Indigenous groups in Chile celebrated a recent court ruling that represented the latest victory in the struggle for respect for their right to be previously consulted about major projects which directly affect their communities.

On Apr. 27, the Supreme Court upheld an earlier decision by an appeals court, which had cancelled the environmental permit granted to the Canadian mining giant Goldcorp for its El Morro gold and copper mine in the northern Chilean region of Atacama.

The company reported that it had brought all work at El Morro to a halt, in line with the verdict handed down by the Court, which ordered it to consult with the small Diaguita de los Huascoaltinos indigenous agricultural community before carrying out any activity in their territory.

Goldcorp owns 70 percent of the El Morro open pit mine, a 3.9-billion-dollar 14-year project that is expected to produce 2,200 tons of copper concentrate per day in the Huasco Valley.

If it goes ahead, the project will affect 2,500 hectares stretching from the Andes mountains to the Pacific coast, including large swaths of land belonging to the Diaguita native community.

The Court also ruled that the company must carry out a more thorough environmental impact assessment, which must also take into account the resettlement of local communities and effects on the traditional way of life of the Diaguita Indians.

In addition, the verdict stated that the company violated International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention 169 Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, Chile’s Indigenous Law, and the United Nations Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

“The sentence in the El Morro case reflects legal precedents in Chile guaranteeing respect for the right to prior consultation of indigenous people with regard to measures that directly affect them, according to the ILO convention,” Consuelo Labra, a lawyer with the Citizen’s Observatory, the organisation that sponsored the legal action, told IPS.

According to ILO Convention 169, which establishes the right of native peoples to be previously consulted on matters affecting their territories and way of life, such as mining, oil or infrastructure projects, the Chilean state must carry out the consultation. However, the process has not yet been adequately regulated in this South American country.

“In late 2009, when the government of Michelle Bachelet (2006-2010) was coming to an end, decree-law 124 established a temporary regulation. But it ended up standing in the way of the implementation of consultation processes,” Hernando Silva, the head of the Citizen’s Observatory legal area, told IPS.

The expert added that in this respect, Chile lags far behind other mineral-rich countries in the region like Peru and Bolivia, which have adopted their own national laws on prior consultation.

But indigenous organisations have taken their struggle to court, and won, in a number of cases.

“We need neither the mining company nor the government for our own development,” said Sergio Campusano, president of the Diaguita de los Huascoaltinos agricultural community. “As a community, we are involved in several initiatives, such as the development of a private protected natural area, which will be the largest indigenous nature reserve in northern Chile.”

Campusano said the mining project not only affects the environment, but also the native community’s own development plans.

“In this initiative, our slogan is that we are ‘guardians of nature’, because that is what we are – it is in our nature. Mining projects do not fit here,” he said.

“We aren’t people who live around a mining project; the mine came and installed itself at the very centre of our ancestral territory,” he said.

The Supreme Court ruling in the El Morro case was not unprecedented.

For the past three years, indigenous communities around the country have filed legal action demanding compliance with ILO Convention 169.

The first case was won by a Mapuche community in the southern city of Lanco, who were not consulted with respect to the construction of a garbage dump near their homes.

Another victory involved a controversial wind farm on Chiloé Island in southern Chile, which the Supreme Court halted due to the company’s failure to properly consult with local Mapuche communities.

“The El Morro case is the result of all of these processes,” said Silva.

After the ruling was handed down, Goldcorp said it would meet with the Environmental Evaluation Service to see what steps to take now.

But experts say the opposition of indigenous communities and the requirement that consultation processes be carried out make it unlikely that the El Morro mining project will continue in the short to medium term. (END)

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

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, May 11 2012 (IPS)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ghost mining town in Coahuila, Mexico. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

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

The controversial concept of degrowth receives little press coverage in a region like Latin America. But the idea of a way of life that is not aimed exclusively at GDP growth does have its proponents in Argentina.

As in other countries of the region, the Argentine perspective on degrowth differs somewhat from that of academics and civil society organisations in the industrialised world, according to sources consulted by Tierramérica.

The threat of a systemic global crisis with various dimensions – environmental, economic, energy-related – will be on the discussion table at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), taking place Jun. 20-22 in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro.

For advocates of degrowth, it has become clear that sustainable development will not succeed in averting environmental collapse or enhancing social justice, the goals set forth 20 years ago at the 1992 Earth Summit, also held in Rio.

Degrowth in the Americas, an international conference taking place in Montreal, Canada on May 13-19, seeks to challenge and move beyond the sustainable development agenda, drawing on previous degrowth conferences in Paris and Barcelona in 2008 and 2010, respectively.

One of the best-known proponents of degrowth, French philosopher and economist Serge Latouche, says that the movement is aimed primarily at promoting a shift away from the pursuit of “growth for growth’s sake”. It would actually be better to speak of “agrowth” instead of degrowth, just as one speaks of atheism, he believes.

Degrowth supporters call for a controlled and rational decrease in consumption and production, in a way that respects the climate, ecosystems and human beings themselves.

Nevertheless, Latouche stresses that degrowth is not a concrete alternative, but rather a matrix of multiple alternatives. Obviously, any concrete proposal or counterproposal is both necessary and problematic, he adds.

In Argentina, “degrowth is not covered by the media, nor does it form part of academic courses in political economy. But it exists, especially now, on the threshold of the Rio+20 conference,” social scientist Julio Gambina told Tierramérica.

In Latin America, “where economic growth was deified in the 1990s, degrowth gets bad press,” added Gambina, a professor of political economy at the National University of Rosario and president of the Social and Policy Research Foundation of Argentina. In his opinion, “it would be better discuss how growth is achieved.”

A number of Latin American countries, he noted, have achieved economic growth on the basis of “an extractivist model of production,” which increases GDP at the cost of the intensive use of natural resources that are gradually being exhausted.

Examples include large-scaling mining, which involves the use of cyanide and causes major environmental impacts, or the expansion of monoculture plantations of soybeans for export, at the expense of diversified rural production.

Gambina pointed to the case of Brazil, where organisations affiliated to the international network Via Campesina challenge this model and call for greater support for peasant agriculture and the productive practices of indigenous and traditional communities, which are less destructive to natural resources. But these groups “have no visibility,” he said.

In the countries of Latin America, there is generally little resistance to the pursuit of growth. “Degrowth is primarily associated with economies that are in crisis, like those of Europe,” he explained.

Statistician María Elena Saludas, national coordinator of ATTAC (the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and Aid to Citizens), commented that “the debate over the impossibility of continuing to pursue limitless economic growth in the framework of a finite planet dates back to the 1960s.”

The conception of sustainable development that began to be heavily promoted at the 1992 Earth Summit does not question the global power structure or the capitalist system, whose leitmotiv is profit, said Saludas.

The same can be said of the so-called “green economy” now being energetically promoted by the United Nations, which is organising Rio+20.

“What we should be discussing,” she said, “is the fact that this economic model cannot be sustained.”

Saludas is critical of the expansion of monoculture production and the heavy dependence of Latin American economies on the export of raw materials. She also warns of the limits of the expansion of the automotive industry, in countries like Argentina and Brazil. “A car for everyone is not sustainable. We need to work towards more efficient and collective transportation,” she said.

In her opinion, the current GDP growth in Latin America is generating “extreme inequality” between rich and poor. Those at the so-called bottom of the pyramid “are barely surviving.” As such, “we cannot tell them that they should be opposed to growth.”

She prefers to highlight experiences like that of Bolivia, where a movement of indigenous peoples advocates the pursuit of “buen vivir” or “living well”, in harmony with nature and not at the cost of natural resources or other members of society.

Saludas said she is enthusiastic about the theory of degrowth, although “not as a proposal for individual changes in behavior, but rather for each community to find a way of experiencing this way of life.”

For his part, Gambina has qualms about a debate which, at least in the way it is currently formulated, is unlikely to gain new supporters.

“Whether the discussion of degrowth will achieve a greater impact remains to be seen. There are groups pushing for a different kind of development, which challenge the prevailing model of production, but they don’t have a favorable cultural environment,” he said.

The pursuit of growth persists as the consensus ideology in the region, which is why the degrowth debate has not gained widespread support, Gambina stressed. He believes the emphasis should not be on “degrowing” but rather on “growing in a different way.” “We need to support family farming, local production and distribution,” as well as challenging the currently prevailing means of measuring development through GDP, he said.

“GDP only counts what is created, and doesn’t subtract what is destroyed,” he explained. “Perhaps there are cases where GDP is lower, as in Cuba or Venezuela, but quality of life or the distribution of wealth improves. Social well-being is not necessarily tied to economic growth,” he said.

*The writer is an IPS correspondent. This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, May 9 2012 (IPS)

Global rights watchdog Amnesty International presented an Argentine court Wednesday with documents which show that Spanish courts are blocking lawsuits brought by the families of victims of human rights crimes committed during the 1936-1939 civil war and the 1939-1975 dictatorship of General Francisco Franco.

The report was presented by the president of the Spanish chapter of Amnesty, Esteban Beltrán, to the federal judge who is investigating Franco-era human rights abuses in response to legal action brought by the families of victims, based on the principle of universal justice.

Beltrán told IPS that “in Spain, all of the doors are being closed to the victims who are seeking justice, truth and reparations for forced disappearances, systematic torture and extrajudicial executions.”

“We have come to urge the Argentine justice system to continue investigating, and we have provided documents demonstrating that this work is not being done in Spain, and that the cases are systematically shelved without a single paper being moved,” he said.

In 2006, human rights groups in Spain provided the Audiencia Nacional – the national high court – with evidence that the number of forced disappearances during the civil war and the Franco regime totalled at least 114,000, and that some 30,000 babies and toddlers were stolen from their parents.

Internationally renowned Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón, a former Audiencia Nacional magistrate, was disbarred for attempting to investigate these crimes in Spain.

Garzón had based his investigation on the principle of universal jurisdiction, which states the crimes against humanity, genocide and terrorism are not subject to statutes of limitation or amnesties and can be tried at any time in any place.

He had invoked the same principle when he attempted, while amnesty laws were still in force in Chile and Argentina, to prosecute former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and others involved in the forced disappearance, torture and murder of thousands of people committed in the 1970s and 1980s by the dictatorships in these South American countries.

Although in February, Spain’s Supreme Court found Garzón not guilty of overstepping the bounds of his jurisdiction, it criticised his interpretation of international human rights law, and said he was wrong to start investigating human rights crimes in Spain because the 1977 amnesty was still in effect for human rights violations committed during the dictatorship.

But the Supreme Court disbarred him for 11 years in a separate case, involving illegal wiretapping in a high-profile prosecution for corruption. He is thus unable to continue investigating human rights crimes in Spain.

The report that Beltrán presented to Argentine Judge María Servini analyses 21 of the 47 cases that the Audiencia Nacional referred to provincial courts, and concludes that nearly all of them were simply shelved, with no action being taken.

Only in two cases were measures taken to exhume bodies from some of the hundreds of unmarked common graves scattered around Spain, identify the remains, and hand them over to surviving family members, the report states. But after this was done, these cases were also blocked, it adds.

The aim of the Amnesty report, titled “Closed Cases, Open Wounds”, is to show that the victims have been abandoned by the justice system in Spain, where these crimes have never been investigated, the human rights group says.

It states that “the rights to truth, justice and reparations for the victims of crimes under international law committed during the civil war and the Franco era continue to be denied in Spain.”

The report openly contradicts the Spanish government’s response to Judge Servini in June 2011, when she was informed that according to Spain’s attorney general’s office, cases involving Franco-era human rights crimes were being prosecuted in that country.

But Amnesty International’s investigation gave rise to a very different conclusion, says the report, which underscores the reluctance of provincial courts in Spain to take action, and their readiness to shelve the cases, while citing new violations of rights that they thereby commit.

“There is a clear violation of the right to justice” due to the failure to investigate the charges, the lack of respect for the right of victims’ relatives to find out the truth, and the denial of the right to reparations, says Amnesty International Spain.

The courts also failed, the report adds, to notify the families of the decision to dismiss the cases after taking virtually no action on them.

In addition, Amnesty questions the legal arguments cited by the courts.

Although the lawsuits involve crimes against humanity, the courts in Spain have argued that the statute of limitations has run out on the crimes or the 1977 amnesty law is still in place, or they have dismissed the cases on the grounds that all of those allegedly responsible are dead.

“Amnesty International considers that Spain is failing to fulfil its international obligations,” states the report, before urging the Argentine courts to continue investigating the crimes committed in Spain.

The legal action in Argentina was filed in April 2010 by Inés García Holgado and Darío Rivas, relatives of victims of Franco-era repression. They have since been joined in the lawsuit by the family members of other victims.

Carlos Slepoy, an Argentine lawyer based in Spain who represents several of the plaintiffs, told IPS that the lawsuit so far involves 20 cases. But he said the number could climb “into the hundreds” as relatives of other victims join in the legal action.

Slepoy said political prisoners who were arrested for their political or trade union activities and affiliations during the final stage of the regime have also come to Buenos Aires to testify in court, bringing powers of attorney enabling them to represent other victims.

Judge Servini plans to travel to Madrid in June to take depositions in the Argentine Embassy from survivors of the repression or family members of victims who wish to join the lawsuit as plaintiffs.

An educational stimulus programme launched in Argentina is aimed at doubling the number of engineering graduates by 2021, in an attempt to fulfil unmet growing demand from industry.

The goal set by a Strategic Engineering Plan drafted by the Education Ministry and the Federal Council of Deans of Engineering Faculties (CONFEDI) is to increase the average annual number of graduates from around 5,000 today to 7,500 by 2016 and 10,000 by 2021.

“Today we only meet 50 percent of industry’s demand,” said CONFEDI president Jorge Del Gener, the dean of the Avellaneda Regional Faculty of the National Technological University.

Del Gener told IPS that “with the economic development that Argentina is experiencing today, the boom in industry, and full employment for students, there just aren’t enough graduates.”

He added that it was necessary to stimulate interest in engineering, and take measures to ensure that engineering students continue their studies until they earn a degree.

The head of CONFEDI said advanced students are recruited by companies at an average starting salary of 9,000 pesos a month (some 2,000 dollars) before they graduate, which delays their studies or even keeps them from completing their degrees.

To turn that tendency around and cater to demand, the Education Ministry and CONFEDI propose, in first place, to awaken interest in engineering among secondary school students.

“The number of people who apply to study the different branches of engineering has basically remained steady for a long time,” Del Gener said. “We believe that is because there is a myth that engineering programmes are very difficult and very long, with a great deal of mathematics.”

To change that negative image, a publicity campaign was designed for the Education Ministry’s 24-hour Encuentro TV station, as well as a spot that will be aired during professional football matches on the channel 7 public TV station.

The ad will show the engineering works underway in Argentina, and the important role that engineering students play, in terms of contributing to the country’s development, Del Gener explained.

A new effort has also begun to strengthen links between secondary schools and universities. The Education Ministry has created a financing plan so that each engineering department will begin to build relationships with a score of nearby secondary schools.

“We want students to see the work and the tests that are done in laboratories,” Del Gener said. “Because since the 1990s, many high schools no longer have laboratories, or offer training in technology.”

CONFEDI also drew up a document to show secondary school students the math skills they need, in order to be admitted to engineering departments.

With respect to the advanced students who join the labour market before they graduate, Del Gener said that many of them fail to complete the final three or four courses, and give up after working for a year or a year and a half.

“They tell us it is frowned upon in the companies to ask for a day off to study for or take an exam,” he said. “That’s why we met with (authorities in) the Ministry of Industry, so it will intercede with the companies to get them to make it easier for their employees to complete their studies.”

In Argentina, there are 21 engineering degrees. The most popular are in chemical, industrial, civil, mechanical, electronic, electrical, metallurgical, materials and systems engineering.

There are also petroleum, mining, and nuclear energy engineering degrees, although the numbers of students in these programmes are much smaller. However, the recovery of state control over YPF, Argentina’s biggest oil company, will increase the influx of students into these degree programmes, Del Gener said.

The government of Cristina Fernández is seizing a controlling stake in YPF from Spain’s Repsol.

The dean also said they are working with the Women in Engineering Forum to fight the myth that engineering is for men. Currently, he said, there are more women than men studying chemical engineering, while there are equal numbers of women and men in industrial engineering programmes.

Del Gener said that CONFEDI is not worried that the campaign to foment interest in engineering will trigger a large influx of engineers from countries in crisis, such as European nations.

“The shortage of engineers is a problem in Latin America as a whole, and around the world. My department has exchange programmes with France, and when the scholarships end, our students are hired to work there,” he said.

To keep students from leaving Argentina after receiving a tuition-free education financed by the state, his department now has students sign an agreement promising to return and share their experience with their colleagues for four years, after their scholarships abroad end.

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, May 9 2012 (IPS)

Clean, renewable energies contribute to economic growth and job creation while decreasing dependency on imports. This is why governments should be increasing incentives for the development of renewable energy during a crisis like the one facing Europe today, German engineer Björn Pieprzyk told Tierramérica.

Even skeptics believe renewable energies could cover half of Germany’s energy demand by 2050, says Björn Pieprzyk. Credit: Courtesy of Björn Pieprzyk

Clean energy sources play a key role in combating climate change and developing a greener economy, said Pieprzyk, a consultant with the Bundesverband Erneuerbare Energie (BEE), or German Renewable Energy Federation.

In an interview in Rio de Janeiro at one of the numerous events being held prior to the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), which will take place in June in this Brazilian city, Pieprzyk told Tierramérica that Germany should be able to meet all of its energy needs with renewable sources by 2050.

This is one of the goals of BEE, founded in 1991 as the political umbrella organisation of the renewable energy sector in Germany. It now comprises 22 associations from the hydropower, wind, biomass, solar and geothermal energy sectors, representing a total of over 30,000 individual members and companies.

But a transition is needed from the existing energy system, based on hydrocarbon fuels such as coal, gas and oil, to these cleaner, renewable sources. This will require cutting subsidies for fossil and atomic energies, stressed Pieprzyk, who is also a co-founder of the Energy Research Architecture consulting firm.

