in courts of the first instance were called ‘Your Honour,’ and in courts of appeal ‘Your Excellency.’ Now we are all called ‘usted’ (the common form of formal address),” she said.

Garrigós recalled that during the presidency of Raúl Alfonsín (1983-1989) the title of “Excelentísimo”, used to address the president, was eliminated, but in the judicial branch the hierarchical form of address was retained. “It may seem trivial, but we want to proclaim our disagreement with this special treatment,” she said.

Another aim is for the justice system to use less cryptic, more understandable language. Garrigós mentioned that the Supreme Court is already doing so, and there are examples in other countries where courts have used linguists capable of “translating” the contents of court rulings for common citizens.

“We have to learn how to do this. It’s difficult, because it’s easier for us to speak our jargon, but we have to make ourselves understood,” she said.

Penguins on the Malvinas/Falkland rocky shore. Credit: CC BY-SA 3.0

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Mar 12 2013 (IPS)

The people of the Malvinas/Falkland islands voted overwhelmingly in a referendum to keep British rule, while Argentina has stepped up its claims to sovereignty over the South Atlantic archipelago located 450 km east of the South American nation.

Half of the islands’ total population of 3,000 responded Sunday Mar. 10 and Monday Mar. 11 to the question: “Do you wish the Falkland Islands to retain their current political status as an Overseas Territory of the United Kingdom?”

Of the 1517 votes cast in the non-binding referendum, from a total electorate of 1649 – a turnout of 92 percent – only three were in favour of being part of Argentina, while 99.8 percent voted yes to remaining British.

“We wanted to send the world a strong message on our right to self-determination,” the British-born Dick Sawle, who has lived on the islands since 1986 and is a member of the legislative assembly and the executive council, told IPS by telephone.

The archipelago, which has an area of just over 12,000 square km and is made up of East Falkland, West Falkland and 776 smaller islands, has been occupied by the United Kingdom since 1833.

“We know Argentina will ignore the outcome, but we trust that the rest of the world’s modern democracies will respect our right to self-determination,” said Sawle.

The vote, which had British support, did not have the backing of the United Nations.

The Argentine government considers the referendum “a British attempt to manipulate the Malvinas question,” as stated in a Mar. 8 communiqué issued by the Foreign Ministry. The government reiterated its demand for “bilateral negotiations” with Britain that take into account the interests, rather than the wishes, of the inhabitants of the islands.

Argentina argues that the inhabitants do not have the right to self-determination because they are not a colonised people demanding independence but an implanted population, with a non-autonomous government. The islands’ foreign affairs and defence are the responsibility of London.

The archipelago is one of 16 non-self-governing territories worldwide, 10 of which are under British rule, according to the U.N. Special Committee on Decolonisation, created in 1961.

In 1965, the Committee passed a resolution urging Argentina and the United Kingdom to seek a negotiated solution to the sovereignty dispute. But the British government’s refusal to negotiate and the 1982 war over the islands made the prospect of talks even less likely.

Argentina’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship launched a surprise invasion of the islands on Apr. 2, 1982. The war lasted until Jun. 10, when Argentina surrendered. A total of 635 Argentine and 255 British soldiers were killed in the war. Three civilians died in a British naval bombardment.

Diplomatic relations between the two countries were cut off before the war and were re-established in 1990, when they set up a “sovereignty umbrella”, agreeing to cooperate on other issues, such as fishing, tourism and oil, while maintaining their separate claims to the islands.

But that policy changed radically after 2003, when the governments of the late Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007) and his wife and successor Cristina Fernández launched a diplomatic offensive in the U.N. and other international bodies and began to pull out of a number of bilateral agreements.

On the 30th anniversary of the end of the war, Fernández travelled to New York to take part in the annual meeting of the Special Committee on Decolonisation. She was the first head of state to attend one of the Committee’s meetings.

On that occasion, the president asked Britain to negotiate, as the Committee’s resolutions have urged for the past half century.

Argentine historian Federico Lorenz, who has written several books on the Malvinas, told IPS that Kirchner and Fernández’s policy “towards the islands, which has been to strengthen Argentina’s position but has been confrontational as well, has played into the hands not so much of the islanders, who are people with rights, but of the British.

“The British have cast us as intransigent and belligerent, when the truth is that until the war, and even afterwards, Argentina has called for negotiations,” said Lorenz.