Q: How do you see the discussion of renewable energies in the context of the Rio+20 conference? A: Developments in the last 20 years have shown that renewable energies are the most important contributor for climate protection worldwide. We can continue with this growth, but for the future we need to make a transition from the existing energy system, and we need a level playing field to cut subsidies for fossil and atomic energies. Renewable energies need new incentives.

We need standards to monitor the real costs of fossil energy in the future. I expect clear and strong standards in the field of sustainability and social development. That means clear conditions for development where renewable energies shall play an important part.

Q: What is the potential for renewable energies in Germany? A: Renewable energies account for 12 percent of the energy system. We are using about 20 percent renewable energy in the electricity sector, nine percent in the heating sector and six percent in fuels. It is still a small percentage in comparison to fossil energies.

But the potentials are very high, especially in the solar energy sector, but also biofuel and hydropower. Germany will be able to cover 100 percent of its energy needs with renewable energies before 2050; in 30 to 40 years it will be possible to achieve these goals.

This is the aim of our federation, although the majority of the German population and the government are less optimistic and expect that half of the energy demand in 2050 will be covered by renewable energies.

Q: Are renewable energies economically viable today? A: In the last 10 years in Germany, the cost of renewable energy – wind and solar – decreased very fast. Nowadays the costs of renewable energy are close to fossil fuel prices to produce electricity. Atomic energy plants are much more expensive than renewable energies.

By next year, the cost to produce solar power in private households will be less than the price that they are paying now. A private household now has to pay about 25 euro cents (roughly 32 cents of a dollar) per kilowatt/hour. The price of solar power now is already less than this amount of money. This energy will be competitive.

Q: Are the other countries of the European Union (EU) following this path of replacing fossil fuels with renewable energies? A: Germany is ahead, but some other countries are following this path and have much better conditions to use renewable energies. The UK and Ireland have a lot of sun in the south.

It is possible for the whole of Europe to follow this path and achieve goals in the next decades. But there is a need for more political and legal incentives in some sectors, especially the electricity sector.

Q: What has been the impact of the economic crisis on renewable energies in the EU? A: In Germany investments in renewable energies are still stable, but there are some plans to cut support for solar energy. There are a lot of decentralised jobs in the whole country. In Germany it is a priority, and big companies like Siemens are earning a lot.

Private sector investment is about 25 billion euros (33 billion dollars) per year. The government has support programmes for heating systems that come to less than half a billion euros (660 million dollars). Nearly all of the money is coming from companies. Germany and Europe can become less dependent on energy imports, and renewable energies are already an important factor for economic growth and increasing rates of employment.

The problem is if governments react like Spain and Italy, cutting state support and legal incentives which are important at this point when renewable energies are so close to being competitive.

Q: How do you see the situation of renewable energies in emerging countries like Brazil? A: Traditionally Brazil has a lot of experience in the use of hydropower and biomass to produce biofuels (such as ethanol). It is a leading country in this sector and is now starting to use wind energy and solar power. It has an advantage for those two energies, since at the moment the price is much lower than ten years ago.

There is a great possibility for Brazil to increase the percentage of renewable energy rapidly – for private households, companies and the whole economy. They also have possibilities to use modern technologies that are environmentally friendly and competitive.

However, Latin American countries still pay double the price in comparison to Europe for renewable energy. There are several reasons for that, for example, because it is a new market. There are now negotiations for new wind farms in Brazil that can produce energy for around six cents per kilowatt/hour.

But for companies to invest you need clear conditions for renewable energy. You need stable conditions for investors.

*The writer is an IPS correspondent. This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Excerpt:

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, May 8 2012 (IPS)

The vital role of women in creating a green economy will be highlighted at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, to be held in Brazil in June.

Rebecca Tavares: "Women's leadership should help the transition towards a green economy." Credit: Courtesy of U.N. Women

Women’s contributions are essential for environmental management, food production and social reproduction, as well as the transition to a green economy, Rebecca Tavares, regional director of U.N. Women for Brazil and the Southern Cone region, told IPS.

This is especially true in rural areas, where women take the lead in climate change adaptation and mitigation activities in farming work. But their rights and their contribution to development continue to be negated, she said.

Q: What will happen at the Women Leaders’ Forum to be held at Rio+20? A: The Forum will bring together women, governments, civil society organisations, academics and the private sector to discuss and reaffirm the centrality of gender equality and women’s empowerment for the achievement of sustainable development in its three dimensions.

There will be a Call to Action supported by U.N. Women and female heads of state to incorporate new ideas, best practices, innovative proposals and visions for the future.

Q: How can women make a difference at Rio+20? A: Sustainable development implies a global compact of laws, policies and standards on gender equity, while at the same time responding to new problems, challenges and opportunities.

Action plans must include mechanisms for implementing a green economy, and must recognise the leadership role of women, and their voice and participation, as key factors to ensure sustainable development.

Q: What is your view of women’s role in relation to climate change? A: One-quarter of the world’s female population lives in rural areas. These women are leaders, decision-makers, workers, businesswomen and service providers. That is why their contribution is vital for the welfare of their families and communities, as well as for the local and national economies.

Gender equality and the empowerment of women are crucial for achieving the three pillars of sustainable development: economic, social and environmental. Where women’s rights and access to resources are ensured, women are powerful agents of change in this direction.

Women play a pre-eminent role in environmental management, food production and social reproduction.

Many also have traditional knowledge that contributes to conscientious use of resources like soil, water and energy. Therefore it is essential to develop training programmes for women in sustainable development techniques, to perfect their knowledge.

Q: How can women contribute to the eradication of poverty and hunger? A: Women’s leadership should help the transition towards growth in a green economy. However, the rights of women who are small farmers, for instance, and their contributions and priorities are still looked down on.

Women can be agents of change through access to the labour market and educational opportunities.

Q: What actions is U.N. Women carrying out in Brazil? A: We have assistance and empowerment programmes for indigenous women, black women living in “quilombos” (communities originally established by escaped slaves) and women working in the extractive industries.

A programme has been developed by the Brazilian government in partnership with U.N. Women, to promote South-South technical cooperation with African, Latin American and Caribbean countries, with the support of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

The goal of the plan is to consolidate best practices and experiences in Brazil, in order to promote gender equality and spread these actions in the social and economic spheres.

Q: What kind of initiatives is U.N. Women involved in to help empower Brazilian women? A: Since 2008, U.N. Women has supported work with rural women who are small farmers.

One of these programmes, “Chapéu de Palha” (Straw Hat), has been carried out in the northeastern state of Pernambuco, in conjunction with the state’s Secretariat for Women’s Policies. The aim is to improve nutrition and the general quality of life in the communities, and to carry out educational and reforestation activities.

Over 28,000 Pernambucan women have benefited since the inception of this plan nearly four years ago, and the programme has received 50,000 dollars from U.N. Women in 2011-2012.

Moreover, in 2010 the Pernambuco state Plan for Public Policies for Rural Women was created, the first of its kind in Brazil.

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By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, May 8 2012 (IPS)

A year after the Raúl Castro government approved a programme of changes and measures aimed at making the Cuban economic model sustainable, the slow pace of implementation is a focus of debate and criticism even among its supporters, who believe it should move forward more rapidly.

In April 2011, the Sixth Congress of the ruling Communist Party (PCC) officially approved the “Economic and Social Policy Guidelines of the Party and the Revolution,” with more than 300 short-, medium- and long-term policy goals. Some were already being implemented at the time, others were initiated in the months that followed and many are still waiting to be put into action.

“The changes should be sped up in some economic sectors,” economist Pável Vidal told IPS. “The best candidates for obtaining immediate significant results” through the new policies appear to be non-state forms of organising small-scale production, he said.

“Unlike large companies, small and medium-sized enterprises, together with cooperatives and agricultural producers, comprise a group that has a lot of flexibility and less inertia, no bureaucracy that is resisting changes, and a large capacity for adapting to a new framework of incentives,” Vidal said.

Among non-state forms of production, Cuban authorities are prioritising cooperatives, although new legislation announced for that sector is still being studied. “One of the aspects that apparently is being discussed is the scope or degree of autonomy that this type of association should have,” said a source who asked to remain anonymous.

University professor Reina Fleitas said that changes related to the workforce “should go slow,” to have as little of a negative impact as possible, especially in the case of women, “who, despite all of the progress, continue to be the most disadvantaged in terms of employment and wages.”

Given the complexity of the issue, the government relaxed a planned reorganisation of the labour force that was to involve the eventual elimination of up to one million state jobs. However, the number of people who have lost their jobs to date, their ages and their gender is unknown.

According to sources from the labour sector, some of the workers who were laid off accepted production-related jobs in the same state enterprise or opted to become self-employed, or private sector workers. This year, an anticipated 170,000 jobs that are considered superfluous or unproductive will be cut.

“It is essential to reduce payrolls, to be able to achieve efficiency and analyse deadweight and capacity to meet the plan and implement the budget, adjusting to what is available,” said Salvador Valdés, secretary general of Cuba’s labour federation, the CTC, in an interview prior to the May Day festivities.

Self-employed workers, who numbered more than 370,000 as of February, and about 80 percent of whom are union members, participated as part of that emerging sector for the first time this year in the parades held on May 1, International Workers Day. It is anticipated that their numbers will reach 600,000 this year.

That growth should be favoured by a gradual transition this year of state workers to private enterprise, in trades such as carpenters, photographers, and repairers of everything from jewellery, mattresses and other household items to electric and electronic equipment.

In addition, since late last year, private businesses have had access to loans from state banks, adding to channels for financing that include personal savings, remittances from abroad and informal financing sources.

In response to a question from Café 108, a website initiative of the IPS news office in Cuba designed to encourage citizen participation in investigative journalism, Prof. Fleitas said it was important to speed up the distribution of idle land, and to carry out the process with a gender-based approach.

In that sense, the sociologist and expert on gender, health and family said the proportion of women who own land was “too small.” She said it was necessary to raise awareness and create conditions in rural areas for women to become individual producers or members of cooperatives, but as owners or co-owners of their land.

According to official figures, in early 2011, women represented 23 percent of the total agricultural workforce of 1.3 million, including the state and cooperative sectors. At the same time, 11,249 women were reported as having received idle lands in usufruct, in line with Decree-law 259.

Under that legislation, in effect since 2008, the state has distributed 1.3 million hectares of land to private individuals and farming cooperatives, with the goal of increasing food production. According to official estimates, one million hectares are still available.

However, experts believe it is indispensable to introduce changes to that decree-law to eliminate factors that create uncertainty and discourage farmers. Possible changes that have been studied since last year include the eventual expansion of land that can be distributed, a longer period of usufruct rights, and the possibility of beneficiaries associating with different forms of production.

In late March, Marino Murillo, vice president of the Council of Ministers, said the goal was to extend cooperatives to non-agricultural sectors, which he did not identify. With respect to time-frames, he said only that the move was imminent.

In the government’s policy guidelines, which are like a roadmap, first-degree cooperatives (in which members are individuals or legal entities) are proposed as a socialist form of collective property in different sectors, for producing and providing services that are useful to society, and in which members are responsible for all expenses based on their income.

Second-degree cooperatives, which are made up of first-degree cooperatives, are also planned, with the goal of organising related complementary activities, those that add value to the products and services of their members, or to make joint purchases and sales, with the goal of increasing efficiency.

Mexico city freeways. Credit: Government of Mexico City's Federal District

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, May 8 2012 (IPS)

In his book “La Ville Radieuse” (The Radiant City), architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris (1887-1965), known worldwide as Le Corbusier, proposed a city filled with skyscrapers, wide streets, cement and cars, but decorated with gardens. The Mexican capital seems to be following these principles.

In recent years the authorities in Mexico City have adopted policies that have favoured the mushrooming of apartment towers and the multiplication of automobiles – an approach that threatens long-term sustainability, according to experts.

The more than 20 million people who live in greater Mexico City face pressing problems like traffic congestion, over-exploitation of aquifers, enormous amounts of garbage, and poor air quality.

“You can’t talk about sustainable development without combining social, environmental and economic sustainability,” Sergio Martínez, an academic at the Faculty of Economics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), told IPS. “The U.N. considers DF (the Mexico City federal district) to be a danger zone; it is shrouded in smog, and major action needs to be taken.

“There are well-designed plans for the city, but they are not implemented,” said the expert, who has studied comparative urbanisation in Mexico and China.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) describes a sustainable city as one whose achievements in terms of social, economic and physical development are made to last, and that has a supply of environmental resources on which it draws in a sustainable fashion.

The left-wing Mexico City government has been carrying out a Green Plan since 2007 – a set of strategies based on ideas such as fomenting the use of public transport and citizen participation.

The programme arose from a “green consultation” or popular environmental referendum carried out in 2007, with questions related to transport, water and waste management. But the results have been criticised by experts.

In the view of Arnold Ricalde, the founder of Organi-K, a local NGO, the city’s most serious problems are water, waste management and mobility.

“Wells are drying up, and it is becoming necessary to drill at ever deeper levels, which worries us. It is a serious mistake, like bringing water in from the surrounding areas. We need to have a long-term vision of the entire basin,” said Ricalde.

The water supply for the metropolitan area is 67,000 cubic metres per second, of which 43,000 are taken from the Valley of Mexico aquifer, which is already overexploited, according to the National Water Commission (CONAGUA).

Water consumption in Mexico City, which has 2,500 wells, is 350 litres per person per day, one of the highest levels in Latin America.

Waste water production is 431 cubic metres per second, only six percent of which is treated. Furthermore, the aging water system leaks like a sieve, and rainwater from storm drains goes to waste.

“Environmental concerns continue to be secondary to political and economic interests. The Green Plan does not take social and economic aspects into account. Urban aspects, which need to be included in a sustainable policy, are still missing,” Martínez said.

The government of Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), promotes public transport, but at the same time builds arterial roads and viaducts that foment the use of private cars. There are 4.6 million vehicles a day in circulation in the metropolitan area.

Public transport in the city includes the Metrobús rapid transit system, with four routes covering 95 km of dedicated bus lanes.

A new 24-km line is also being built for the city’s subway system, which already has 11 lines. It will connect the east and west of the city, and is expected to start operating this year.

Bicycles have also received attention from the authorities. Ecobici, a bike-sharing programme, got under way in 2010, and has an average of 30,000 users a day with 1,200 bikes available at 90 stations.

“The policy is contradictory. Mobility is declining and building more roads does not solve the problem. More roads just mean more traffic. Private vehicles should be restricted. We do not understand how public and alternative transport can be promoted on the one hand, while on the other, viaducts are being built that encourage the opposite,” said Ricalde.

In the last few years, many people have started to grow vegetables or ornamental plants on the rooftops of condominium and apartment buildings, as well as vertical gardens or “living walls”, usually on the first few floors of the buildings.

Urban agriculture, which has flourished for decades in the south of Mexico City, is growing, and providing the city with more and more fresh produce.

Since Bordo Poniente, the capital’s largest garbage dump, was closed down in December, waste management has become a more challenging problem. Mexico City produces 12,600 tonnes a day of solid waste.

Of this amount, 3,000 tonnes are used to make compost, 800 tonnes are recycled, including plastic bottles, cardboard and metals, and 600 tonnes are converted into alternative fuels, according to the city secretariat of works and services.

The sustainability of the Mexican capital will be one of the biggest challenges for the next mayor, to be elected Jul. 1 and to take office in December.

However, the issue is completely marginal to the political platforms of the main contenders, Miguel Mancera of the PRD, and Beatriz Paredes of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

“None of the candidates views the issue holistically; they just brush the surface,” said Ricalde, whose organisation carries out projects to foster environmental responsibility, the use of eco-friendly technologies, recycling, and reforestation, and to change consumption habits.

“The path to sustainability begins with cultural change. It is a way of life that requires a complete re-orientation of the entire lifestyle, and it is not going to be achieved just by using recycled paper or driving a hybrid car,” Martínez concluded.

Teacher Nelly Olaya shows IPS the Floragaita school greenhouse, where seedlings are grown to help reforest the headwaters of the Las Ceibas river. Credit: Courtesy FAO

By Constanza Vieira
NEIVA, Colombia, May 8 2012 (IPS)

“Out of love for the river, we reforest, recycle, and make this place beautiful,” says a sign welcoming visitors to the Floragaita school, where a balsa (Ochroma pyramidale) tree with enormous white flowers guards the entrance to the lush green grounds on a hill in the heart of Colombia’s Andes mountains.

The Floragaita schoolchildren themselves came up with that slogan for a campaign launched in 2006 by Celia Cardozo, a slight, vivacious teacher who coordinates the 10 public secondary schools that serve the rural outskirts of Neiva, the capital of the southwestern province of Huila, which have incorporated environmental issues in the teacher training programme.

The campaign won a prize granted as part of the Las Ceibas River Basin project, which got under way in 2008 in this rural, mountainous area outside Neiva. Before the project began, local farmers widely used the slash-and-burn technique and people dumped everything into the river, from raw sewage to old mattresses.

Cardozo is determined to buy a blender to make recycled paper at the Santa Helena secondary school, which is in the same area. “People here don’t have paper,” she told IPS. But she added that the main objective is “to save even just one little tree a year.”

In February, the Santa Helena school won 450 dollars when it took second place in a contest for a prize awarded locally by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). But that is 60 dollars less than what the blender costs.

First prize, 560 dollars, went to Floragaita, for the best proposal for environmental education in the Las Ceibas River Basin.

The Las Ceibas River is the only source of piped water for Neiva, a city of 295,000 people 300 km southwest of Bogotá, where day-time temperatures range between 28 and 37 degrees year-round.

The population of Neiva grew by 130,000 people in the last 20 years. But the water flow in the Las Ceibas River has significantly declined.

The challenges are to reforest, in order to improve water retention, and to put an end to the slash-and-burn technique, traditionally used by local peasant farmers to clear land, which increases the sediment load in the river.

Another task is to get the 600 families living in scattered houses in the river basin to adopt farming practices that combine production with conservation, while improving water quality.

“If we manage to do this, it’s possible that by 2030, when Neiva has grown by another 100,000 or 130,000 inhabitants, we will still have good quality water in the river, to supply that population,” Humberto Rodríguez, an engineer who heads the Las Ceibas River Basin project, told IPS.

Despite the abundance of water resources in much of Latin America and the Caribbean, 15 percent of the population lack access to drinking water, and more than 20 percent have no basic sanitation.

The Las Ceibas project, which began in 2008, operates well under a trust fund system which ensures that the money is not lost in a maze of poor management.

Besides FAO, partners in the project include the Empresas Públicas de Neiva – the municipal public utilities company – and the city government, which told IPS that the plan is for the project to continue to form part of its Development Plan until 2015.

Other partners are the Huila provincial government and the Corporación Autónoma Regional del Alto Magdalena – the environmental authority in the area.

But in Rodríguez’s view, the main partner is the community itself. “Unless the community makes a project its own, you can’t say things are working well,” he said.

“Governance means, precisely, participation and responsibility shared by the institutions and the community. Only under these conditions can we say there is real governance” in the river basin area, he said.

In Floragaita, they are starting at the beginning: with the children. In fact, only three of the 18 students say they think “the city is better.” The rest say they want to stay in the countryside.

“They say they don’t like Neiva because it’s too hot there, and because everything costs money, even a glass of water, and there are many thieves. The smartest ones make these comparisons,” said Nelly Olaya, a teacher who works together with Cardozo.

The dirt road climbs in several curves before it reaches the school, where three one-storey buildings, including a cafeteria, are surrounded by trees and abundant vegetation. In one of the large classrooms, there are half a dozen computers with broadband internet connection.

Downhill, cassava, plantain, carrots, lettuce, cilantro, chives, bananas, giant granadilla, papaya and medicinal herbs are growing in the school’s vegetable garden.

There is also a greenhouse where a variety of trees are grown, including: soursop (Annona muricata), which produces a long, prickly green fruit that can weigh up to two kilos; cambara (Erisma uncinatum), a tree that provides medium density wood that is used locally for making fences; and naranjillo (Trichanthera gigantea) and naked albizia (Albizia carbonaria), trees that protect river banks.

Sometimes, the children of Floragaita make field trips to plant dozens of tree seedlings along rivers on nearby farms.

The first tree planting session took place in 2005, when the children planted 75 seedlings. They have planted 300, 400 and up to 1,200 seedlings along rivers threatened by deforestation in this rural area.

On the tree planting days, the children play games using the multiplication tables, and learn what each tool is called in English.

Because the Floragaita school grounds are small, Olaya proposed that the families prepare an area where the children can sit outside, “so they won’t spend all day in the classroom.”

That is how the school got its “environmental classroom”, 3,200 square metres in size, under large pine trees, with aviaries made by the children and their parents, and tables and wooden benches painted with hearts and surrounded by flowers.

Hands-on mathematics is taught here. “I give them a tape measure and I tell them ‘two metres long’, ‘one centimetre wide’,” and the students measure the objects around them, the teacher says.

“There is no need to write on a blackboard that this is a metre and this is a centimetre; we don’t have paper here,” Olaya explains. “So I teach this to them using a tape measure.”

The children sit and look out at the view for geography class, learning what is a hill, a mountain range, a river basin, a tributary, or a valley.

The land for the environmental classroom was loaned to the school by Álvaro Díaz, the president of the Junta de Acción Comunal, an elected local civic organisation.

Díaz’s eight children went to school here. “The future is in the countryside,” which is why it is important for the children to fall in love with nature, he says, adding that they “learn better” in a classroom like this one.

But of the 35 assistant teachers who have been posted to Floragaita, 29 or 30 hope to continue their studies in areas that have nothing to do with the countryside.

Olaya always takes the new assistant teachers to the greenhouse first, and tells them: “If you don’t want to get dirty, then don’t be a rural schoolteacher.”

* This article was produced with support from FAO.

The Brazilian government of Dilma Rousseff is taking firm steps towards stronger relations with Africa, such as the creation of a special fund to finance development projects together with multilateral lenders like the World Bank.

South America’s giant is keen on establishing a strategic association with Africa, and the tool for doing that is its powerful national development bank, the National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES), which will work in conjunction with the multilateral African Development Bank (AfDB).

“There is a 40-billion-dollar shortfall in financing for a spate of 50 projects, which means the African Development Bank will have to scale up its capital and its activities,” said BNDES president Luciano Coutinho. He added that not only public bodies need to be involved in this cooperation, but also private banks in the capital markets.

The alliance was announced at an Apr. 3 seminar on “Investing in Africa: Opportunities, Challenges and Instruments for Economic Cooperation”, organised by the BNDES in Rio de Janeiro, which drew delegates from development institutions, business leaders, and personalities like former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011).

André Esteves, the president of the private Brazilian bank BTG Pactual, also announced the launch of a one-billion-dollar risk capital fund for investment in Africa.

“This will be the biggest private sector contribution for investment in that continent, and a show of the (Brazilian) business community’s affinity with the government strategy,” he said.

Makhtar Diop, World Bank vice president for Africa, listed some of the enormous challenges in Africa: integrating the continent in terms of transportation, ports, railways, and telecommunications; managing natural resources like water; energy development; and the struggle for food security.

To boost the continent’s competitiveness in the global market and address the infrastructure deficit, Africa needs at least 68 billion dollars in investment up to 2020, according to the Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA).

The World Bank particularly supports PIDA, a joint initiative of the African Union Commission (AUC), the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), and the AfDB.

“We are working together to grow the programme, which is a window of opportunities for the poorest countries,” Diop said.

AfDB director Alex Rugamba explained to IPS that “PIDA covers the sectors of transport, energy, water resources and information and communication technologies (ICTs).”

“It was designed for a period of 30 years, because without infrastructure we will not be able to reach the goal for the continent of six percent economic growth,” he added.

Rugamba said the programme must be given priority, in order to maintain steady growth over the next few decades. Forty billion dollars in investment will be needed in the energy sector alone, he added.

Brazil’s exports to Africa climbed from 2.4 billion dollars in 2002 to 12.2 billion dollars in 2011, while total trade – exports and imports – soared from 4.3 billion dollars to 27.6 billion dollars in the same period.

Diop and Rugamba both said that Brazil would play an important role in boosting investment in infrastructure in Africa.

“Brazil has experience in the process of harnessing water resources,” said Diop. “It has been a pioneer in clean energy from this source, with large dams already operating and under construction, and it has an excellent track record in mining and oil production.”

Africa is a new market, said Maria das Graças Foster, the CEO of Brazil’s oil giant Petrobras, who noted that the company is active in Angola, Namibia, Libya and Nigeria.

She pointed out that “important oil reserves have been found in Ghana and Uganda, while production now stands at 58,000 barrels a day in Nigeria, and at 2,000 barrels in Angola.”

Murilo Ferreira, the CEO of Brazilian mining firm Vale, stressed that the company has 7.7 billion dollars in investments in nine African countries, in copper, coal, iron ore and nickel mines.

Ferreira also said 900 kilometres of railways and a deep-water port are being built in Mozambique.

“It’s a long-term vision, and we want to achieve environmentally sustainable and socially responsible ways of doing things,” he said.

“We need to increase dialogue with local society, because we don’t want to come across as imperialists,” he added. “We are willing to address the demands of each population (in the countries) where we are active, because we aren’t perfect, and sometimes we make mistakes. It’s necessary to be humble enough to admit one’s errors.”

Former president Lula praised his country’s efforts in forging closer ties and cooperation with the economies of Africa. This is “a moment that requires audacity, to build a new Africa,” he said.

“Peace, democracy, growth and distribution of wealth are Africa’s watchwords for the 21st century. This is a time for unity and solidarity. Today there is a wealth of opportunities to be exploited by Brazilians, other South Americans, and Africans.”

Lula said “Africa cannot be looked at like it used to be seen, as a simple supplier of minerals and gas…We have to find African partners. We don’t want hegemony; we want strategic alliances.”

María dos Prazeres de Souza has lost count of the number of births “without a single death” she has attended as a midwife, an occupation that there is renewed interest in strengthening in traditional communities in Brazil where state services are not available or are not entirely acceptable for cultural reasons.

In countries like Mexico, where this indigenous baby was born, and Brazil, many mothers still give birth at home, attended by midwives. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

The 74-year-old de Souza says that prior to 2008 she attended 1,000 births in her home city of Jaboatão dos Guararapes, in the rest of the state of Pernambuco, and in neighbouring states in Brazil’s impoverished Northeast.

She said she never ceases to be amazed every time a mother’s expression changes from pain to joy.

“A woman in labour feels pain, but when her baby is born she smiles and cries with happiness,” she told IPS, recalling the tears of emotion she has shed herself at each birth she has attended.

De Souza, an indigenous woman, learned her skills as part of her cultural heritage. Her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother taught her the skills from childhood.

“At first I would attend the births of cats, dogs and other animals, but later on in emergency situations, when my mother was not available, I began to attend women in their homes,” she said. Subsequently she trained as an obstetric nurse and worked in hospitals for 20 years.

Now retired, she still attends home births, sometimes “in exchange for just a thank-you hug,” like many of her colleagues who are midwives in the poorest parts of the country.

“It is undeniable that the technologies and practices of the official health model have brought great advances, but we must try to achieve a balance between the traditional and the biomedical approaches if we want to guarantee the health of mothers and children, not just physically but also mentally and spiritually,” said Paula Viana, coordinator of the Curumim Group Midwives Programme in Pernambuco.

Because of their wisdom and experience, midwives should be integrated in, not excluded from, the health system, Viana said in an interview with IPS.

The Curumim programme has shown that traditional midwives contribute to earlier identification of problems in pregnancy, and that as natural leaders they help in cases of women who have been raped, in vaccination campaigns or in HIV/AIDS prevention programmes.

Midwives have contributed to the increase in prenatal checkups at public health facilities and healthy practices like breastfeeding, while they provide therapies such as massages, relaxing baths and emotional support.

The Curumim Group, on the occasion of International Day of the Midwife this Saturday May 5, is launching a campaign for recognition of the value of the role of traditional midwives among indigenous people and in “quilombolas”, communities of descendants of escaped slaves.

The campaign is also seeking recognition of home births attended by midwives within the Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS), the Brazilian national public health system, as well as the designation of midwives’ knowledge and practices as part of Brazil’s intangible cultural heritage.

“Traditional midwives are the bridge between the community and the health services. In many places where there are no doctors, they provide primary health care for the general population, and at other times they are the only person with the connections to get a sick person to hospitals or health clinics in nearby cities,” Viana said.

De Souza has personal experience of the isolation of many rural, riverside or jungle communities. Once she attended a birth on the second floor of a half-built house that still did not have a stairway, so she had to climb up a rope rigged precariously by two police officers.

“After the birth I had a lot of trouble getting down on my own, because one of the police officers was carrying the baby and the other was carrying the mother,” she said.

According to Health Ministry statistics, 41,000 women a year give birth at home in this country of 192 million people, most of them attended by midwives. But the authorities admit the number may be higher.

Although health policies and projects officially take home births into consideration, “the fact is that these births mostly take place in marginalised and isolated communities, without the involvement of the SUS,” Viana said.

“Traditional midwives can probably teach more than they can learn,” but like any other health professionals they must train to improve and update their skills, and must have access to adequate materials and equipment, as well as means of transport for emergencies, she said.

De Souza said many of her colleagues in Brazil have no social benefits or labour rights, and receive no recognition for their work.

“The government has to address this issue, especially as we have had a Brazilian president who was brought into the world by a traditional midwife,” the expert said, referring to former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011), who is from the Northeast.

Viana emphasised that “risk is inherent to childbirth, whether it takes place in a woman’s home or in a hospital.” But the danger of a serious health complication would increase if “women in labour were deprived of the support of traditional midwives,” she said.

That is why the Curumim Group’s representative is calling for “both healthcare models, the traditional and the biomedical, to join together,” especially in remote and isolated communities.

In de Souza’s view, pregnancy is a natural process, but “many women have got it into their heads that they are ill, or else they don’t want to suffer pain and they ask for a caesarean.” SUS figures for 2008 show that half of the three million births registered that year were by caesarean section.

The maternal mortality rate has declined steadily in Brazil since 1990, when there were 140 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. By 2010 the figure was 58 per 100,000 and it is expected to drop still further. The main causes of childbirth-related death among women are hypertension, haemorrhages and postpartum infections.

The infant mortality rate has also fallen, to 15.6 per 1,000 live births in 2010, 47 percent lower than in 2000, according to the latest census.

In these circumstances, Viana said, the full range of regional obstetric care should be considered in order to achieve further improvement.

“The more the scientific community endeavours to establish the biomedical model of health, the more we need to analyse the consequences of the excessively interventionist and medicalised nature of childbirth,” she said, pointing out that the number of traditional midwives is in decline.

De Souza, the midwife who has brought more than 1,000 babies into the world, says: “We have been blessed, and we continue to be blessed. We have thousands of years of history behind us, and that must command respect.”

After the Argentine Congress approved the renationalisation of YPF, the country’s biggest oil company, late Thursday, thousands of demonstrators from different political and social groups cheered the decision outside the legislature.

President Cristina Fernández announcing the nationalisation of YPF. Credit: Office of the president of Argentina.

A total of 208 out of 257 deputies in the lower house voted for the expropriation of a 51 percent controlling stake in the company, after the Senate did so a week ago in a 63-3 vote, with four abstentions. The bill, originally introduced by President Cristina Fernández on Apr. 16, now goes to her desk, to be signed into law.

But in contrast with the strong legislative and popular support for the move, opposition leaders and experts point to the uncertainty surrounding the country’s new energy policy, in which YPF will play a central role.

“The parties supported the creation of a new state enterprise. But how will we reach the goals of regaining our self-sufficiency, and attracting investment?” Gerardo Rabinovich, an engineer with the “General Mosconi” Argentine Institute of Energy (IAE), made up of experts who worked in the oil and gas industry during governments of the Radical Civic Union party, told IPS.

The new law declares domestic supplies, production, industrialisation, transport and sales of oil and gas a question of “public interest”, and seizes 89 percent of the YPF shares owned by the Spanish company Repsol.

Of Argentina’s 51 percent, just over half will be held by the federal government, and the rest will be in the hands of the oil and gas-producing provinces.

The remaining 49 percent of YPF will belong to the Petersen group, a private company owned by the Eskenazi family of Buenos Aires, which has 25 percent of the shares, and Repsol, which will be left with six percent, while the rest trades on the New York and Buenos Aires stock exchanges.

Things have now come full circle. YPF (Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales), which was created as a state-run company in 1922, was privatised in two stages by the neoliberal government of Carlos Menem (1989-1999), in 1993, and in 1999, when it was sold to Repsol. Since then the state has held less than one percent of the shares in the company.

Besides presenting the bill on the expropriation of YPF, the centre-left Fernández administration appointed officials to temporarily run the company for 30 days.

Everyone in favour of expropriation

A few hours before the vote in Congress, the president said the seizure of the company’s shares would pose “a big challenge: to create a modern and competitive oil company, aligned with the country’s interests.”

According to local newspaper reports, the search is already on for the right people to run the company.

Miguel Galluccio, an Argentine engineer who worked at YPF before it was privatised and has ample international experience in the oil industry, appears to be the leading candidate to head the firm, and according to the Buenos Aires dailies Ámbito Financiero and La Nación, has already been selected by Fernández.

The law states that between 1998 and 2011, total oil production in Argentina went down 15.9 million cubic metres, 8.6 million of which were the responsibility of YPF, which drastically reduced exploratory drilling.

From an annual average of 110 exploratory wells drilled by the then state-owned company from 1970 to 1992, the number plunged to just 30 in 2010. Since then, the economy has required growing amounts of imported oil and gas to fuel its steady economic growth.

The text of the law also notes that total production of natural gas, a key source of energy for electricity generation in Argentina, fell 6.6 million cubic metres between 2004 and 2011, 6.4 million of which corresponded to YPF.

That means the company was responsible for 54 percent of the drop in oil extraction and 97 percent in the decline in natural gas production, the law says.

As a result, YPF lost clout in the local energy sector. Its share of production fell from 42 percent in 1997 to 34 percent in 2011.

Against that backdrop, legislators of the Frente para la Victoria – the governing left-wing faction of the Peronist party – allied lawmakers, and most of the opposition voted to pass the law without modifications.

For example, filmmaker Fernando “Pino” Solanas, a lower-house member of the small local opposition party Proyecto Sur, backed the president’s bill after describing his opposition to the privatisation of YPF in the 1990s, which cost him an attempt on his life that left him with a permanent disability in his legs.

Uncertain future

But there are still doubts regarding the future of YPF, such as the ones raised by the IAE in a document favourable to the recovery of state control over the company, but critical of the government’s bill.

In the paper, the IAE argues that the proposed expropriation does not ensure that oil and gas production will increase to past levels, and does not guarantee the attraction of “the investment that is indispensable for achieving the self-sufficiency that (the law) proclaims as its objective.”

Rabinovich said that in order to move towards a long-term sustainable energy policy, what was needed, in the first place, was “a new law on hydrocarbons that provides the investor with a legal framework that makes it possible” to operate in the oil and gas industry.

The law currently in force dates back to 1967, when the entire energy sector belonged to the federal government. Today, the oil and gas reserves belong to the provinces, thanks to a 1994 constitutional reform, and the companies that exploit and commercialise them have changed hands.

The IAE says it is necessary to create a regulatory agency along the lines of Brazil’s National Petroleum Agency, in order to guarantee transparency and the development of human resources.

“Much more than the expropriation (of shares) from Repsol is needed,” said Rabinovich.

Claudio Lozano, a lower house legislator from the centre-left Frente Amplio Progresista, also told IPS that he had reservations.

His party was divided in the Senate vote, but unanimously backed the bill in the Chamber of Deputies.

Lozano, an economist, said it was necessary to go beyond the nationalisation of YPF. He proposed moving towards 100 percent state control of the company, and recovering the state’s capacity to regulate the entire energy sector.

“We’re only able to oversee 34 percent of the country’s oil and 23 percent of the gas, which was what YPF had, but we have to go after the rest of the sector,” he said.

Lozano said that, besides passing a new law that would create a framework for the oil and gas industry, it is urgently necessary to repeal the 1992 decrees that deregulated the sector and allowed private oil companies operating in the country to rake in most of the industry’s profits.

“The first article in the law, which declares all activity in the oil and gas industry a matter of public interest, cannot translate into operating capacity unless these decrees, which run counter to the new law’s stated aim, are eliminated,” he said.