He argued that “the islanders should be listened to in both the question of the dispute and with regard to a broader scenario, which would allow us to have a comprehensive view of the problem. We can’t think of the dispute over the islands as if they were empty.”

But the Argentine government refuses to recognise the inhabitants of the islands as a third party, and accuses the UK of “trying to distort reality” with the referendum, which the Fernández administration saw as a “bad faith” maneuver because it was not based on U.N. resolutions.

British Prime Minister David Cameron says the islanders have the right to self-determination, writing in a column in the British newspaper The Sun on Sunday that “as long as the Falklanders want to stay British, we will always be there to protect them. They have my word on that.”

After the referendum, Cameron said Argentina should take “careful note” of the results. “I think the most important thing about this result is that we believe in self-determination, and the Falkland Islanders have spoken so clearly about their future, and now other countries right across the world, I hope, will respect and revere this very very clear result…They want to remain British and that view should be respected by everybody, including by Argentina.”

Sawle said that under the administrations of Kirchner and Fernández, “aggressive actions against us increased.” He cited, for example, the 2003 suspension of charter flights between Argentina and the islands and the 2007 cancellation of fishing and oil agreements.

In late 2011, Argentina’s partners in the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) trade bloc – Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay – banned ships flying the Falkland Islands flag from docking in their ports, in solidarity with Argentina’s sovereignty claim.

Other regional bodies and blocs also expressed solidarity with Argentina.

During the government of Carlos Menem (1989-1999), things were “much better (for the islanders) because we had dialogue,” Sawle said. In that period, there were talks regarding fishing and oil and gas production, but the sovereignty question was not discussed.

Sawle responded in the negative when asked whether the islanders thought Argentina’s arguments had any weight at all. “Argentina is chasing a dream. I don’t think it is right in its claim to the islands. I never did, and I never will.”

Argentina is set to become the first country in Latin America to legalise surrogate motherhood as an option for heterosexual and homosexual couples or single people who cannot conceive but want to have a child who is biologically their own.

“It’s been one of the hardest topics in family law,” Marisa Herrera, a lawyer who participated in a thorough reform of the civil code created in 1869, told IPS. Groups of experts worked on redrafting it under the direction of the Supreme Court, following a proposal by President Cristina Fernández.

The project was presented to Congress in early March, and if approved as expected it will make Argentina the first Latin American country to legalise this practice, also known as “rent-a-womb.”

Brazil and Mexico* have laws on surrogacy, but they lack the breadth of scope and the innovative nature of the Argentine bill, experts from those nations told IPS.

The reform bill puts forward a civil code that is much more open in terms of family law. It incorporates the already established right to marriage between persons of the same sex, as well as no-fault divorce, while replacing the concept of parental authority with that of parental responsibility.

But gestational surrogacy was the most complex issue for the experts, Herrera said, mainly because of the criticisms – “some extremely valuable” – from feminists and other groups that fear women who act as birth mothers will be “objectified,” or will be motivated by profit, especially in the case of poorer women.

There are a large number of ads on the internet posted by women from Latin America offering to act as surrogate mothers for a fee, as well as by couples looking for a healthy woman capable of carrying a baby to term in return for health care and economic support.

In Argentina surrogacy is practised, but it is unregulated, as in all other countries in the region. Some couples prefer to travel to countries where the practice is legal, and come back with their baby, but that implies heavy costs that not everyone can afford, resulting in discrimination, Herrera said.

The practice is legal in Australia, Greece, India, Israel, Russia, South Africa, some states in the United States and Canada, and is under consideration in Belgium, Bulgaria, Finland, Iceland and Ireland. In some countries where it is permitted within limits, like Brazil, flexibilisation of the law is being debated.

This information appears in an essay titled “Por qué sí a la regulación de la gestación por sustitución a pesar de todo” (Why gestational surrogacy should be regulated, in spite of everything), by Herrera and two other lawyers who drafted the reform bill, Eleonora Lamm and Aida Kemelmajer.

In it, the experts put forward the reasons for regulating the practice and essential precautions for making it safer.

“I don’t know if this method is ideal, but it exists,” Herrera said. “It is frequently used a lot abroad, and we cannot ignore it. It is better to have a law to regulate and control it, protecting the child above all, but also the surrogate mother and the intended parents who want to have their biological child this way.”

The bill stipulates that gestational surrogacy must be approved by a judge before the embryo is implanted. The judge will require medical and psychological health certificates for the birth mother and her “free, full and informed” consent.