If the 1992 decrees are not repealed, he said, there is a risk that the new YPF “will become the dumb partner” in the energy sector.

Rightwing President Otto Pérez Molina is keeping his promise to take a hard line on soaring crime in Guatemala, but his government is neglecting prevention measures. Analysts warn the strategy, along with upcoming legal reforms, may jeopardise human rights.

One of the first steps taken by retired general Pérez Molina when he took office on Jan. 14 was to send army troops out on street patrols together with the National Civilian Police (PNC).

He also created special task forces to investigate the causes of and propose solutions for robbery, extortion, homicide, kidnapping and femicide (gender-based killings of women).

A sixth military unit to guard the border, beginning with the northwestern department (province) of San Marcos, on the border with Mexico, is expected to become operational in July. Its mission, according to the authorities, will be to combat contraband, and trafficking in persons, drugs and arms.

In April, a new department on drug trafficking was established in the Interior Ministry, while the police are receiving training in rapid response and use of weapons.

So in his first 100 days in office, Pérez Molina has set in motion his main electoral promise: to combat crime with “mano dura” (iron fist). But analysts and activists emphasise the need for preventive measures to bring down the skyrocketing crime rates.

“The country lacks a democratic policy on crime that takes into account basic, elementary matters and regards punitive intervention as the last resort,” said Marco Canteo of the Guatemalan Institute for Comparative Studies in Penal Sciences (ICCPG).

Canteo told IPS that criminal policy in a democratic country should be based on crime prevention and on safeguarding economic, social and cultural rights.

But the new government’s strategy is based on aggressive law enforcement ordered by the executive branch, backed by legislative measures, he said.

For instance, lawmaker Fernando García of the governing Patriotic Party (PP) introduced a bill proposing chemical castration of those convicted of sexual offences.

Pérez Molina is also considering changing Article 8 of the Civil Code to lower the age of criminal responsibility from 18 to 12, and he is pursuing an anti-gang bill introduced by his party but bogged down in Congress.

“These initiatives are essentially repressive in nature, and do not meet minimum standards in terms of human rights, democracy and the rule of law,” Canteo said.

Studies by international bodies rank this Central American country of 14 million people among the 14 most violent countries in the world. Last year, 6,187 people were murdered, 706 of them women, according to the state National Institute of Forensic Sciences (INACIF).

But repressive measures in reaction to the violence do not of themselves ensure a solution, experts say.

“Prevention must be emphasised in schools, where the state should invest more money and not regard it as an unwelcome expense,” Nicolás Pacheco, an activist with the Social Movement for the Rights of Children, Adolescents and Young People in Guatemala, told IPS.

“What 17-year-old teenagers are doing now (in the epidemic of youth gang violence) is happening because no work was done with them 10 or 15 years ago on issues like human values and citizenship, and now we are reaping the consequences,” he said.

Therefore, Pacheco said, the idea of criminalising children and adolescents is “worrying.”

He said the anti-gang law “stigmatises young people because of the way they speak, dress, and cut their hair.” In his view, when crimes are committed by minors, “the adults responsible for the children should be prosecuted.”

The previous government of social democratic former president Álvaro Colom implemented the “Open Schools” initiative, which allowed public schools to be used at weekends for learning, recreational and artistic activities, to help prevent violence.

Verónica Godoy, of the Public Security Monitoring and Support Group (IMASP), a local NGO, told IPS that projects like “Open Schools”, which has been suspended, “should continue but in a comprehensive fashion.”

As a positive example, Godoy cited Brazil, where society, state and private institutions and local authorities work with different social groups, such as single mothers and gangs, through recreational programmes, anti-drug campaigns and situational crime prevention.

Godoy considers it essential to develop prevention programmes that have an impact “that is not evaluated in the immediate term, but in the medium and long term.”

Education also deserves more attention, according to Janet Possié, a teacher. “If every government focused on education, crime levels would fall, but this country is one of those that invest least in this area in Latin America,” she told IPS.

Possié added that she knows of no violence prevention initiative adopted by this government. But she said that “it would be unfair to criticise it for the actions it is taking, because the people are demanding tough measures against crime.”

The economic crisis plaguing many countries in the European Union has forced Central America to look at preventive measures to mitigate the effects in this region, which could include a decline in tourism, migrant remittances, exports and investment.

The search for new markets and proposals for reforms to increase tax collection and impose exchange controls are some of the actions being taken in this region, made up of Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama, with the aim of strengthening the local economies and counteracting external shocks.

“This region needs to look more within itself and towards its neighbours, because the agro-export economic model based on products like coffee, sugar and cardamom is not working,” Jonathan Menkos, an expert with the Central American Institute for Fiscal Studies (ICEFI), told IPS.

Menkos added that “these countries must diversify their production and exports and invest in security, justice, education, health and nutrition, besides coming up with a strategic plan for investment in economic infrastructure.”

Along those lines, in February Guatemala approved a package of tax reforms with which it aims to collect 154 million dollars this year, 552 million in 2013 and 579 million in 2014.

El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras and Panama also adopted tax reforms between 2008 and 2011 in the face of the global economic crisis that broke out four years ago in the United States.

The presidents of the central banks of Central America and the Dominican Republic, meanwhile, agreed early this year to adopt measures to ensure financial liquidity, create mechanisms for monitoring risk management and overseeing financial systems, and take steps to mitigate the effects of the crisis in the Eurozone countries.

Central American countries have also recently signed free trade treaties with Colombia and Peru, and are trying to start trade talks with the Common Market of the South (Mercosur), made up of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. (Venezuela is in the process of joining as a fifth full member.)

Costa Rica, for its part, established diplomatic ties with China in 2007, and is awaiting approval of a free trade deal with Singapore and exploring other markets like India, all of which has given it greater economic independence, according to analysts consulted by IPS.

The stringent austerity policies adopted by the governments of European countries like Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Belgium and the UK, to address their debt crisis, have caused recession, soaring unemployment and distortions of international trade.

This will impact the countries of Central America, analysts say. In first place, this region’s chief trading partner is the United States, which is affected by the situation in Europe.

In addition, while Central America depends on intraregional trade in second place, its next largest partners are the European Union and Mexico.

In 2010, exports to the United States represented 32 percent of the region’s total, and imports from that country amounted to 38.5 percent, according to the Secretariat of Economic Integration of Central America (SIECA).

“The crisis in Europe will be reflected in slower economic growth in the United States, which in turn will reduce growth in this region,” with effects on trade, international development aid, remittances sent home by migrants living abroad, and tourism, Menkos said.

Monthly economic activity in the region has already begun to slow down since November, says an ICEFI bulletin published in March.

The activities that have felt the slowdown are manufacturing, agriculture and fishing, the report says.

In Central America, which has a total population of 43 million, GDP growth averaged 4.7 percent in 2011, above the Latin American average of 4.4 percent, according to ICEFI.

But inequality and high poverty rates are still serious problems in this region, especially among indigenous people and the rural population.

Economic analyst Mauricio Garita told IPS that the risks posed for this region by the effects of the European crisis “are very large and can multiply because its big trading partner is the United States, and the second is the EU itself.”

But this also represents a major opportunity for the region, he said. “We can try to attract the investment that would otherwise go to Europe, and begin to make headway in areas in which they will fall short, like tourism and technological products,” said Garita, a former SIECA consultant.

The search for new markets can offer many advantages, he said. “There are countries like Nicaragua that have diversified their trading partners with good results, just as Costa Rica is doing with Canada, South America and Asia,” he added.

But Nicholas Virzi, director of economics at the Universidad Rafael Landívar, a private, Jesuit university in Guatemala, told IPS that “Central America lacks a long-term strategy based on free trade and the creation of a good business environment, marked by guarantees for property rights, the rule of law, legal certainty, and healthy money.”

Improving the business climate, establishing clear rules, providing security for people and their investments, freeing up trade, diversifying the portfolio of clients for exports, and flexibilising the labour market are, in his view, some of the measures that the region must adopt – “to start with” – to weather the impacts of the crisis in Europe.

But when will the effects be felt in Central America?

Pedro Prado, with the Association for Social Research and Studies (ASIES), a private local think tank, told IPS it would be “very bold to say exactly when.” He added that this would depend on when the full impact of the crisis hits the United States.

The securing of loans and development aid from the EU, trade, and remittances from migrants could all be affected, the analyst said.

But he added that “in our latest survey, variables like production and the expectations of the business community were very positive. I wouldn’t predict a negative impact in the short term, although it’s necessary to wait, before reaching a conclusion.”

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, May 3 2012 (IPS)

Local communities can play a key role in adaptation to climate change if they are helped to properly understand the problem and take it on board. “Climate literacy is needed,” says Ángela Corvea, a long-time Cuban environmental activist.

“People do not always take these problems seriously, and do not see the risks involved in extreme natural events, which will become more frequent and increasingly severe,” Corvea adds, answering a question on Café 108, an initiative of the IPS Cuba office website to promote citizen participation in investigative journalism.

In her view, “small-scale actions by local communities can help deal with these changes, which are no longer merely imminent, but are already happening.” Rising temperatures and sea levels, recurrent droughts, and more intense floods and hurricanes are some of the consequences of climate change.

In 2003, Corvea created an environmental project named Acualina, to raise awareness about the environment, especially among children and teenagers. Every year for over a decade, she has organised coastal clean-up actions to contribute to the global campaign “Clean Up the World”, which started in Australia.

“We need to encourage savings of water and other resources, consume only what is necessary, avoid polluting, and try to keep our surroundings clean and pleasant; we need to recycle, and to be informed and teach others, especially children and young people; we need to act in solidarity, and to talk about these issues everywhere in order to draw attention and create awareness,” Corvea says.

Enrique Arango, an expert at the National Centre for Seismological Research (CENAIS), agrees with Corvea that the risks associated with climate change are only apparent in the long term, which makes it difficult to raise awareness at the community level. “It’s like smoking: no one sees the immediate effects, so people don’t give up the habit even though they know smoking is harmful,” he says.

In Cuba, it is difficult to separate the community from the centralised political and administrative bodies. “If an initiative does not come down from the authorities, it is not carried out or it remains unfinished,” one person wrote on the Café 108 comments site.

According to Arango, one way to teach people climate change literacy in their neighbourhoods is through interactive projects in which a high percentage of the population participates. A systematic approach, strong leadership, and above all political will are required at all levels; “otherwise, results will only be achieved while the programme is under way,” he said.

Social networks began to play a definite role in Cuba in creating ecological awareness in December 2011, when users of the microblogging network Twitter convened clean-up action and environmental education at the mouth of the Almendares river.

“Big things grow from small things. Everyone worked on their own little patch and helped each other. Ultimately, the issue was not just cleaning up the garbage, but provoking a reaction, raising the awareness of the population of the area itself to clean up and care for their own section of river,” twitterer Salvatore (@salvatore300) commented to IPS.

Osmel Francis, the leader of rap group Cubanos en la Red, promotes actions supporting social protection and care of the environment through his music. “Singers do not always realise how useful we can be to society,” he told IPS.

He has joined Corvea in clean-up actions on the Quibú river, one of the most polluted waterways in Havana.

Francis said there is a lack of environmental awareness, and the key to raising it is education. “The media must also get more involved, because we organise campaigns and clean-up actions but these are not always reported. I don’t see the environment as a priority issue (for the media),” he said.

“As for adaptation to climate change, even we (environmentalists) need education and training in order to learn more about what can be done, and how to reach people with our message,” Francis said.

Meanwhile, based on his experience as a photojournalist, Rolando Pujol is convinced that the population must have more knowledge of the risks it faces.

Often, coastal dwellers insist on remaining in at-risk areas because their life and livelihoods are closely linked to the sea. “They prefer to rebuild their homes time and again” after they have been destroyed by hurricanes, and they are also influenced by stories of places far inland that have had to be rebuilt, he said.

Ramón Pichs, an expert on climate change and development, said the role of the population in adaptation strategies was “essential” in Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean islands.

The success of any project will be greater “if the communities have an adequate level of awareness about the problems,” said Pichs.

In an interview with IPS, the Cuban academic described the active participation by his country’s citizens in health programmes and campaigns against disease vectors, and a project in Trinidad and Tobago for restoring the Nariva Swamp with the participation of several local civil society organisations.

The local level is key for climate adaptation, and the roles of the population and of the different organisations present in the community are essential for taking appropriate action, said Pichs, who also stressed the importance of links between these sectors and national institutions dealing with environmental issues.

Women in one of the poorest neighbourhoods of this city 40 km north of Rio de Janeiro no longer have to spend money on vegetables, because they have learned to grow their own, as organic urban gardening takes off in Brazil.

Cooperative member Rosinéia Soares displays the aubergines growing in her garden in Parque Genesiano da Luz. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

The land here is not fertile, like it is in the hilly region of the state of Rio de Janeiro that supplies the city’s markets. And the climate is sometimes too hot for vegetables to grow without stress or pests.

But in the poor neighbourhood of Parque Genesiano da Luz in the city of Nova Iguaçu, local women can now proudly say they eat what they themselves have grown.

The women sell the rest of what they produce – 70 percent – through the Univerde cooperative they set up, which comprises 22 families who put five percent of what they earn back in, to run the cooperative.

Production is carried out on an individual basis, but everything else, including the sales of produce, is done collectively.

“It’s wonderful to see what you grow in the garden, bring everything home fresh, and give your children such healthy food,” Joyce da Silva, one of the members of the cooperative, told IPS. “So much so that when the low-production season arrives, we don’t even buy outside, because now we know that conventional products have a lot of poison. And I don’t want to eat that anymore.”

The gardens, which are each about 1,000 square metres in size, are located on what once were empty lots. Below them lie pipelines of the state oil company, Petrobras, which financed the project when it got under way in 2007.

When the financing dried up, many of the more than 50 families taking part at the time dropped out, due to a lack of resources.

But a group of women decided to continue, against all odds: they didn’t have funds, tools, or transportation to haul seeds and seedlings or take their products to the street markets to sell them.

But they were determined not to give up the independence they had achieved.

“Before getting involved in the cooperative, I only looked after my home,” da Silva said. “But afterwards, I gained economic independence. Another kind of independence is the health I achieved for my family. And also the improved living conditions. Things at home improved in general.”

The Urban Agriculture Programme, which now provides the women with technical assistance, was created in 1999, and was expanded into peri-urban areas in 2011 by AS-PTA, a non-governmental organisation that promotes urban family gardening and agroecology.

This programme is aimed at boosting the incomes of families in peri-urban areas – poor neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the cities of Rio de Janeiro, Queimados and Magé, where it benefits a total of 650 people.

The urban farmers do not use chemicals. Both the fertilisers and pesticides they use are homemade and non-toxic.

The majority of the food consumed in the city comes from far away, which means prices are driven up by transport costs, Marcio Mattos de Mendonça, the coordinator of the Urban Agriculture Programme, told IPS.

“The people who live in these communities need food from nearby areas,” he said. “Fresh vegetables are often left off the menu, and unhealthy kinds of food are given priority.”

In line with the global demographic trend, Brazil’s population of more than 192 million people is increasingly urban.

In 2000, 81 percent of Brazilians lived in urban areas, and 10 years later the proportion has risen to over 84 percent, according to the 2010 census.

But the growing urbanisation has not snuffed out the vocation for farming passed down through the generations, Mendonça said. In many poor urban areas like the favelas or shantytowns lining the hills of Rio de Janeiro, people have kept alive the custom of growing vegetables and medicinal herbs, and raising small animals like pigs, goats or barnyard fowl.

Aldeni Fausto, who always grew vegetables in her yard, inherited that practice which has been kept alive by migrants from rural areas and which she is now successfully reproducing within the city limits.

“Living in nature is what I like the most,” she said. “The pleasure of planting, harvesting and feeding ourselves, reviving our family’s roots and traditions and teaching them to our children; that is so important, so we don’t forget our history.”

Fausto, the president of the Univerde cooperative, said the distancing of rural migrants from their land led to “an increase in diseases, an imbalance in nature, and financial problems, because these people have nothing to eat and no interest in producing food.”

But “if people planted a little bit in every corner, they wouldn’t suffer from a lack of food,” she said.

Da Silva looks at it from another angle. “I never imagined producing food in the middle of the city. This area didn’t even have a market. And sometimes we couldn’t even afford to go somewhere else to buy things,” she said.

The visit to the cooperative was one of the field trips organised by World Nutrition Rio 2012, an international nutrition congress organised in Rio de Janeiro Apr. 27-30 by the World Public Health Nutrition Association and the Brazilian Association of Collective Health.

Among other issues, the congress discussed healthy eating habits, the planet’s resources, and the need to recognise and support traditional food systems – three core concepts that underlie the activities of the Univerde cooperative.

Da Silva said her family had various health-related problems linked to eating habits that she now understands were harmful.

Her daughter, for example, had anaemia. “Even though she is dark-skinned like I am, she looked sort of yellowish and was very weak. But with this food, she is now in good health, her skin shines, and her lips and gums are nice and red; this was the best thing about it, for me,” da Silva said.

Fausto also noticed improvements in her family’s quality of life. “Although I don’t look like it, I used to be fat. I have seen changes in my body, in my health, in my children’s diet. My mind now is more at ease, and I have found an equilibrium,” she said, pointing out that she is now free of obesity-related health problems like back pain and hypertension.

But the route these women chose is not an easy one. Without strong support, like the funding they received at first, the sustainability of the cooperative is always an issue of concern.

Of the more than 50 plots of land available for urban farming in Nova Iguaçu, only 22 are currently in use, said one of the visitors from the congress, Angélica Siqueira, a student in her final year of coursework for a degree in nutrition at the alternative economy centre of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.

“There is still a prejudice that the countryside is poor,” Siqueira told IPS. Her team is attempting to apply urban and peri-urban farming techniques in poor neighbourhoods in her state, in southern Brazil, through the Technological Incubator of Popular Cooperatives.

The hope of the cooperative members is that now they have official certification, they will be able to sell their produce to the federal government’s school meals programme, which stimulates purchases by public schools of food produced by family farmers.

“Before, we didn’t even know how to run a company, and now we administer our own cooperative,” said Fausto, a true convert to urban gardening. “It’s therapy. One little plant gives you back gratitude and love.”

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, May 2 2012 (IPS)

“It’s very hard for them to put food on the table, but they are very noble people,” Diego Orozco, one of the thousands of young urban Guatemalans who spent last weekend with a poor rural family, told IPS.

“They only ate a plate of beans, but they gave me the privilege of also giving me an egg and some boiled water,” added the 18-year-old, who comes from a middle-class family.

“The most significant thing was that I realised the importance of water. They get water every four days, and it’s really hard for them to be able to take baths and have drinking water. If they don’t have water they can’t irrigate their crops, and without crops, they don’t have food,” he said, after spending Saturday Apr. 28 and Sunday Apr. 29 with campesinos or peasant farmers in the western department (province) of Quetzaltenango.

Like Orozco, more than 6,000 middle- and upper-middle-class young people, mainly from the capital, visited 14 of the country’s 22 departments to stay with poor rural families and get an up-close view of the poverty and malnutrition they face.

The president, right-wing retired General Otto Pérez Molina, and cabinet ministers and other public officials also participated in the activity.

The initiative, “Todos tenemos algo que dar” (We All Have Something to Give), brings the private sector and the government’s Secretariat for Food and Nutritional Security together to raise awareness among young people about poverty and malnutrition, and get them to take part in the search for solutions.

In Guatemala, which has the highest chronic malnutrition rates in Latin America, one out of two children under five is undernourished, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF.

And a full 54 percent of the country’s 14 million people live in poverty, while 13 percent – mainly indigenous people – live in extreme poverty, according to the government’s 2011 National Survey on Living Conditions.

“We waste water and we don’t value what our parents give us,” Orozco said. “We are all human and we should all have the same, not some less and others more. There are people who work very hard, and who have a really hard time trying to get ahead, and others who don’t have to struggle at all.”

The visitors stayed overnight in the public schools closest to the communities they visited, ate their meals with campesino families, took part in their daily work activities, and exchanged opinions about their lives.

Juan Carlos Girón, an 18-year-old private school student, spent the weekend with a family in Vixbén, a mainly indigenous community in Quetzaltenango in Guatemala’s western highlands.

“I visited a couple with nine kids,” he told IPS. “They’re poor, but very noble. They have a small woodstove, a few plates, a sheet metal roof with holes, and a dirt floor.

“The father told me that last week his children didn’t have anything to eat, because the family had no money. But they welcomed me with a special meal (sheep liver) that they used all their savings to buy, when they usually eat just corn tamales with coffee or water,” he added.

“I felt embarrassed and sad because I know that so many people in the world don’t appreciate or take advantage of what they have,” he said.

Girón helped the family wash the dishes and wash clothes, cut firewood, and take the sheep out to pasture.

He noticed that one of the youngest children “was five years old, but was the size of a three-year-old, and she was really skinny. They said they ate well, but you could see how things really were.”

He said that he realised he can’t complain about his own life.

Guatemala is considered one of the most unequal countries in the world. Nearly 80 percent of the country’s farmland is owned by just five percent of the population, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The organisers of “Tengo algo que dar” were pleased with the results.

“It was very positive and special, an encounter between human beings with the same vision, the search for joint solutions between two realities: urban Guatemala and rural Guatemala,” Luis Enrique Monterroso, the head of the Secretariat for Food and Nutritional Security, told IPS.

But the initiative, which forms part of the government’s “Zero Hunger” plan to combat malnutrition, doesn’t end there.

The official explained that in May they would hold an exhibition on food solutions, where different experiences will be shared, and in June, a national “coperacha” or collection will be held, to provide tools for farmers and launch projects to attack malnutrition.

“And in July, we’ll go back to the communities, with a proposal for individual or collective solutions,” he said.

Businessman Emilio Méndez, one of the organisers, said that “until we manage to join forces, the problem of malnutrition won’t be solved. It will continue to grow bigger and bigger, and will lash back at us.”

“It’s a tragedy that 50 percent of Guatemalan children are malnourished. That means that 50 percent of Guatemala’s future is compromised,” he said.

Meanwhile, a seed of hope was planted in the communities visited by the officials and young people.

“I thought it was good they came, because the kids came from somewhere else to see the work we do every day,” Delvi Pérez, an 18-year-old farmer, told IPS.

His family, who live in the community of Huitán, often find it hard to feed themselves. “The truth is that we don’t have enough. We plant 11 to 15 cuerdas (between four and six hectares) a year in basic grains and vegetables, but since there are 11 of us, we have to lease land elsewhere,” he said.

“I think they’re going to do something for us. I’m not sure, but they could help with fertiliser for our land, so we could improve production,” he added.

Almost six years after the nationalisation of gas and oil reserves in Bolivia, foreign companies maintain an active presence in the sector, and the government is now offering them greater incentives to increase oil production.

Gasfield discovered by Repsol in Huacaya, 800 km southeast of La Paz. Credit: IPS/Photostock

During the same week that President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina announced the expropriation of 51 percent of shares in the oil company YPF, previously held by the Spanish corporation Repsol, the Bolivian government issued a decree that raised incentives for crude oil production from 10 dollars to 40 dollars a barrel.

Supreme Decree 1202 establishes that the Bolivian national treasury will issue tax credit notes in the amount of 30 dollars.

For each barrel (159 liters) of crude they produce, foreign oil companies will continue to receive 10 dollars in cash in addition to a credit note that can be used for tax payments.

In a statement released by the state-owned oil company Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB) on Apr. 19, company president Carlos Villegas stated that the reason for the allocation of this additional incentive was that “operators have not made significant investments to find larger reserves of oil.”

Researcher Carlos Arze of the Centre for Research on Labour and Agrarian Development (CEDLA) explained that the contracts signed between foreign companies and the Bolivian government following the 2006 nationalisation did not include clauses obliging the companies to replenish reserves.

On May 1, 2006, leftist President Evo Morales announced the nationalisation of Bolivia’s hydrocarbon reserves. In October of that year, new contracts were signed with the oil and gas companies operating in the country – most of which were foreign-owned – and endorsed by the Bolivian Congress.

Six years later, these companies are earning 824 million dollars in profits, “and not a single one has pulled out of Bolivia,” Arze told Tierramérica. He recalled the comments of a Brazilian businessman who concluded at the time that his operations in Bolivia would be even more secure, since they now had congressional backing.

“If this was an anti-imperialist nationalisation, why didn’t they leave?” asked Arze.

In 2004, the oil and natural gas industry in Bolivia was worth 1.172 billion dollars. The companies operating in the sector took 71 percent of the profits (832 million dollars), according to Arze.

The new contracts changed the equation. Now, private operators receive 27 percent of revenues, while the state keeps 73 percent through various taxes, shares and royalties, he noted. But in absolute terms, the amounts earned by the companies have changed very little.

In 2010, the sector generated 3.053 billion dollars, of which the oil and gas companies received 824 million dollars. If you add the incentives for oil production, estimated at six million dollars annually, the total is 830 million, just two million dollars less than they earned before the rules of the game were changed, noted Arze.

According to YPFB, between 2001 and 2005, the state took in 332 million dollars annually in oil and gas revenues.

After nationalisation, these revenues rose to a yearly average of 2.07 billion dollars. Over the last six years, the state has earned 12.424 billion dollars from oil and gas operations.

Gas production has risen from 40.4 million cubic metres daily in 2005 to 45.06 million cubic metres in 2011.

But oil production has fallen. In 2005, Bolivia produced 50,035 barrels of oil a day, but in 2011, output had dropped to 41,147 barrels.

As of June 2011, 15 foreign companies, headed up by Petrobras of Brazil, had signed contracts with Bolivia for oil and gas exploration and extraction activities, for terms of between six and 28 years, according to figures from YPFB.

Political economy professor Julio Alvarado told Tierramérica that Bolivia’s current oil policy is aimed at encouraging foreign companies to continue operating in the country’s most productive fields.

Alvarado noted that the nationalisation decree ordered an audit of the transnational companies, but the final reports were not made public. This protection of corporate data is a demonstration of a policy favorable to foreign investors, he said.

In the meantime, Bolivia has become increasingly dependent on fuel imports for domestic consumption. In 2010, imports totaled 600 million dollars, in 2011 they had risen to 900 million, and this year they are expected to reach 1.2 billion dollars, according to Alvarado’s figures.

In 2010, Spanish oil and gas company Repsol was the foreign company with the second largest share in production in Bolivia, with 8.7 percent, far behind Petrobras, which accounts for 63 percent.

In the oil sector, Repsol has operations in a quarter of the country’s blocks and fields and accounts for five percent of exploration activities.

During the nationalisation process, the Bolivian state’s forced purchase of 1.1 percent of the Spanish share in the Andina company was compensated with a payment of 6.2 million dollars in 2007.

In contrast, the nationalisation of the shares held by U.S.-based Amoco in the Bolivian company Chaco resulted in the filing of a lawsuit against the Bolivian state for 233 million dollars, said Arze.

Repsol is in charge of production at the Margarita gas field in the southern department of Tarija, which holds some two trillion cubic feet of gas and is the source of the eight million cubic metres of gas per day supplied to Argentina – an amount equivalent to the daily consumption in Bolivia.

In March 2010, Bolivia pledged to increase gas exports to Argentina to up to 20 million cubic metres daily by 2017.

The source of this gas is the Margarita-Huacaya field, operated by different companies. Repsol is present as part of the joint venture Repsol YPF E&P Bolivia SA, which has a 37.5 percent stake in the field.

Arze believes it will be a profitable business for Repsol, since it will benefit from the prices paid by Argentina, roughly 11 dollars per million British thermal units (BTU) in the first quarter of 2012.

Brazil, which imports three times the daily consumption in Bolivia, pays nine dollars per million BTU.

*The writer is an IPS correspondent. This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

According to a book published in the Argentine capital, major Latin American newspapers with access to the secret cables obtained by Wikileaks decided not to print them because doing so would run counter to their own interests.

“Wiki Media Leaks”, by journalists Martín Becerra and Sebastián Lacunza, analyses the information about the relationship between the region’s newspaper companies and the United States, through its embassies.

“Many media outlets have communicated the leaked material, but only on extremely few occasions have they dared to publish diplomatic documents that could harm them, let alone any that specifically refer to them,” the book says.

Hundreds of thousands of secret, confidential and unclassified United States diplomatic communications were obtained by Wikileaks, a not-for-profit organisation, and handed over to large newspaper companies in 2010 for publication.

The cables span the period from December 1966 to February 2010, although the vast majority of them are from 2008-2010.

Lacunza, an IPS contributor with a degree in communication sciences, said the idea arose when he and his colleague saw that media with access to the cables “were reluctant to publish some ‘juicy’ ones that referred to themselves.”

Of the total of 251,287 cables sent by the U.S. Department of State and U.S. embassies around the world that came into the possession of Wikileaks, some 32,000 originated from Latin America, five to 10 percent of which refer to news media, Lacunza estimated.

Among their most notable findings was the “moderate nature” of ambassadors’ responses to “the tremendously audacious, illegal proposals of the media élites,” Lacunza told IPS.

According to the book, U.S. diplomacy has in certain circumstances been less aggressive, more accommodating, and less radical in its preferred options than local élites.

Beginning with an overview of the media in Latin America, Wiki Media Leaks goes on to detail which outlets in different countries had privileged access to the cables that were leaked by the organisation headed by Australian activist Julian Assange.

The investigation emphasised the concentration of news media ownership in very few hands in most countries of the region. However, as the authors point out, this is not generally a concern for Washington.

The book includes a chapter specifically on Argentina, which sheds light on clashes between the main newspaper companies and the centre-left government of President Cristina Fernández.

Another chapter deals with the strategies employed by the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires with friendly countries like Peru, Colombia and Chile.

Later on, the text focuses on countries with more problematic relations with Washington, such as Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela and Honduras. And finally it analyses the cases of Brazil and Mexico, the region’s largest economies.

The book by Lacunza and Becerra, who holds a doctorate in information sciences, shows that in some countries like Argentina and Brazil, renowned columnists from newspapers and television programmes have taken their protests against their (left-wing) national governments to U.S. embassies, where they have sought support for their opposition arguments.

These arguments, expressed in the media, are collected by the embassies and sent to the U.S. State Department as part of their analysis, in a circle Becerra describes as “information endogamy.”

One of the journalists mentioned in the book is Joaquín Morales Solá, a columnist with Argentina’s La Nación newspaper, and a programme presenter on a pay channel belonging to the Clarín consortium; another is William Waack, with Brazil’s TV Globo. Both were quoted by the respective U.S. ambassadors “to keep the cables from appearing to be completely subjective,” the book says.

Lacunza told IPS that the practice of appealing to the embassies, while governments were attempting to create more progressive laws on the media, had turned out to be “a failed strategy” by the media, “belonging to bygone decades.”

In the chapter on Argentina, former U.S. ambassador to this country Earl Anthony Wayne says the Clarín media group “is not always managed as responsibly as we would like,” and adds that the Clarín newspaper, the flagship of the consortium, which boasts the highest circulation in the country, “can topple governments.”

“The (Fernández) government has a point about the Clarín group. It does have a tremendous amount of clout because of its dominant presence in print, TV, cable, and radio,” the ambassador said. He also said there is still plenty of press freedom in Argentina.

Wayne said that in the Argentine media, “there is more focus on rumours and unchecked assertions than the best media standards would call for.”

U.S. cables about Peru, Colombia and Chile are magnanimous, but not bereft of criticism of the media in these countries.

Peruvian newspapers that campaigned against now President Ollanta Humala were termed “sensationalist.”

In Colombia, the embassy said the media were “closely aligned with the government” of former right-wing president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010), the predecessor of current conservative President Juan Manuel Santos, and were restrained in their stance on Uribe’s confrontation with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

The embassies were generally more critical of media policies in Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador – all of which are governed by leftist presidents – but they also criticised the lack of rigour or independence of media outlets aligned with the political opposition.

“(Bolivian President Evo) Morales is correct that wealthy families are the primary owners of Bolivia’s media outlets and that they generally have a conservative, pro-business outlook. These families often do not share President Morales’ political views,” one cable says.

In Ecuador, former U.S. ambassador Heather Hodges acknowledged there was “a grain of truth” in the observations of President Rafael Correa to the effect that “the media play a role here, in this case, of opposition,” another dispatch says.

“Many media owners come from the élite, from the business world, and they feel threatened and defend their own interests through the media,” said Hodges.

Cables from the U.S. embassy in Venezuela expressed surprise over a visit by Miguel Henrique Otero, the head of the newspaper El Nacional, asking for funding from Washington to counteract the withdrawal of government advertising.

As for Honduras, the book says that U.S. ambassador Hugo Llorens spoke out from day one about the “coup” perpetrated Jun. 28, 2009 against former president Manuel Zelaya, and criticised the media for their stance against the government and against democracy in the country.

Romeo Langlois, a French reporter in Colombia, removed his helmet and bullet-proof vest and ran towards the guerrillas during fighting between them and Colombian army troops on Saturday, Defence Minister Juan Carlos Pinzón reported.

The fate of Romeo Langlois, a French reporter who has worked in Colombia for 12 years, is unknown. Credit: Courtesy Simone Bruno

The Colombian government classifies Langlois as “missing,” while the French government said he was “kidnapped” or “taken prisoner” during the clash.

“Romeo was shot in his left arm and is wounded. And because of the pressure at the scene, he took off his helmet and vest and headed towards the area where the guerrillas were located,” Pinzón said.

Langlois was wearing the military gear because the Colombian army requires that it be used by journalists who are accompanying troops to cover war operations.

But reporters’ advice among themselves is to take off the military gear immediately in case of attack, to avoid being taken for combatants.

According to several members of the army who were taking part in the antinarcotics operation, Langlois abandoned his camera and, shouting that he was a journalist, ran towards the place where the rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) were shooting from.

“I don’t think there has ever been a kidnapping of a correspondent by the guerrillas,” Alfredo Molano, a local journalist who is a sociologist by training, told IPS.

“As far as we know, from the official sources, the reporter voluntarily gave himself up to those who were winning the fight, who at that moment were the guerrillas,” he added. “He couldn’t run to the police or the army, because they had been defeated. So he waved a white flag to the winners of the clash.”

Langlois, who works for the global television network France 24 and the French newspaper Le Figaro, has lived in Colombia for 12 years. He has a reputation among his fellow foreign reporters as a courageous journalist with great expertise on this country’s decades-old armed conflict, the economic interests underlying the war, and its victims.

He and another French reporter, Pascale Mariano, made the documentary “Pour tout l’or de Colombie” (For All the Gold in Colombia), which is currently being shown on many television stations around the world.

The incident occurred on Saturday Apr. 28 near the village of Buena Vista in the southern region of Caquetá, which formed part of the 42,000-square-km area demilitarised by the government of Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002) for peace talks with the FARC, which collapsed in 2002.

Langlois was working with Italian documentary-maker Simone Bruno on an assignment about drug trafficking for France 24 and Le Figaro. They reached the Larandia military base in Caquetá on Tuesday Apr. 24.

A team of reporters from the National Geographic Channel was also there, to film the antinarcotics operation.

But the operation, originally scheduled for Tuesday, was postponed on Wednesday, and again on Thursday and Friday. The National Geographic team left, and Bruno returned to Bogotá because he had other work to do.

IPS learned on Sunday that approximately one week ago, the FARC refused entry into the region by a team of human rights defenders on a routine mission because, according to rumours, the rebel group was planning operations in the area.

A joint army-police antinarcotics force finally made the incursion on Saturday in Unión Peneya, where the village of Buena Vista is located.

Official reports differ as to what happened, and on the number of casualties – reported as anywhere between four and 21 – when an armed forces helicopter was shot.

Reporters Without Borders said in a statement Monday that “The war of words and half-truths is an intrinsic part of the Colombian civil war, and the consequences can be dangerous for its victims. The search for the facts must continue and no statement liable to expose Langlois to more danger should be made until the exact situation has been established.”

Bruno, whose computer was stolen in Bogotá in strange circumstances Saturday, returned to the region early on Sunday.