A multidisciplinary team from the court will advise the surrogate mother about the risks and implications of the pregnancy. She will not be able to use her own eggs, and one or both of the intended parents must provide reproductive cells (eggs or sperm). This is to ensure there is no dispute over parentage.

In the view of the experts, “the intended parents must have demonstrated they are incapable of conceiving or carrying a pregnancy to term.”

They also say that in order to avoid becoming a form of “labour imposed by poverty and tolerated by the state,” the surrogate mother can only bear a child for others twice. She should also have at least one child of her own before entering into a surrogacy agreement “to ensure that she understands the seriousness of the commitment.”

The surrogacy agreement must be free of charge. Medical expenses, health care and food may be paid for but they do not alter the altruistic nature of the contract. And even if financial payments are involved, it is anticipated that the limit of two pregnancies will curtail the “business.”

Doctors will not be able to carry out embryo implantation without prior legal permission in every case, according to the bill.

In this way, legal safeguards are provided to all the parties. The child’s parentage is not changed at birth, because the intended parents are legally its parents from the moment the judge authorises the surrogacy, and they are responsible for the child from pregnancy on.

Brazil has no legislation on surrogate motherhood, but the Federal Medical Council has regulated it since 2010. It is allowed only when a couple cannot have a child of their own, and the surrogate mother must be a first- or second-degree relative (such as mother, sister or aunt).

The president of the Commission on Bioethics and Biorights of the Brazilian Bar Association, Bernardo Brasil, told IPS that the constitution forbids traffic in human organs, and “that includes the uterus.” So the regulations prohibit paying a fee to the substitute mother.

The Federal Medical Council allows the payment of medical expenses and the costs involved in the pregnancy, “but a contract cannot be entered into for financial gain. The person who lends her uterus cannot seek to cash in on the arrangement,” he said.

In his view, the Council’s resolution “is limited in nature because it only involves medical practice, but says nothing about the relations between the surrogate mother and the intended mother,” who is a relative, so that litigation about parentage may arise between them.

“There are profound ethical implications and there is still a great deal of resistance from religious groups in Congress. Brazil is experiencing a legal vacuum, because the Medical Council resolution is a provisional measure, but legal guidelines are lacking,” he said.

Mexico, too, lacks a national law on the question. Only the southern state of Tabasco has regulations for surrogate gestation since 1998, without addressing the issue of financial gain.

In 2010 the Mexico City government approved a surrogate gestation law restricted to married heterosexual couples, but it was vetoed. Another bill is currently under debate, although it would only apply in the capital.

Angélica García, the head of the non-governmental Mexican Foundation for Family Planning, told IPS that surrogacy should be “regulated in accordance with sexual and reproductive rights and freedom of choice; scientific information should be provided, the mental and physical health of the surrogate mother must be cared for, and there must be no coercion or blackmail.

“The financial aspects are not the most important. Without clear legislation, we would be left in doubt as to whether surrogacy should be profitable or not. It would be very difficult to decide whether or not a fee should be charged,” García said.

* With additional reporting from Fabíola Ortiz in Rio de Janeiro and Emilio Godoy in Mexico City.

Despite the great strides made in Latin America with tobacco control legislation, the industry deploys a range of strategies to circumvent the restrictions imposed on cigarette advertising, social organisations and experts complain.

With tobacco product advertisements banned in every country in the region, companies are now targeting points of sale in their efforts to increase product visibility, and implementing corporate social responsibility programmes to maintain brand popularity.

These are among the findings of a recent multi-organisation report that looks at case studies from Mexico, Colombia, Argentina and Brazil documenting civil society’s reactions to the tobacco industry’s ploys in 2010-2012.

The report, issued in Spanish under the title “Health is non-negotiable; Civil society addresses the tobacco industry’s strategies in Latin America”, was prepared by the Argentine and Mexican chapters of the Inter-American Heart Foundation (Fundación Interamericana del Corazón, FIC) and Brazil’s Alliance for the Control of Tobacco Use (Aliança de Controle do Tabagismo, ACT), among other organisations.

Mariela Alderete, assistant director of FIC Argentina, told IPS that tobacco companies in her country were taking advantage of the lack of regulations necessary to properly enforce the tobacco control law passed in 2011.

“The regulations would help enormously in covering legal gaps regarding, for example, advertising or no smoking areas,” she said.

Argentina is the only South American nation that has not yet ratified the World Health Organisation’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC), although it was signed by the government in 2003. Pressure from the country’s tobacco-growing provinces has delayed ratification, as they argue that the treaty’s provisions harm their local economies, despite the fact that they export 80 percent of their tobacco.

The report observes that in the last few years “great strides” have been made in the efforts to curb smoking in the region.

“However, the (tobacco) industry is deploying innovative strategies to reach new publics, violating or circumventing health policies” aimed at preventing tobacco-related diseases and deaths.

In some cases, identical strategies are used, repeating the same arguments that have been effectively refuted again and again by health bodies that call for tobacco control.

These strategies are aimed at preventing the passage or enforcement of anti-tobacco laws, says the study, published in late 2012 but virtually ignored by the media.

According to the report, tobacco companies hide behind “front groups,” typically small tobacco-growers, café, restaurant or bar proprietors, convenience store owners and licensed gaming operators, using them to protest these laws by highlighting the negative impacts that smoking limitations allegedly have on their businesses.

They also lobby legislators and other politicians, helping to finance their election campaigns or other initiatives, and they manipulate figures to cast doubt on effective measures for combating the addiction to smoking, such as increasing taxes on tobacco products.

Argentina banned tobacco advertising in 2011, with the exception of points of sale, under the Advertising, Promotion and Consumption of Tobacco Products Act. Last year, the Health Ministry also ordered tobacco companies to display graphic health warnings on their product labels, accompanied by texts such as “Smoking causes cancer” or “Smoking during pregnancy causes irreparable harm to your unborn child”.

But according to Alderete, these warnings are being made light of with the sale of cigarette cases that cover packs almost entirely, leaving only the brand visible and displaying a message that says “Lay off” over the mandatory images.

The creation of regulations for implementing the law has been delayed, among other reasons, because of opposition from the National Lottery, the state agency that controls licensed betting offices. These businesses demand that they be allowed to install air purifiers and ventilation systems and that smoking areas be authorised in their establishments.

“This is what the tobacco industry proposes in its Living Together in Harmony programme, but such systems are known to be ineffective and to violate the right to health of workers and non-smokers. The industry is using the National Lottery as a front” to push its agenda, Alderete said.

In Mexico, tobacco companies fought attempts to raise taxes that affect the price paid by consumers, arguing that increasing taxes would only boost cigarette smuggling, based on figures that contradicted government data.

While tobacco companies claimed in the media and through street campaigns that illegal cigarette imports had increased fivefold, official figures cited in the “Health is non-negotiable” report indicate that smuggling has shrunk “significantly” in recent years.

However, the last few years have also seen a rise in the number of shops and other points of sale that sell loose cigarettes and in some cases to minors, despite the law’s explicit ban, Erick Ochoa, an expert with FIC Mexico, told IPS.

“It’s pointless to ratify the Framework Agreement and have solid legislation if neither instruments are enforced in practice,” Ochoa stressed. “Good intentions are not enough. You need commitment from political leaders willing to draft solid regulations and make sure they’re enforced.”

The industry has also found ways of getting around tobacco control laws in Brazil, which was among the first to ban cigarette ads (in 2000). As the ban does not apply to advertising within points of sale, cigarettes, which were formerly only sold in kiosks, are now sold in bakeries, supermarkets, newsstands and nightclubs.

According to the report, in 2012 the Brazilian branch of the multinational corporation British American Tobacco (BAT) filed a lawsuit against ACT to force it to pull an anti-smoking television spot from the air, but the suit was thrown out of court.
Litigation was also the strategy chosen by the tobacco industry in Uruguay, where smoking is banned by law in all indoor public spaces since 2008 and a 2009 decree requires that health warnings cover 80 percent of the front and back of cigarette packs.

U.S.-based tobacco giant Philip Morris took legal action against the government of Uruguay under the Switzerland-Uruguay Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) at the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, claiming that the South American country’s regulatory measures violated the investment protection agreement signed in 1991 between the two countries.

But the government of the left-wing Frente Amplio coalition is not abandoning its anti-tobacco policy, which began in 2006 under the administration of former president Tabaré Vázquez, an oncologist.

In Colombia, where a full ban on tobacco product advertising and promotion is in force, two claims of unconstitutionality were brought against the ban, arguing that it violates the freedoms of economy and enterprise. But both actions were dismissed.

The tobacco companies operating in the country then focused their strategy on retailers, offering to sponsor activities of the National Federation of Retailers, with events across the country.