That afternoon, speaking from Caquetá, he told the television news station Canal Capital that the army had said they would give him Langlois’ video camera, but without the memory sticks – in other words, without the footage he had taped.

Bruno said he did not know where the reports that Langlois had been kidnapped came from, and stressed that the Colombian government reported him as “missing.”

Journalists who cover such operations are given workshops by the military on the risks they will face.

Although journalists travelling in a military vehicle do not in theory lose their protection as civilians under international humanitarian law, according to the same law, they accompany troops under their own risk.

Jesuit priest Javier Giraldo, a prominent human rights defender, pointed out that this kind of reporting “is very dangerous and can be misinterpreted by the other side.”

“Romeo Langlois is well-known by Colombianas y Colombianos por la Paz (Colombians for Peace),” said Gloria Cuartas, a member of that civil society group which helped broker the release of 30 civilian and military hostages held for years by the FARC, and which got the rebel group to promise in February to stop kidnapping civilians for ransom.

“I can attest to his commitment to covering Colombia’s complex armed and social conflict, and to his efforts to reach the victims and the communities that have been affected the most,” Cuartas, who won the 2008 Edict of Nantes prize granted by that French city to those who stand out for their fight for the rule of law, civil peace and freedom of conscience, told IPS.

“Human rights defenders have known Romeo Langlois for years,” said Claudia Girón, a psychologist who is the coordinator of projects with the Manuel Cepeda Vargas Foundation, a local human rights group.

Langlois’ most outstanding journalistic work has included “Galerías de la memoria” (roughly, galleries of memory) – travelling exhibits that seek to draw visibility to victims of state crimes, Girón said.

“Langlois is one of those people who, from an ethical standpoint, has shown all sides of the conflict, has pushed for peace in Colombia, and has shown the complexity of this conflict, in which there are victims on all sides, caused by all of the armed groups,” said Girón, who appealed for his safety.

Elsy Álvarez and María Menjivar – with her young daughter – planting plantain seedlings in a clearing in the forest. Credit: Claudia Ávalos/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala and Claudia Ávalos
SAN JULIÁN, El Salvador, Apr 30 2012 (IPS)

María Elena Muñoz industriously weeds a clearing in the forest and then digs several holes, where she and another four dozen women are planting plantain seedlings, to help feed their families in this poor farming area in El Salvador.

The group is involved in an agroecology programme that has two main aims: achieve food sovereignty, which is at risk in the rural communities of San Julián; and foment the development of energy forests, which provide local families with sustainable energy and help mitigate the impact of climate change.

“The forest belongs to everyone, it gives us fruit and firewood for cooking,” Muñoz, 42, told IPS.

She is president of the Association of Communities for Development in the district of Los Lagartos in the municipality of San Julián, which is home to 19,000 people in the western province of Sonsonate.

These communities, and especially local farms, are hit hard by climate swings year after year, said Mercy Palacios with the Salvadoran Ecological Unit (UNES), a local environmental NGO.

“During the drought, the crops are scorched, and during the rainy season, they are drowned,” she said the day IPS accompanied the local women in their activities in the community forest.

Subsistence agriculture is the mainstay of the local communities, where peasant farmers grow corn and beans on infertile hillsides, and the harvests are steadily declining, due to climate phenomena.

El Salvador, and Central America in general, suffers heavy rain in winter – the rainy season – which almost inevitably leaves a trail of pain and destruction. In October, for example, the rains claimed 43 lives in the country and flooded 10 percent of the national territory.

The cost of rebuilding in Central America in the wake of the October storms will amount to 4.2 billion dollars, according to estimates by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

“We are suffering from climate extremes, something new that we have to adapt to,” Palacios said.

“There are very poor families that subsist on what they get out of the forest,” said Elsy Álvarez, a 37-year-old mother of two. “For example, they sell tangerines in the town, and get a ‘cora’ (quarter – 25 cents of a dollar) for tortillas or to give to their kid when he goes to school.”

Tired of losing the family harvest, the women in Los Lagartos decided to do something to ensure food sovereignty, and began to plant an energy forest.

Food sovereignty refers to people’s right to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.

The idea of the project came from UNES environmentalists who were working in the area, establishing an “agroschool” to teach the basic concepts of agroecology. But soon the local women made the idea their own, and have made it flourish, without financing.

The food sovereignty project encompasses one-quarter of the 40 rural villages and communities in San Julián, a municipality 60 km west of San Salvador whose ancestral name was Cacaluta, which means “city of crows” in the Náhuat language.

The project benefits about 50 families – 300 people – and the energy forest component will be expanded from Los Lagartos to other participating communities.

In Los Lagartos, population 5,000, the women work in their family gardens, where they grow vegetables with organic compost that they themselves produce. They also use it in their plots of corn and beans, staples of the Salvadoran diet, and on fruit trees in the forest.

The compost is helping change planting techniques in the area, in favour of the environment. And the women plan to start selling their organic fertiliser in the future, to earn funds for the project.

The forest is less than one hectare in size, but it has a special importance for the women in Los Lagartos because they have managed to regain control over the area and replant it, after a sugar mill destroyed it 10 years ago to plant sugar cane.

“For 10 years we have been fighting for this forest,” said Muñoz, a married mother of four. When she and the rest of the women saw that the forest was being cut down, they complained to the authorities and managed to rescue a small portion – but the damage was already done.

So they began to replant. They planted avocado, mango and nance (golden spoon) trees. And this year they began to grow plantains (cooking bananas), and trees that can be used for their wood, like conacaste (elephant ear tree).

“Now we don’t let anyone cut down our forest,” Álvarez said during a break in the planting work. “We exploit it ourselves, but only the dry branches and what is cut in the pruning process.”

The concept of energy forests followed here is not based on planting trees to cut them down later for lumber, but on the sustainable use of trees, by using dry branches as firewood, and planting fruit trees.

“A tree has a useful life expectancy, and the branches can be used as firewood, while maintaining its capacity to regenerate,” Palacios explained.

In this country of 6.1 million people, some 400,000 families – 25 percent of the population – use firewood for cooking, according to official figures.

The poorest 10 percent of households in El Salvador spend more on firewood (three percent of their budget) than on electricity, according to the 2010 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report on El Salvador.

The use of firewood represents a major cost for poor families, which means that having a forest that covers their needs is a big help for the family budget.

Consumption of firewood not only represents an important expense in their budgets, but many households also dedicate a significant proportion of their time to collecting it, the UNDP report says.

In El Salvador, 36.5 percent of the population lives in poverty, and 11.2 percent in extreme poverty, according to official figures from 2010. But in rural areas, the poverty rate stands at 43.2 percent, and 15 percent live in extreme poverty.

Luis González, an environmentalist with UNES, said the Los Lagartos project falls under the concept of climate justice, which indicates that not every region, and not every population group within regions or countries, is affected in the same way by global warming.

“There are sectors that are more vulnerable than others, and different studies show that women are among the most heavily affected groups,” he said. For example, he added, when drought dries up a water source, women suffer the stress of having to find a new source of water, further away from their homes.

A gender focus must be included in this kind of environmental project, to give women a more decisive role, said Ima Guirola, with the women’s group Cemujer. In this part of the country, she told IPS, it is women who are taking the lead in efforts to adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change.

“The important thing is to see whether women are adopting technological tools and scientific know-how on the environment, and whether they are participating in the decision-making involved in the project,” she said.

By Fabíola Ortiz
BONSUCESSO, Brazil, Apr 30 2012 (IPS)

In the green belt of market gardens that feeds the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro, women farmers are learning environmentally friendly techniques in response to extreme weather events and their effects on the land.

In the hilly Serrana region of the southeastern state of Rio de Janeiro, where many women are small-scale farmers, violent storms in January 2011 caused floods and mudslides that destroyed practically the entire production of vegetables in the area.

The producers are now back to their normal activities, but with greater concern for a less invasive type of agriculture that is better adapted to the new realities of climate change in their lives, 38-year-old Rosana Nogueira, who runs a small family farm, told IPS.

Her 24-hectare farm is in Lúcios, an area that is home to 400 families in the Formiga river basin in the rural district of Bonsucesso, near the city of Teresópolis, one of the zones worst hit by last year’s storms in which 916 people died state-wide.

Nogueira and her 68-year-old mother, Jandira Nogueira, practise farming techniques with a low impact on the environment, protecting the vegetation along river banks and controlling soil erosion, an approach that is starting to help mitigate climate change effects in the area.

Rebecca Tavares, regional director of U.N. Women for Brazil and the Southern Cone region, told IPS that in Brazil, as across the world, rural women “make vital contributions to the welfare of their families and communities, as well as the local and national economies.”

In the face of the challenges posed by climate change, they “have a pre-eminent role to play in environmental management, food production and social reproduction,” she said.

Farmers in the Formiga river basin have seen increasing signs of global warming year after year. Summers are longer, temperatures are higher, and storms are more frequent and more intense, while winters are increasingly dry. All these things affect the cycles of production and the traditional seasons for planting and harvesting.

“We weren’t used to environmental disasters like last year’s. I have lived on this property all my life, and my father has been here for 73 years, and we have never seen anything like it, nor did my grandfather tell him about anything of the sort,” said Rosana Nogueira, whose family was completely cut off for 15 days and was without electricity for a month.

Nogueira family farm with a crop system adapted to climate change. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

Production recovered in the second quarter of 2011, and farmers developed a new awareness – still in its infancy – of the need to care for the environmental aspects of their work on the land.

“Many farmers still take over forested areas to expand agricultural production, although the forests are a defence against climate change, but others are beginning to understand,” said Nogueira as she toured her farm with IPS. New greenhouses, vegetation planted on hill slopes and recent reforestation of the river bank are some responses to the disaster.

Small farmers in the area are also changing their minds about pesticide use. “We used to think that using a lot of pesticides was the way to increase production, so much so that farmers themselves would experience toxic effects when they sprayed the poisons. Now farmers want to get rid of agrochemicals,” she said.

Nogueira has the definite impression that there are more and more women farmers in the area in charge of small and medium farms, although she has no figures to prove it. Sometimes they are on their own, and sometimes their husbands give them a hand, but the men usually have wage-earning jobs in nearby towns and cities.

And even when a man is running a farm, his wife almost always works alongside him, she added.

“Women pay more attention to the details of the productive process, and we are better organised. We are more concerned about the environment and we are more determined about preserving it and farming in eco-friendly ways,” said Nogueira, who is six months pregnant and lives on the farm with her parents, her husband and their 12-year-old son. All four adults work on the farm.

“Women are more farsighted about the future of their families than men, and we are more open to innovation. The way forward for farming is sustainability,” she said with conviction.

The destructive storms of 2011 caused 12,000 dollars’ worth of losses on the Nogueira farm. Nearly 30 percent of the crops were damaged and 90 percent of the harvest was ruined.

The Nogueiras produce a variety of vegetables and some citrus fruits, and had to use their savings to rebuild greenhouses and regenerate the soil.

Nogueira was able to secure a grant of 8,000 dollars from the Sustainable Rural Development Programme in Micro-Watersheds (Rio Rural), implemented by the state of Rio de Janeiro’s agriculture secretariat.

The Rio Rural programme manages a fund of 79 million dollars provided by the World Bank in 2009 to promote sustainable development practices in rural areas of the state, with a particular focus on women farmers.

“Women are strategic to the sustainability of families and productive units, and they are the ones who are most concerned about food security,” Helga Hissa, the technical coordinator of Rio Rural, told IPS.

Rural women also act as promoters of ecological awareness in their communities, she said. “They lead their families into adopting practices like organic vegetable gardens, and they introduce native species of trees that grow into small forests on their farmland,” Hissa said.

The programme covers river basins in 59 municipalities and 37,000 family farms, comprising some 150,000 people who represent 30 percent of the rural population in the state. Teresópolis, 100 km from Rio de Janeiro, is the nearest big city.

Hissa acknowledged that the 2011 catastrophe has made many people in the area more aware of climate change, a process in which “women have a key role as communicators, because they are enterprising and are more open to trying new practices.”

“We didn’t know how to regenerate the soil, which was degraded by the floods. We took a Rio Rural programme course on green regeneration. They showed us how to plant oats to recover the soil, and to plant along the contours of the land,” Nogueira said.

“I also learned how to make organic vegetable gardens and grow food for us to eat without using agrochemicals,” she said.

She and her family managed to regenerate the vegetation along the banks of the river and to reforest 10 percent of the farm, twice what small farms are required to do by law.

“We used to have 40-year-old trees on the riverbank. Trees hold the soil, maintain the course of the river and help regulate temperature,” her mother, Jandira Nogueira, said.

“What many farmers lack is information about what is happening to the climate. If we don’t know how it is changing, we will continue to have tragedies like last year’s,” she said.

Students at the new secondary school that caters to members of sexual minorities. Credit: Courtesy Bachillerato Popular "Mocha Celis"

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Apr 27 2012 (IPS)

With 35 students, the first secondary school specifically for transvestites and other members of sexual minorities who face discrimination in mainstream schools opened in March in the Argentine capital.

The “Mocha Celis” Popular Baccalaureate is the name of the tuition-free school supported by nonprofit organisations, which caters especially – but not exclusively – to transvestites, transsexuals and transgender persons over the age of 16.

The school is named after an illiterate transvestite who worked as a prostitute and was an activist with the Association of Argentine Transvestites. A week after Celis went missing, her body was found, showing signs that she had been beaten and shot to death.

Activists suspect that Celis was killed by a federal police officer who had previously threatened her.

In an interview with IPS, Francisco Quiñones, the head of the new school, explained that the idea was “to create an inclusive school, free of discrimination, that takes into account and values the different trans identities, where they can manage to finish secondary school.

“Public schools, which are governed by rules that cater to heterosexuals, drive these people away,” and they end up dropping out of school at much higher rates than the rest of the population due to discrimination, which can even go as far as physical violence, he said.

Quiñones said transvestite students in the new school have talked about their own past experiences, such as being forced to go to the boy’s rest room, where they were sometimes attacked. “Some never went to the bathroom because they were too terrified,” he said.

For that reason, the Mocha Celis school was welcome news. “For me it’s like a door to the world,” said Laura Barrionuevo, 29, who had to drop out at the age of 15 from the vocational high school she was attending.

“I was from Ituzaingó, in the (northeastern) province of Corrientes. When I started to dress as a transvestite, a tsunami was unleashed in the school and in the town, and I had to leave. When I was older, I registered in other schools, but I felt like people looked at me as if I were a monster,” she told IPS.

She now rents a room 35 km from the Mocha Celis school in Ezeiza, a district in the southern part of Greater Buenos Aires. It takes her a total of nearly six hours a day to commute to and from school, Monday through Thursday, but she says she is happy.

Barrionuevo enjoys sewing, and she and other students plan to save up money to buy sewing machines and material to make their own clothes. “I wasn’t made to work standing on a street corner; if I was any good at that I would have earned a fortune by now,” she said, alluding to prostitution.

Once the school gains recognition from the Education Ministry of the City of Buenos Aires – a process that is taking longer than it should, according to Quiñones – the students will be able to graduate after three years, with a high school diploma showing that they specialised in community development.

The coursework at the school prepares the students to be community leaders or to set up cooperatives. But once the school gains official recognition, the diploma will also allow them to continue their studies.

“I like radiology, and journalism too,” Barrionuevo said.

The school is operating in a building that is on loan from the Asociación Mutual Sentimiento, a community development NGO, and was registered by the Fundación Diversidad Divino Tesoro, a non-profit organisation that defends the interests of sexual minorities.

Classes are taught by 25 teachers, who also helped refurbish the building.

The symbol chosen for the school was Argentine statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-1888), a former president who was the driving force behind the development of public education in this South American country. But the painting of him on the wall has undergone a transformation: he is wearing a blond wig and pink lipstick.

In the first-year classroom, the seats are arranged in a circle rather than straight rows of desks. “Here, what the students know is as valid as the teacher’s knowledge,” Quiñones said.

The curriculum is the same one that is used in conventional adult education classes, but “with a broader focus,” he clarified. There are a few additional courses, such as classes on cooperatives or “trans history”, that take a look at the activism of the trans community.

The idea for the school emerged from an assessment of the conditions faced by transvestites in Argentina, which was published in a 2005 book, “La Gesta del Nombre Propio” (roughly, “the epic struggle for a name of one’s own”). The book described the intolerance, humiliation, marginalisation and attacks suffered by transvestites.

One of the chilling statistics provided by the book was that 64 percent of the 302 transvestites interviewed had not completed primary school. And of those who had managed to finish, only 20 percent graduated from high school.

That lack of education effectively bars members of the trans community from gaining access to quality jobs, and pushes the majority (79 percent of the study sample) into prostitution as their main source of income.

The study also found that while only 11 percent of the respondents were studying at the time, 70 percent said that they would have liked to, but that they were not willing to hide or deny their true sexual identity.

The report showed that as a result of the discrimination they face on so many fronts, many members of the trans community die young. Of 420 who had died in recent years, mainly of AIDS or murder, 69 percent were between the ages of 22 and 41.

But the idea is not to limit the school to members of the trans community. “Of the 35 students registered in the Mocha Celis school, there are 10 who do not identify as trans, but are people who live on the streets or are very poor, who feel excluded from mainstream schools,” Quiñones explained.

“Although we made it clear to them that they would have to take classes like ‘trans history’, they told us that for them it wasn’t easy to find a warm place free of discrimination where they could finish secondary school, which is why they have come here,” he added.

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Apr 27 2012 (IPS)

“It changed our lives” is a sentiment frequently heard from commuters who use Metrocable, the aerial cable car system that connects one of the poor hillside neighbourhoods in the Venezuelan capital with the city’s public transport system.

The Metrocable system that has connected the hilltop neighbourhood of San Agustín with the Caracas metro since January 2010 is the second mass transit aerial tramway in Latin America, after the one that has been operating in Medellín, Colombia since 2006. And in July 2011, a third system began to operate in Rio de Janeiro, linking hillside favelas or shantytowns with the rest of the city.

“Metrocable has boosted our dignity,” María Eugenia Ramírez, 51, a cable car security guard who lives in San Agustín, told IPS. The poorest part of her neighbourhood lines a steep slope in the hills that surround the valley where Caracas is located at 1,000 metres above sea level.