This involves financing gatherings of kiosk owners and small shopkeepers and organising contests, discounts, prizes and incentives for the sector. “They even offered university scholarships for their children,” Alderete said.

Non-governmental organisations, however, are more concerned with tobacco company sponsorship of campaigns against child labour, artistic and cultural events, or social reinsertion programmes for demobilised combatants (former left-wing guerrillas or far-right paramilitaries) and their families, which are often carried out in partnership with the state.

This funding explains why it is not uncommon to see cigarette-makers praised in the news for their social contributions.

“It’s a mockery of the absolute ban (on tobacco advertising), and it’s not seen as an advertising strategy,” the report says.

Manuel Cordero, captured on camera in 2009 by a journalist with Uruguay’s Channel 12 violating house arrest in Brazil. Credit: Canal 12

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Mar 5 2013 (IPS)

The trial over a campaign of terror coordinated among the dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America in the 1970s and 1980s began Tuesday in Buenos Aires with former dictator Jorge Rafael Videla as one of the main defendants, along with another 24 former military officers.

Under Operation Condor, as the coordination between the military dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay was known, opponents of the regimes were tracked down, kidnapped, tortured, transferred across borders and killed – including guerrilla fighters, political activists, trade unionists, students, priests, journalists or mothers demanding to know what had happened to their missing sons and daughters.

“This is the first time in Latin America that a trial is being held over Operation Condor, to prosecute those responsible, above and beyond trials held in some countries for specific cases,” lawyer Luz Palmas of the Fundación Liga Argentina por los Derechos Humanos (FUNLADDHH), a human rights organisation, told IPS.

The 25 defendants include Videla and other former generals like Reynaldo Bignone and Luciano Benjamín Menéndez. Uruguayan general Manuel Cordero, prosecuted for the role he played in the illegal detention centre at Automotores Orletti in Buenos Aires, was extradited from Brazil for this trial.

Three of the accused were declared unfit to stand trial for health reasons. Another 15 people under investigation died before the case came to trial.

“Orletti was an operational base for Condor. Foreigners who were kidnapped were taken there, which is why it was decided to take both the cases to oral trial together,” said Palmas, who represents survivors of the torture centre as well as victims of forced disappearance.

The trial that began Tuesday, which could stretch on for up to two years, is for the kidnapping and forced disappearance of 106 people. The largest group of victims were Uruguayans (48), but there were also Argentines, Bolivians, Chileans, Paraguayans and one Peruvian.

The case was initiated in 1999, when the two amnesty laws that put a stop to the prosecution of members of the military for human rights abuses committed during Argentina’s 1976-1983 dictatorship were still in force.

The lawsuit thus invoked forced disappearance as a crime against humanity that was not subject to amnesty.

After the amnesty laws were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2005, along with the presidential pardons of former members of the military junta, the case picked up speed, more victims were included and more people came under investigation.

In the Orletti case, the crimes are illegal detention and torture. Sixty-five victims were identified, some of whom survived and, like Ana Inés Quadros, a Uruguayan citizen, have already testified in an earlier stage of the trial in 2010 against four torturers belonging to the Argentine intelligence services.

At that time, Quadros declared that she was kidnapped in Buenos Aires in July 1976 and taken to Orletti, where she was tortured and raped by Cordero. She was later transferred to an illegal detention centre in Uruguay, and eventually freed.

However, Cordero is only being tried for illegal detention under Operation Condor, and not for the crimes he committed in Orletti, because the Brazilian justice system did not grant extradition for that case.

In the view of Lorena Balardini, research coordinator for the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), a local human rights group, this trial “is the biggest to be held so far in the region over Operation Condor, and could serve as an impetus for other countries where there have been delays or backsliding,” she told IPS.

Balardini said there had been “a setback” in Uruguay. She was referring to a Supreme Court ruling in February this year overturning a lower court verdict to remove the statute of limitations on crimes of the 1973-1985 dictatorship, regarded as crimes against humanity.

“This trial is a way of making these abuses visible and judging them from the viewpoint of coordination between dictatorships,” she said. For this reason, CELS, in its capacity as legal representative of several victims, has focused on key cases in which that coordination is proven.

For example, CELS is representing the families of Marcelo Gelman – the son of Argentine poet Juan Gelman – and his wife María Claudia García Irureta. The couple was kidnapped in Buenos Aires in 1976 at the ages of 20 and 19 respectively, when García was seven months pregnant.

Gelman was killed and his body was identified in 1989, but García was taken from Orletti to Uruguay, where she gave birth to Macarena Gelman, who was finally tracked down at the age of 23 by her grandfather in 2000. García’s body has never been found.

Complaints will also be lodged on behalf of Horacio Campiglia and his secretary Susana Pinus, Argentine citizens who were kidnapped in Galeão airport in Rio de Janeiro in 1980 and were presumed to have been transferred to Argentina, where they disappeared.

In the context of Operation Condor, other famous cases were investigated specifically, such as the murders in Argentina of Uruguayan Congressmen Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz in 1976.

Former Bolivian president Juan José Torres, who took refuge in Argentina after being overthrown by Hugo Banzer in 1971, was also murdered there in 1976.

According to lawyer Carolina Varsky, head of litigation at CELS, these murder cases were not included in the Operation Condor trial in order to evade restrictions imposed by the amnesty laws, and only cases of forced disappearance – considered “ongoing crimes” – were taken up.

As for the central role played by Chile’s DINA, the secret police of late dictator Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), Varsky regretted the lack of progress in prosecuting direct or indirect agents of repression who participated in Operation Condor.

Essential evidence came from Paraguay, where lawyer and journalist Martín Almada discovered in 1992 what are known as the Archives of Terror in a police station in Asunción, containing innumerable documents shedding light on the fate of Operation Condor victims from the seven countries.

Further evidence is contained in declassified documents from the United States State Department, such as a 1976 memo from an FBI agent describing the coordinated actions of South America’s military regimes, which could go “as far as murder.”

Despite the government’s insistence that the purpose of the agreement struck with Iran is merely to investigate the 1994 bombing of the Jewish institution AMIA, as the Argentine parliament voted its ratification, discussions focused on geopolitics and the country’s position in the changing international scenario.

Following the Senate’s approval last week, Argentina’s House of Representatives voted early Thursday to adopt a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed with Iran to unblock the judicial inquiry into the terrorist attack against the Argentine-Israelite Mutual Aid Association (AMIA), which left 85 people dead and more than 300 injured.

After much debate, the agreement was finally ratified without the support of any legislators from the opposition.

The Iranian parliament still has to ratify the agreement, which will allow Argentine federal judges to travel to Tehran to question five Iranian nationals accused of planning the bombing, for whom at Argentina’s request Interpol had issued red notices (arrest warrants) in 2007.

The opposition’s greatest objection to the agreement is the establishment of a truth commission that will be formed by five independent legal experts, none of them from Argentina or Iran, to examine the legal proceedings conducted in Argentina and issue a non-binding opinion to the parties.

Among victims and relatives of the victims, positions are divided between those who see the agreement as a step back and those who view it as an opportunity, however uncertain, to move forward in a case that is at a standstill due to lack of cooperation from Iran.

Tehran has challenged the evidence allegedly found by Argentine prosecutors against the Iranian nationals and refuses to extradite the suspects.

One of the suspects is Iran’s current Defence Minister Ahmad Vahidi, who, despite the Interpol red notices against him, travelled to Bolivia in 2010 to meet with President Evo Morales.

As she announced the MoU, Argentina’s central-left president, Cristina Fernández — who in the past had taken a firm stand before the United Nations General Assembly demanding that Iran comply with the extraditions– vowed she “would never allow the AMIA tragedy to be used as a pawn in a geopolitical game of chess played out by foreign interests.”

With this move, however, Argentina distances itself from the Western powers that are pressuring Iran to abandon its uranium enrichment programme through economic sanctions, but without ruling out military actions, which is what Israel is openly proposing.

“Argentina is not taking a neutral stance with this agreement. On the contrary, to Western eyes the memorandum constitutes an implicit alliance with Iran,” Argentine political scientist Andrés Malamud, a researcher at the University of Lisbon’s Institute of Social Sciences, told IPS.

According to Malamud, the foreign policy pursued by Fernández and her predecessor, her late husband Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007), had been marked until now by a tacit understanding with the United States.

Under that agreement, Washington backed Argentina’s efforts in multilateral financial institutions in exchange for Buenos Aires’ support in the fight against terrorism. “The AMIA case served as a kind of guarantee for that non-written pact,” Malamud said.

“From now on, though, Argentina’s foreign policy will be viewed as anti-West. It’s not a position that can’t be reversed, and the consequences are not yet serious. But it’s no longer up to our country, which is now tied to decisions that will made in Washington, Tehran and Jerusalem,” the expert said.