“I wasn’t prepared to walk through the air,” says Ramírez, who has seven grandchildren and has already lost two of her four children.

Naiger Hernández and Doralis Viera also remember their first vertigo-inducing rides in the cabins that carry commuters between the system’s five stations in nine minutes.

“In the cabins you run into people you didn’t know and people you knew before but had lost touch with. Now we have that day-to-day contact again, neighbourly relations,” said Ramírez, one of the neighbourhood leaders, at a weekly meeting of community councils held to organise activities around Metrocable.

Since 2006, the community councils have been the key component of “people’s power”, promoted by the government of populist left-wing President Hugo Chávez, who has been in office since 1999.

There are already 35 community councils in the district, and the plan is to reach 38, Alfredo Mariño, an architect who coordinates the San Agustín integral development plan, which is associated with a Brazil-Venezuela presidential agreement signed in 2009, told IPS.

The plan is aimed at creating a methodology for tackling the issue of informal or unplanned neighbourhoods, in contrast with “the ‘formal city’,” he said.

“These neighbourhoods are urban manifestations of a highly unequal system, which relegates large segments of the population to living conditions that at times are subhuman, where they have to subsist by creating their own habitat,” Mariño said.

The hilly southern part of the neighbourhood, San Agustín del Sur, was the site of the first self-construction project in Caracas, and offers favourable conditions for implementing a broad experimental multi-project plan like the one coordinated by Mariño, or a new transportation system such as Metrocable.

The neighbourhood, which is home to just over 45,000 people, has a population density far lower than that of other poor districts lining the hillsides. It also preserves part of the original greenery, and its soils are relatively uneroded.

At the same time, Mariño pointed out, the neighbourhood has “a strong urban cultural and social tradition.” San Agustín was settled mainly by people from a region with a large black population, which helped strengthen the community’s sense of identity, in its efforts to reinforce the dignity of a marginalised culture.

Before the cable car system began to operate, local commuters had to climb down hundreds of steps every day, or ride in jeeps that operate as collective transport on the neighbourhood’s steep roads, to reach the metro station or the largely unregulated system of often rickety buses and vans that wind their way through the chaotic traffic in Caracas.

“I used to get up at 5:00 in the morning to reach work at 8:00. Now I rise at 6:30, and I don’t come home exhausted from climbing the stairs,” said Viera.

San Agustín del Sur “is an enclave isolated by different barriers, a kind of ghetto,” said Mariño. “We are seeking to replace the exclusion with inclusion on multiple levels.”

“Inclusion” is a buzzword frequently used by experts and users of Metrocable when they talk about what the system has achieved – and which aspects of the project have gone unfulfilled, such as the promise of social services like day care centres and shops that were to be given a space in the stations – now that it transports an average of 15,000 people a day.

Since June 2011, riders have had to pay for a ticket, at a price equivalent to 23 cents of a dollar, integrated with the metro ticket system.

“One condition set by President Chávez was that the construction project had to include the local people from the neighbourhood, as did Metrocable itself: all of its workers are from San Agustín,” said cable car operator Jenny Álvarez, a 35-year-old mother of two.

Ramírez stressed that “many fathers and young guys who were using drugs were given the opportunity to work on the construction project, and now they are men leading decent lives.”

She added that “the community takes care of Metrocable; no one touches the installations.”

Caracas, a city of five million people, was the most violent capital in the Americas in 2011, with a murder rate of 108 per 100,000 people, according to the United Nations. Most of the homicides occur in poor neighbourhoods.

In response to criticism of the cost of the system and the relatively limited number of people using it, Ramírez replied that “if this had been built in ‘las lomas’ (the hills where the wealthier neighbourhoods are located) it would have been fine, but since it was built in the ‘cerros’ (the steeper hills) where the ‘barefoot blacks’ live, they’re opposed to it,” she said, referring to opposition-aligned media and experts in a country marked by extreme political polarisation.

In Caracas, the hills are known by different terms depending on the social strata: they are called “cerros” when they are the site of shantytowns; “colinas” when the residents are middle class; and “lomas” when the neighbourhoods are upper middle class.

Odebrecht hired paintings by Natalya Critchley, a British artist who has lived in Venezuela for over a quarter century, for display in the Metrocable stations.

Critchley, who is known for her paintings of industrial landscapes, told IPS that Metrocable is “a non-invasive transport system, with a low impact on space.

“However, it should not only be limited to that, but should serve to influence public spaces, apply green technologies, create infrastructure, like a boulevard, and generate activities to benefit the barrio, including a tourist route. The view of the city from the stations is amazing, and it is not adequately exploited,” she said.

But until all of that happens, cabins named after Venezuela’s 23 states, and basic values – like inclusion, patriotic fervour, ethics, equity, freedom, solidarity or peace – are already part of the urban landscape, visible, as they shuttle up and down, from roads and highways down below.

The 380 families living in Piquiá de Baixo, a small town in the northeastern Brazilian state of Maranhão, are fed up with having to endure high levels of pollution from nearby steelworks in their water, air and soil.

Clouds of iron dust hang over Piquiá de Baixo. Credit: Courtesy of Piquiá de Baixo Residents' Association

The town takes its name from the piquiá tree, a species highly valued for its wood, which has become extinct in the area where five steel plants have been operating for the past 25 years, headed by Brazilian mining giant Vale.

At present some 500,000 tonnes of pig iron, an intermediate product in the process of steel refining, are produced annually in Piquiá de Baixo. Pig iron is produced in blast furnaces by smelting iron ore, using charcoal or coke as fuel and limestone as a purifying agent.

The steel industry in the municipality of Açailândia, where the town is located, depends on supplies from Vale’s iron ore mines. The pig iron is transported to Atlantic ocean ports near São Luis, the state capital, 500 km away.

Local people in the small town, who live in modest dwellings with yards bordering on the grounds of the large steel plants, are suffering health problems from pollution.

As a result of the extremely poor quality of the air they breathe and the water they drink, more than 40 percent of the residents of Piquiá de Baixo suffer from respiratory illnesses, lung diseases and skin lesions, according to a study by the Reference Centre for Infectious and Parasitic Diseases at the Federal University of Maranhão.

The local population is demanding a transfer to a clean, safe place far away from the steel plants. The majority are farmers, who now can only work land over 200 km from their homes.

Similarly dire situations are occurring in many of Brazil’s mining towns, and a number of them are also organising protests.

Edvard Dantas Cardeal, 68, is the president of the Piquiá de Baixo Residents’ Association, whose members are affected by the smoke, soot and residues generated by the 70 smelting furnaces in the area.

“We are in danger, because we live next to five steel mills. In addition, Vale has a railway station just 300 metres from our homes, where every day hundreds of tonnes of iron ore are transported across our town, 24 hours a day,” he told IPS.

The hazardous living conditions in Piquiá de Baixo are highlighted in the Relatório de Insustentabilidade da Vale 2012 (Report on Vale’s Unsustainability, 2012), launched Apr. 18 in Rio de Janeiro by the International Network of People Affected by Vale, which includes 30 social movements in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile and Mozambique, some of the countries where the mining company operates.

Andressa Caldas, head of Justiça Global (Global Justice), an NGO working for human rights, told IPS that the situation in Açailândia is emblematic, because the community which has been settled there for over 50 years “is asking to be transferred due to the degree of environmental degradation and toxic pollution it is suffering.”

Danilo Chammas, the lawyer for the Piquiá de Baixo residents, concurred. He pointed out that the town already existed when the steel plants arrived 25 years ago. Now, “coexistence has become impossible, as the local people are forced to breathe iron ore dust mixed with charcoal every day,” he said.

“The families should have been relocated when the steelmaking complex was built; but a move is still the only alternative, and is urgently needed,” he told IPS.

Chammas said the residents are demanding “a greater commitment by Vale to the local people; and the company should contribute resources toward the building of a new settlement far away from the pollution.”

According to the Report on Vale’s Unsustainability, the company “refuses to make reparations for the harm caused these people, or to cover the cost of their resettlement.”

Cardeal also said his community’s demand is a matter of utmost urgency, as they cannot stay there any longer, because of the serious risk of further deterioration in public health.

“We cannot stand it any longer; the steel mills pollute the river that flows through the town, and all we can do is ask God to get us out of this place,” he said.

IPS was able to confirm that land a good distance from the steel mills was expropriated in July 2011 by the municipal government of Açailândia to relocate the affected families. The former owner of the land appealed the decision, but the issue was resolved in favour of the expropriation on Mar. 20 by a Maranhao court.

Cardeal and Chammas travelled to Rio de Janeiro in an attempt to meet with representatives of the Vale consortium, which was privatised in 1997.

“We came in the spirit of dialogue, to give Vale the opportunity to clean up its image, tarnished by its link with the pig iron industries, many of which promote slave and child labour,” Chammas said.

Vale’s press office declined to comment to IPS about the matter, although later it issued a communiqué in response to the Report on Vale’s Unsustainability.

“Vale respectfully receives all suggestions and complaints referring to its operations. We are aware that mining activity has an impact, and therefore we work in association with communities and governments to find solutions that guarantee people’s safety, as well as harmonious and healthy coexistence,” the statement says.

As a result of climate change-related extreme weather events like a rise in the sea level and increasingly intense storms alternating with drought, Caribbean island nations are facing the challenge of adopting adaptation measures that could be too costly for their budgets.

Experts predict more and more intense storms in the Caribbean. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

One important message from the report is that costly investments are not needed to mitigate the effects of extreme weather events; there are other ways of dealing with the impacts that do not involve major spending on infrastructure, he told IPS.

That clarification is important because funds for climate change adaptation are scarce in this region, added the expert, who is co-chair of IPCC Working Group II: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability.

The IPCC, which was established in 1988, has published four comprehensive assessment reports reviewing the latest climate science, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for its “efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”

Field was in Havana to participate in a workshop held to divulge the results of the IPCC “Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation”, produced as a tool for climate adaptation policy-making.

According to statistics provided in the Apr. 18-19 workshop, the rise in sea level could lead to a reduction in the size of the Caribbean islands and have a negative impact on infrastructure, including airports, roads and capital cities, which tend to be located near the coast.

More than half of the population in the region lives less than 1.5 km from the coast. Ian King, an expert from Barbados with the United Nations Development Programme Caribbean Disaster Risk Reduction Initiative (UNDP CRMI), said the first challenge is to assess the threats, in order to decide on the most suitable adaptation policies.

King told IPS that research on management of coastal areas and marine ecosystems has been carried out in Barbados, and that it is now a question of investing in these areas to protect not only the species but the population and infrastructure, facilitating access to information that helps evaluate the best way to manage disaster risks.

One of the ways is to model different scenarios of the risk of high-intensity storms and their impact on coastal areas, King said. Better adaptation policies can be established on this more scientific basis, he added, saying the decision of whether or not to pull out of at-risk areas largely depends on the communities themselves.

Although it is clear that adaptation to climate change is a pressing need, there is a problem of financing for programmes in countries with weak economies like the islands of the Caribbean.

“It is precisely the lowest-income sectors that are most vulnerable to these problems,” Beat Schmid, Oxfam director in Cuba, told IPS.

He said the financing of adaptation programmes in developing countries by those who caused global warming was a question of “climate justice.”

There is a broad scientific consensus that the rise in the average global temperatures is due to greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere by human activities, mainly in the industrialised nations.

Schmid pointed out that in international negotiations, Oxfam and other organisations advocate the creation of a 100 billion dollar a year global fund to finance the adoption of concrete adaptation measures.

“There are also other mechanisms on the table, such as a financial transaction tax and an airline ticket tax,” he added.

The capacity of developing nations to undertake adaptation measures is limited, added the expert from Oxfam, an international confederation of 14 organisations working with over 3,000 partners in more than 100 countries to come up with lasting solutions to poverty.

In Schmid’s view, Cuba is a symbol of what can be achieved. But he clarified that this is a country with a strong state whose social policies reach the most remote areas, and which has invested steadily in human capital.

He also mentioned that this country has carried out large-scale, long-term programmes focusing on water sources and forests, for example, which started to be implemented years ago, not with the idea of adaptation, but to reduce risks like water scarcity and desertification – problems that are aggravated by climate change.

“But many countries do not have these strengths, or the level of poverty is so high that governments cannot even think about climate change adaptation programmes,” he said. “Even in the case of Cuba, the needs far surpass the possibilities of financing these programmes.”

He also lamented that there is still talk of each country paying for adaptation measures, and that only five industrialised nations are living up to the commitment to spend 0.7 percent of GDP on development aid, while several countries have actually cut their official development aid.

The IPCC special report on risk management warns that economic losses caused by global warming-related natural disasters are increasing, and this will have a great impact in the future on areas like tourism, agriculture and water supply.

Young people learning computer skills at Campus Tec. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, Apr 26 2012 (IPS)

“We’re making a three-dimensional educational video game. The idea is to create virtual worlds where children can explore and interact with other people and objects,” said Carlos Villagrán, seated at a computer in the Campus Tecnológico in the Guatemalan capital.

The Tec, as it is better known, was conceived as “a physical space where innovation and technology can find a place to flourish at world-class levels of competitiveness,” according to its web site.

The campus is inspired by Silicon Valley, the technology park in California that is home to hi-tech giants like Adobe Systems, Cisco Systems, Intel, Apple Inc. and Hewlett-Packard.

So far, the Guatemalan campus is thriving. The Tec’s seven-storey building, inaugurated in June 2010, is fully occupied by 100 companies in the information technology (IT) sector, most of whose personnel are young people.

They specialise in producing special effects for movies, video games, and software for mobile telephones and the internet.

The Tec building, located in Cuatro Grados Norte, a cultural district with pedestrian areas, parks and restaurants, also houses the technology institute of the private Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, all of which has generated great anticipation and enthusiasm.

“We were about to throw in the towel because of lack of support, but then we came here and found plenty of people developing their own projects and companies,” Villagrán told IPS.

“There are three dimensional designers and modellers here who are collaborating with us,” he said.

“We have found a place to work, and we are more enthusiastic now,” said this 26-year-old computer science engineer, who wants to see his project “expand all over the world.”

Villagrán participates in the Tec’s “business incubator”, a sort of technological seedbed for entrepreneurial startup companies that is also part of the campus.

The incubator programme “accelerates the process of creation, growth and consolidation of innovative projects and businesses,” María Mercedes Zagui, in charge of business development at the Campus Tecnológico, told IPS.

“We have over 200 enterprise projects that are constantly buzzing around us. These are people who are allied to and interested in us, but we do not have enough space in the building for all of them,” she said.

To cope with the demand, a new 14-storey building is under construction to house more companies, including international firms, while strategies to attract the attention of potential clients abroad are growing.

Zagui said plans are in motion to open a Campus Tec office in the U.S. Silicon Valley technology complex in August.

“That will give us a global presence, because having an address here is not the same as having one in the United States, in the world’s largest business incubator. In addition, there are opportunities for making contacts and securing financial resources there that we do not have here,” she said.

According to the Ibero-American and Inter-American Network of Science and Technology Indicators (RICYT), this impoverished Central American country of 14 million people invests 12 million dollars a year on research and development, equivalent to 0.04 percent of GDP.

Direct government investment in science and technology represents only 27.9 percent of the country’s total investment in this area, while 21.7 percent is contributed by higher education, and the remaining 50.4 percent comes from abroad, the network says.

Meanwhile, the businesses at the Tec continue their struggle to innovate and open up a niche for themselves in the field of technology.

One of them is BigoMo, which does video postproduction and visual effects and is renowned for its work in “The Chronicles of Narnia” film series. Source Tour, meanwhile, has launched a virtual shopfront for tours and tourist activities in Guatemala.

“Being here has been good for our growth. I have met lots of people who work in the same field, but I see them as collaborators, not competitors,” said Mauricio Macal, the head of CG Armada, a multimedia production unit.

But the challenges are great. For one thing, the local market tends to undervalue these technological products, to the point that clients often do not want to pay the real value of their work.

Macal blames this on the fact that many people sell their work at far below market prices.

“There’s a lot of undercutting in the business. Some young people are making logos for 150 quetzals (20 dollars), and they are competing with companies that have fixed overheads, like office rent, and that use brand-name computers and legal software,” he complained to IPS.

In spite of the hurdles, the IT industry seems to be taking off at the Tec, for instance at Milk ‘n Cookies, another Guatemalan company devoted to multimedia production, web platforms and applications for cellphones.

“We have just tripled our office space,” Nelson Melville, the company’s project developer, told IPS.

The firm created the Minimundi site, an educational tool on the internet that teaches children about recycling and respect for the environment.

The site is sponsored by Ecoembes, a Spanish nonprofit association that works in the management and processing of recycled materials. Other companies like MTV and Discovery Mobile have also contracted services from the Guatemalan firm.

“The creative artists working here are expert at what they do, and their work is a labour of love. We have no reason to envy designers anywhere else in the world,” Melville said.

By Mario Queiroz
LISBON, Apr 25 2012 (IPS)

For the first time in 38 years, the former soldiers and officers who opened the doors to democracy in Portugal did not take part in the official celebration of the Carnation Revolution, which toppled Europe’s longest dictatorship in 1974.

The officers instead called a protest against the economic crisis and the austerity measures adopted by the government of Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho. The march down the Avenida da Liberdade ended with a demonstration that filled the huge Praça do Rossio, Lisbon’s main square.

Wednesday’s protest was supported by former socialist president Mario Soares (1985-1995), considered the “patriarch” of Portuguese democracy, who also declined the place of honour he traditionally occupies in the legislature, as a former head of state.

Retired colonel Vasco Lourenço, who was commander of the army forces in Lisbon during the coup, explained that the former officers did not participate in the official ceremony because “the political line followed by the current political leaders no longer reflects the democratic regime that was the heir to Apr. 25, 1974, as outlined in the constitution.”

Lourenço heads the 25th of April Association, made up of retired and active-duty members of the military who played a role in the coup that overthrew the dictatorship that governed Portugal with an iron fist from 1926 to 1974.

Over the past few months, the officers who led the Carnation Revolution – named for the flowers that people put in the barrels of the soldiers’ guns after the coup – have been criticising the government for destroying nearly all of the achievements of that historic event.

The so-called “captains of April” boycotted the ceremony in parliament but did not fail to commemorate the revolution, which marked not only the end of the 48-year extreme-right isolationist dictatorship but also of Portugal’s nearly 560-year colonial empire.

In the space of just a few hours 38 years ago, the Movimento das Forças Armadas (MFA – Armed Forces Movement) – a revolutionary movement led by 144 left-wing junior officers tired of the colonial wars raging at the time in Portugal’s “overseas provinces” – removed the heads of the armed forces and made way for democracy by calling for elections for a constituent assembly.

Since then, Portugal had not experienced the kind of social unrest seen today, a reaction to the tough austerity measures adopted by the conservative government of Passos Coelho to reduce the fiscal deficit, a condition imposed by the “troika” of creditors – the International Monetary fund (IMF), the EU and the European Central Bank (ECB) – that approved a 110-billion dollar financial bailout for Portugal in 2011.

The policies have included pay and pension cuts, across-the-board tax hikes, an end to essentially free universal public healthcare, increased rates for natural gas, electricity, fuel, transport, and vehicle licenses, and a rise in monthly tuition fees for students.

A reform of the labour code that is making its way through parliament will also make it easier to hire and fire workers, eliminate the holiday bonus salaries, limit unemployment benefits, reduce the number of public holidays, cut overtime pay, allow a longer workday, and slash the number of vacation days.

In his speech to thousands of protesters, Lourenço said “the government does not serve the elected officials but the voters, and therefore cannot sell the country to the economic and financial powers-that-be.”

“Elected officials no longer represent Portuguese society (when they try to) legitimate the dictatorship of the markets, because the people did not give parliament the power to hand over that authority,” the retired officer told the demonstrators, many of whom were older people who personally lived through the Carnation Revolution.

Lourenço added that due to the draconian measures imposed by the troika, Portugal “is now a protectorate” that follows the dictates of “Merkozy” – an allusion to the real power-holders in the EU: the government of Germany led by Chancellor Angela Merkel and the French government headed by President Nicolas Sarkozy.

“We aren’t boasting of being the saviours of the nation, but we do say the military knows how to stand firm in the defence of its people,” he said.

For his part, Soares said that thanks to the April Revolution, “everything changed and there is no comparison to the past of poverty, war and dictatorship, in which Portugal was ‘gloriously alone’ (a famous phrase of dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar) during 48 years of cruelty.”

The pluralist democracy ushered in by the revolution “had a great influence in the establishment of many democracies, especially in Spain, Greece and Latin America, without excluding our beloved Brazil, which at that time was also dominated by a dictatorship (1964-1985),” he added.

However, “we are now experiencing a crisis that came from outside, from the United States and from the rest of Europe, which has a great deal to do with the current incapacity of many leaders on this continent, who blindly believe in austerity policies and are not concerned about the exponential growth of unemployment or the paralysis of economies in recession,” he said.

Soares explained to IPS that his stance in the protest held on this year’s anniversary was “of solidarity with the April heroes” at a time when the government of Passos Coelho is “destroying social achievements like social security, education and healthcare by means of privatisation and the limiting of the rights of the Portuguese.”

The former president said the austerity policies are leading to the “impoverishment of millions of Portuguese…(which) is not leading us anywhere, or more precisely, is leading us from bad to worse every year.”

By Mario Osava
PORTO VELHO, Brazil, Apr 25 2012 (IPS)

In Grenoble, France, there is a 40-metre-long scale model of the Jirau dam that is being built in Brazil’s Amazon jungle. The exact replica of the project makes is possible to foresee and analyse possible risks, such as the heavy flow of sediment in the Madeira River.

But “the model does not take people into account,” which is why it did not help anticipate the workers’ uprisings and strikes against poor working conditions that have twice held up construction for lengthy periods of time since 2011, said Ari Ott, a professor of anthropology at the Federal University of Rondônia in Porto Velho, who describes the dam as “an engineering marvel.”

Jirau is one of the two big hydroelectric complexes under construction on the Madeira River in the northwestern Brazilian state of Rondônia. Jirau is 130 km from Porto Velho, the state capital, while the Santo Antônio dam is just seven km outside of the city.

In the revolt that broke out in March 2011, apparently after a worker was denied transportation to visit a sick family member in the city, nearly all of the lodgings built to house the 16,000 workers were burnt down, along with other buildings and 60 buses and other vehicles.

The uprising gave rise to a lengthy strike demanding wage hikes, better transportation, and more frequent permits allowing workers from distant areas to visit home.

Work on the dam only gradually got under way again three months later.

On Apr. 3, protesters once again set fire to one-third of the housing at Jirau, leaving some 3,200 workers without lodging.

But this time, a small group of workers, described as vandals by the company and the government, were identified and arrest warrants were issued for 24 suspects.

The new attack on the installations occurred after an assembly in which the Jirau workers decided to put an end to a 25-day strike.

The March 2011 rebellion was the catalyst of a movement that brought work to a halt not only on Jirau but on other major construction projects around Brazil.

But the violence this time was less widespread, and was apparently the work of a small minority of employees who disagreed with the decision reached by the assembly.

“They aren’t radicals, because they have no cause; they just like chaos,” said Altair Donizete de Oliveira, vice president of the Rondônia construction workers’ union, STICCERO.

After the latest incidents, police were posted at the plant, where they are likely to become a semi-permanent fixture, the trade unionist lamented.

The companies building the hydropower complex should also be more rigorous in the selection of workers, Oliveira said. But he conceded that this would be difficult “because of the shortage of workers,” which basically means, he said, that anyone available is hired.

The unrest among the workers at Jirau, who this month won a seven percent wage increase and other benefits, also extended to Santo Antônio, although no violence was reported there.

Santo Antônio benefits from its proximity to Porto Velho. Because most of its workers are housed in town, it only needs to provide on-site lodging for 2,500 workers, said Oliveira. Jirau, by contrast, houses six times as many workers, in an isolated jungle area far from the city.

As a result of the unrest and strikes, a growing number of workers have quit their jobs at the dams and returned home. Since work began in 2008 on the Santo Antônio dam, which currently employs about 15,000 people, more than 50,000 workers have spent time on the construction site, Oliveira said.

A year ago, the trade unionist had predicted that unrest would break out again at Jirau because the dam is being built by a consortium controlled by a foreign company, the French utility GDF Suez.

Analysing the factors fuelling the conflicts, Oliveira said “Brazilian companies have a heart,” while foreign firms only use cold logic based on technical considerations. He also mentioned cultural differences.

In addition, the large concentration of workers at enormous construction sites scattered across the country seems to be fomenting worker unity and a more combative stance in search of improved wages and conditions.

Brazil’s construction industry has historically had a reputation of paying low wages and offering precarious working conditions.

But the swift rise in demand for workers has strengthened their mobilisation, and the workers now often spontaneously take action even before their unions decide to do so, as occurred at the Jirau dam in 2011.

Growth in wages has not kept up with the increase in demand for labour power. “A few years ago, a construction worker earned three minimum salaries (equivalent to just over 1,000 dollars today) while they now earn less than two,” Oliveira said.

Besides the dams, mega-construction projects under way in Brazil include four oil refineries, two petrochemical complexes, several port and steel works complexes, railways, roads, and a network of canals to divert water from the São Francisco River, which cuts across Brazil from the centre to the east, to improve the water supply in the semi-arid Northeast.

The wave of strikes that has accompanied the construction fever has also affected Belo Monte, another hydropower complex where work has been delayed on the Xingú River in the eastern Amazon rainforest. A large part of the construction site’s 7,000 workers took part in a strike from late March to early April, demanding better working conditions. They resumed the stoppage on Monday Apr. 23.

In the meantime, the Rio de Janeiro Petrochemical Complex (Comperj), which now employs nearly 15,000 people, has been hit since December by intermittent strikes in the different companies in charge of construction of the complex since March 2008, 40 km from Rio de Janeiro.

The inauguration of the project, under the state-run Petrobras oil giant, has been postponed for a year, to 2014. And the cost of construction has steadily risen, to 20 billion dollars.

Comperj will include a refinery capable of handling Brazil’s heavy crude oil, and first, second and third-generation units for producing petrochemicals. The project will generate 200,000 direct and indirect jobs.

But work stoppages, as well as environmental conflicts, have plagued the mega-project. The start of operations of the refineries, which are urgently needed to reduce imports of gasoline and other oil derivatives, has been delayed. Brazil is already self-sufficient in crude oil, but lacks refining capacity to respond to fast-growing consumption needs.

A criminal lawsuit against 1,500 former members of DINA, the secret police of Chile’s 1973-1990 dictatorship, is seeking to shed light on the most active player in the repression, which stretched outside the country’s borders.

Villa Grimaldi, a former detention and torture centre, now a "peace park". Credit: Marysol*/CC BY-SA 2.0

“We are trying to get the DINA (Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional) investigated as a criminal organisation,” Boris Paredes, a human rights lawyer, told IPS.

“The conclusion reached is that DINA operated as an extermination group, and as such, we believe that all of its members were part of an illicit association,” he said.

The charges filed this month by the Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos (AFDD – Group of Families of the Detained-Disappeared) is based on a memorandum that the office of the army chief of staff handed over to Judge Alejandro Solís on Aug. 28, 2008.

The memorandum, an official list of 1,500 names, was provided to the judge in connection with a case involving the victims of Villa Grimaldi, the largest torture and detention centre run by the 17-year military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

The 1,500 names on the list are of official members, from the senior-most military officers and civilians to the lowest-ranking staffers, of DINA, which was dissolved in 1977 and replaced by the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI – National Information Centre), that operated until the end of the regime.

“It’s important for the country to know which people participated in these bodies, because we must urgently make progress on passing legislation that respects human rights and that, as is being done in Argentina, prohibits human rights violators from holding public positions,” Paredes said.

He said several judges have taken the position that “no one who belonged to DINA was unaware of what was happening, and each one was a gear in a large machinery set up to kidnap, torture and kill people.”

AFDD spokeswoman Gabriela Zúñiga told IPS that the courts in Chile have handed down sentences against the “poster boys” of the repression, like army General Manuel Contreras, founder and chief of DINA, and Álvaro Corbalán, CNI head of operations.

“But there are a large number of agents who we don’t even think of as belonging to (DINA),” she said, mentioning Rosauro Martínez, a lawmaker of the co-governing right-wing Independent Democratic Union (UDI), who she noted is “paradoxically” a member of the Latin American Parliament’s human rights commission; Cristián Labbé, mayor of the upscale Santiago neighbourhood of Providencia,; and Augusto Pinochet Hiriart, the son of the late dictator.

“In a healthy society, which wants to resolve the issue of human rights violations by means of state policies, it is unseemly for terrorists and perpetrators of crimes against humanity to be in public positions, without having been held accountable in the courts and before society,” Zúñiga said.

Cath Collins, director of the Observatory of Human Rights at the Diego Portales University, said DINA operated as an “extra-institutional apparatus purposely created outside the discipline of the armed forces, to enable the military to deny that they were institutionally involved in the human rights violations.”

According to the information that the AFDD has compiled, and the evidence presented in court, DINA was responsible for the deaths of all of the AFDD members’ lost loved ones, and was also responsible for coordinating the repression against opponents with the rest of the dictatorships of the Southern Cone of the Americas, in what was known as Operation Condor.

The Pinochet regime killed and forcibly disappeared 3,216 people, while another 38,254 survived prison and torture, according to the Interior Ministry’s human rights programme, which based its figures on the 2004 and 2011 reports by a commission presided over by Catholic Bishop Sergio Valech (1927-2010) until his death, and the 1991 truth commission headed by Raúl Rettig.

The Diego Portales University’s Observatory of Human Rights found that nearly 70 percent of the cases of those who were killed or “disappeared” are still being investigated by the justice system, 22 percent have never gone to court, and the rest have been concluded.

The report says that between 2000 and 2011, 824 former agents of the dictatorship faced prosecution, although 31 of them died during that period.

Of the 793 former agents who are still alive, 544 are still under trial or are awaiting sentencing or appeal, 177 have been sentenced but have never been imprisoned due to benefits they have received, 66 are in prison serving their sentences, and six have been convicted but are free due to reduction of sentence or because their sentences were commuted.

The report also indicates that 47 of the former agents behind bars are serving their sentences in the Punta Peuco prison and 10 in the Cordillera prison, which are both exclusively for military personnel, and have comforts that “border on luxury.”

Punta Peuco’s inmates include Contreras, who is serving 25 life sentences – more than 300 years in prison – and his second-in-command, former Brigadier-General Pedro Espinoza.

Another of the human rights violators held at the modern Punta Peuco prison is former Brigadier-General Miguel Krassnoff, who was sentenced to a total of 144 years in prison on charges of forced disappearance and murder.

A tribute was paid to Krassnoff in November 2011 by Providencia Mayor Cristian Labbé, a former army colonel.

Although Collins stressed the large number of people who have been convicted of human rights violations in Chile, she said the sentences were considered light in comparison to the gravity of the crimes, and pointed out that only around one-third of those who have been sentenced are actually in prison.

Another pending challenge is repealing or modifying the 1978 amnesty for human rights abusers, which is still in effect.

And while states have an international obligation to investigate human rights crimes, it was not until 2011 that cases were presented on behalf of victims of human rights crimes for whom no legal action had been brought.

In January 2011, Santiago prosecutor Beatriz Pedrals filed 726 new lawsuits which included, for the first time, legal action for the death of President Salvador Allende (1970-1973) in the Sept. 11, 1973 bombing of the La Moneda government palace during the coup mounted by Pinochet.

Previously, all of the lawsuits had been filed by survivors or by family members of victims.

“Progress has been made, but we have clearly not achieved full justice,” said Zúñiga. “Most of the perpetrators have got off scot-free.”

Paredes, meanwhile, said that in the last few years, “there have been important advances made in the courts, by magistrates who have courageously done important work…We have seen results with respect to unveiling the truth.”

But she concurred with Zúñiga that “justice is lame-footed because the sentences handed down are ridiculously short.”

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Apr 23 2012 (IPS)

A truce negotiated between El Salvador’s main gangs has drastically reduced murders and encouraged hope that this country may have found a way out of the labyrinth of violence in which it seemed lost. But the deal is fragile, causing uncertainty.

After the leaders of the two main gangs in the country, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18, agreed a truce on Mar. 9 in the maximum security prison where they were confined, mediated by the Catholic Church and a civil society representative, murder rates have declined significantly, from 14 to five or six a day.

The truce “is a source of hope, but that does not make it robust,” leftwing commentator and former guerrilla commander Dagoberto Gutiérrez told IPS.

A homicide reduction policy that relies on the goodwill and determination of gang leaders “is plagued with risks and uncertainties,” he said.

The order to stop attacking rival gangs, as well as soldiers, police and security guards, was obeyed by gang cells or “clicas” all over the country.

One of the uncertainties is how long the clicas will follow their incarcerated bosses’ directives.

In 2011 there were 4,374 murders in El Salvador, equivalent to a homicide rate of 70 per 100,000 population, one of the highest in the world, according to several international studies.

“We are aware that we have failed God and society, and on behalf of all my gang, MS-13, I want to ask for forgiveness from society, and ask that you give us an opportunity to change,” said MS-13 leader Dionisio Umanzor at a mass celebrated Mar. 26 in the prison of Ciudad Barrios, in the eastern province of San Miguel.

However, these gangs have not said that they will give up other forms of crime, such as extortion, which affects a large proportion of El Salvador’s 6.2 million people.

Over the last year, different opinion polls have shown that for Salvadorans, violence is the most pressing problem.

On Apr. 14, President Mauricio Funes told heads of state meeting at the Sixth Summit of the Americas in Colombia of an “unprecedented” event: it was the first day in decades that not a single murder had been reported in El Salvador – although later in the day there was, in fact, one killing.

According to a report published by the online newspaper El Faro on Mar. 14, in return for an end to the bloodshed, the government agreed to transfer the top leaders of the gangs from the maximum security Zacatecoluca prison, known as “Zacatraz”, in the central province of La Paz, to lower-security prisons.

The government denied participation in the agreement between the “maras”, as the gangs are popularly known, although it confirmed it had transferred the gang leaders at the request of the Catholic Church mediator, Bishop Fabio Colindres.

“My request evoked a response and as a result, crime, the worst problem in this country, has been turned around,” Colindres told IPS.

The maras originated in the 1970s and 1980s in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities where Central American migrants and refugees became gang members and were later deported to their countries of origin.

Conditions of poverty and marginalisation led young Central Americans without a future to swell the ranks of the maras.

“I joined a gang in Los Angeles in 1978. I was marginalised in the United States and also back in my own country, without any employment opportunities or anything,” Luis Romero, a Salvadoran former gang member who runs Homies Unidos, an organisation working for the social reintegration of former gang members, told IPS.

In Romero’s view, the truce between gangs is the most positive opportunity yet to confront the violence, which past and present governments have attacked with methods that have emphasised repression rather than prevention.

“We have been waiting for something like this for years; it is a ray of hope,” he said.

Jeannette Aguilar, head of the Public Opinion Institute at the Central American University, agreed that the decline in homicides is cause for celebration. But she is concerned that it is not the result of a public policy embodying the will of the state to provide prevention and reinsertion services.

“A situation like that of El Salvador can only be solved sustainably through a public policy with actions for the short, medium and long terms,” Aguilar told IPS. And such a policy must include proposals from the rest of civil society.

“I am concerned about the situation, because it is very unpredictable,” she said.

On Mar. 28, Funes called on all sectors of the country to participate in a national pact to create opportunities for gang members wanting to rejoin society.

The business community will have an important role to play, in terms of providing jobs for former mara members, who have traditionally been discriminated against because of tattoos that identify them as belonging to a gang.

In mid-April, Ministry of Justice and Security officials announced a plan to create employment training centres at a cost of 20 million dollars, so that former gang members can learn a trade to help them reintegrate into society.

According to Gutiérrez, financing the plan will be a major challenge in the current difficult situation in the country and the world, which makes it hard to find resources for a sustainable reinsertion project.

For their part, gang members have proposed that the government devote its annual 42-million-dollar subsidy for public transport companies, which are subject to regular extortion by the maras, to reinsertion programmes. But the transport companies have dismissed the idea out of hand.