For Malamud, the Fernández administration’s argument is simple: the investigation is blocked and the agreement is the only possibility it has of making any progress. But, “what is the leading consequence of this high risk move that has low chances of success?” he asked.

“The answer is Argentina’s realignment in the international scenario, distancing itself from the West and moving closer to the South or to emerging powers, in Argentina’s official version, or to pariah states, in the opposing Western version,” Malamud said.

The agreement would also seem to align Argentina more closely with its counterparts in South America, namely Venezuela, Ecuador and Brazil.

In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez has always been clear in his support to the Iranian regime, as has been Ecuador’s Rafael Correa and to a lesser extent Brazil’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011).

In 2010, the government of then President Lula da Silva joined Turkey in an attempt to mediate with Iran in the controversy over Tehran’s nuclear programme, but the initiative was rejected by the United Nations Security Council by a “humiliating 12 votes against two,” Malamud recalled.

“Some see the alliance with Iran as beneficial for Argentina because it opens up markets, can be a source of technology or can give legitimacy to the country in the new international order that is being forged. But the most recent precedent in this sense, (the attempted mediation) by Brazil and Turkey, was not a positive one,” he said.

Brazil and Venezuela voted against Argentina’s request for red notices at Interpol’s General Assembly. Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, however, adopted a less enthusiastic stance on this issue and did not meet with her Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, when he attended the Rio+20 summit in 2012.

Legislators of Argentina’s governing party, such as Senator Daniel Filmus, insisted on highlighting that ratifying the agreement in no way entails supporting a regime that denies the Holocaust, refuses to recognise Israel’s right to exist as a state, or persecutes minorities.

But the agreement is trapped in an international scenario that forces its players to adopt positions. While the powers of the Western Hemisphere pressure Iran to drop its nuclear programme, Argentina offers Tehran a possibility for an understanding between the two countries, without any guarantee that it will bring results in the AMIA investigation.

As Argentina’s Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman cautioned, the agreement could fall apart if the suspects refuse to be questioned. Although he added that they would also have that right if the investigation was conducted in Argentina, and that has not been possible so far.

“The agreement will have to be judged based on its results,” Malamud said.

“If the inquiry commission achieves something substantial, the government will score a point. If the West sinks under an economic Armageddon, it also scores,” because Argentina will have forged ties with energy producing countries, he said.

“But if the United States or Israel bomb Iran and defeat it, Argentina will be forced to go back two spaces,” he said.

He does not rule out any of these possibilities or that the Argentine government will have to “pay a very high political price” if it fails.

An agreement between Argentina and Iran to dig deeper into a 1994 bomb attack on a Jewish community centre in this city will test the solidity of the evidence garnered by a judicial investigation that has ground to a halt because of lack of cooperation from Tehran.

A memorandum of understanding between the two countries, to be debated in the lower chamber of Congress after being approved Thursday by a narrow margin in the senate, would allow Iranian citizens suspected of participating in the attack to be interrogated in their country by Argentine federal justice officials.

If the memorandum is approved, it will not be the first time that Argentine judges travel abroad to investigate suspects who cannot be extradited. But this case, under Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral, is in need of guarantees to avoid the desired shortcut to end impunity from turning into a cul-de-sac.Argentina is playing its last card.

The agreement awaiting ratification by the Argentine parliament also provides for the creation of a truth commission made up of international legal experts, who will rule on the legitimacy of the judicial process, although their conclusions will not be binding.

Investigations carried out so far by the Argentine justice system indicate that the attack on the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA, Israeli-Argentine Mutual Aid Association), which destroyed the centre, killing 85 people and injuring over 300, may have been planned by officials and diplomats in Tehran and carried out by a member of the Lebanese Shi’ite group Hezbollah (Party of God) acting with Iranian funding.

In November 2007 the Interpol General Assembly issued a “red notice” international arrest warrant requested by Argentina for Iranian citizens Ali Fallahian, Mohsen Rezai, Ahmad Vahidi, Mohsen Rabbani and Ahmad Reza Asghari. Lebanese citizen Imad Fayez Mughniyah, killed in Syria in 2008, is also wanted.

Vahidi is the current minister of defence in Iran, and Rezai is a presidential candidate in the forthcoming June elections.

Iran has persistently refused to extradite those accused. It also refused a previous Argentine proposal to hold a trial in a third country, after the example of Libyans accused of planning the bomb explosion aboard a passenger airplane belonging to former U.S. airline Pan Am over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, who were tried in a court in the Netherlands.

Given the lack of cooperation from Iran, repeatedly denounced by Argentina in successive United Nations general assemblies, the centre-left government of President Cristina Fernández came to this bilateral agreement.

Fernández, who sent the initiative to Congress on Feb. 8, said the memorandum is “a very important step to unblock a case that was absolutely immobilised, without any possibility of interrogating the accused by Argentine justice.”

The pact is rejected by most opposition parties and by some Jewish community organisations in Argentina, who fear a trap on the part of Iran that would claw back what little advances have been made in justice. But relatives of the victims and Amnesty International applauded the road now taken by Buenos Aires.

Human rights watchdog Amnesty International, based in London, said in a communiqué issued Thursday that the memorandum “creates an opportunity to move forward towards justice and reparations for the victims of the attack on AMIA.”

Both Iran and Argentina must guarantee that the rules of procedure of the Truth Commission are made public and comply with international standards, it said.

The most controversial chapter of the agreement, in the view of the opposition, is the creation of a Truth Commission made up of five legal experts, from countries other than Iran and Argentina, that will scrutinise the evidence in the investigation against the accused, and will issue rulings, although these will not be binding.

“There are precedents for Argentine judges travelling abroad to carry out investigations, but this is not just another case, because here there will be a commission to rule on whether the evidence collected by Argentine justice is relevant or not,” lawyer and academic Guillermo Jorge, a professor at the private University of San Andrés, told IPS.

“Argentina is playing its last card. I see no alternative to this way forward in the case,” said Jorge, the director of the Centre for Transparency and Corruption Control at his university, where proposals for international judicial assistance for clarifying crimes involving more than one country are created and studied.

The legal expert recalled the case of the 1974 attack in which former Chilean army commander Carlos Prats and his wife, Sofia Cuthbert, were killed. Judge María Servini, in charge of that investigation, travelled abroad to collect evidence and question the accused in that crime.

Servini’s work in Chile and the United States contributed to proving that the attack was ordered by secret police agents of the Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) and carried out by U.S. agent Michael Townley, as he himself confessed as a protected witness in his country.

Recently, judge Ariel Lijo travelled to Germany to collect evidence in a case against executives of the transnational company Siemens, accused of paying bribes to Argentine officials to obtain a billion-dollar contract for manufacturing identity documents in 1998.

On the basis of the information gathered in a wider investigation carried out by the German justice system on bribery undertaken by Siemens in different countries, Lijo requested the arrest of a group of executives of the company. Germany refused their extradition, but judge Lijo is preparing to travel there to question the suspects.

According to Jorge, the controversy in the case of the attack on AMIA arose because although the Argentine justice system considers the evidence accumulated in the investigation to be sufficient to justify interrogating the suspects, in the view of Iran it is weak and insufficient.

The Iranian government maintains that the evidence is based on intelligence reports from other countries and the testimony of allegedly repentant criminals; hence the refusal of the extradition requests. However, it has accepted the memorandum, which introduces a new actor in the controversy, that is, the Truth Commission.

“Although Argentine judges can disregard its conclusions, the commission of experts can rule that the evidence is sufficient and sound, and that will carry political weight. Later on, a court will assess the testimony and decide whether or not to proceed. It will be an advance in terms of the prosecutions,” Jorge said.

The other possible scenario, he said, is that the commission rejects the evidence. “Some legal experts dislike evidence based on intelligence reports answering to political interests,” Jorge said. Argentina has a precedent that does not work in its favour, he said.

In 2003, one of the Iranian suspects, Hadi Soleimanpour, was detained at the University of Durham in the United Kingdom on an Interpol warrant for his arrest pending extradition to Argentina. He was a former ambassador for his country in Buenos Aires at the time of the AMIA attack.

But after analysing the Argentine case against him, Soleimanpour was freed by British justice due to lack of evidence about his participation in the attack, according to the presiding judge. Iran claims this is proof of impropriety in the prosecution’s case.

Interpol stopped pursuing the diplomat after his brief detention and appearance before a London court.

However, Argentina argues that there have been great strides in evidence collection since then. Furthermore, the judge formerly in charge of the case was Juan José Galeano, who was dismissed from his post in 2005 because of serious irregularities committed in the investigation of the attack’s “local connection.”