Credit: Bigstock

By Germán Velásquez
GENEVA, Aug 22 2016 (IPS)

In a landmark decision that has been hailed as a victory of public health measures against narrow commercial interests, an international tribunal has dismissed a claim by tobacco giant company Philip Morris that the Uruguay government violated its rights by instituting tobacco control measures.

The ruling had been much anticipated as it was the first international case brought against a government for taking measures to curb the marketing of tobacco products.

Philip Morris had started proceedings in February 2010 against Uruguay at the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) under a bilateral investment treaty (BIT) between Uruguay and Switzerland. The decision was given on 8 July 2016.

Under the BIT, foreign companies can take cases against the host state on various grounds, including if its policies constitute an expropriation of the companies” expectation of profits, or a violation of “fair and equitable treatment” These investment treaties and arbitration tribunals like ICSID have been heavily criticised in recent years for decisions favouring companies and that critics argue violate the right of states to regulate in the public interest.

In this particular case, the tribunal gave a ruling that dismissed the tobacco giant’s claims and upheld that the Uruguayan pro-health measures were allowed.

President Tabaré Vázquez of Uruguay, responding to the ruling, stated on 8 July:: “We have succeeded to prove at the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes that our country, without violating any treaty, has met its unwavering commitment to defend the health of its people… From now on, when tobacco companies try to undermine the regulations adopted in the context of the framework tobacco convention with the threat of litigation, they (countries) will find our precedent.”

Germán Velásquez

Philip Morris International (PMI) started legal proceedings against Uruguay’ government at the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), based at the World Bank, in February 2010. This was the first time the tobacco industry challenged a state in front of an international tribunal.

Philip Morris claimed that the health measures imposed by the Ministry of Health of Uruguay violated its intellectual property rights and failed to comply with Uruguay’s obligation under its bilateral investment treaty (BIT) with Switzerland.

Two specific measures were contested by Philip Morris. The first measure was the Single Presentation Requirement introduced by the Uruguayan Public Health Ministry in 2008, where tobacco manufacturers could no longer sell multiple varieties of one brand. Philip Morris had to withdraw 7 of its 12 products and alleged that the restriction to market only one variety substantially affected its company’s value.

The second measure contested by Philip Morris was the so-called “80/80 Regulation”. Under a presidential decree, graphic health warnings on cigarette packages should cover 80 percent instead of 50 percent, of the packaging, leaving only 20 percent for the tobacco companies’ trademarks and advertisement.

Uruguay adopted strict tobacco control policies to comply with the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC), in light of evidence that tobacco consumption leads to addiction, illness, and death.

According to the Ministry of Health, since Uruguay introduced its tobacco control programme in 2003, its comprehensive tobacco control campaign has resulted in a substantial and unprecedented decrease in tobacco use.

From 2005 to 2011 per person consumption of cigarettes dropped by 25.8 %. Tobacco consumption among school-going youth aged 12­17 decreased from over 30 percent to 9.2 percent from 2003 to 2011. Ministry of Health data also indicate that since smoke-free laws were introduced, hospitalization for acute myocardial infarction has reduced by 22 percent.

Since this was the first international litigation, the case is highly important for similar debates taking place in other forums, like the World Trade Organization, where some states are being challenged by other states for their tobacco control measures. It is a significant victory for a state facing commercial threats by tobacco companies fighting control measures.

The decision is supportive of states that choose to exercise their sovereign right to introduce laws and strategies to control tobacco sales in order to protect the health of their population.

This is a David against Goliath victory. The annual revenue of Philip Morris in 2013 was reported at $80.2 billion, in contrast to Uruguay”s gross domestic product of $55.7 billion. The international lawyer and practitioner in investment treaty arbitration Todd Weiler stated in a legal opinion that: “the claim is nothing more than the cynical attempt by a wealthy multinational corporation to make an example of a small country with limited resources to defend against a well-funded international legal action.”

An important aspect of the case was that the secretariats of the World Health Organization and the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC) submitted an amicus brief during the proceedings.

The brief provided an overview of global tobacco control, including the role of the WHO FCTC. It set out the public health evidence underlying Uruguay’s tobacco packaging and labelling laws and detailed state practice in implementing similar measures.

This is a David against Goliath victory. The annual revenue of Philip Morris in 2013 was reported at $80.2 billion, in contrast to Uruguay''s gross domestic product of $55.7 billion
The Tribunal accepted the submission of the amicus brief on the basis that it provided an independent perspective on the matters in the dispute and contributed expertise from “qualified agencies”. The Tribunal subsequently relied on the brief at several points of the factual and legal analysis in their decision.

In accepting submission of the amicus brief the Tribunal noted that given the “public interest involved in this case”the amicus brief would “support the transparency of the proceeding”.

The Tribunal ruling upheld that Uruguay could maintain the following specific regulations:

Prohibiting tobacco companies from marketing cigarettes in ways that falsely present some cigarettes as less harmful than others.

Requiring tobacco companies to use 80% of the front and back of cigarette packs for graphic/pictures of warnings of the health danger of smoking.

According to expert Chakravarthi Raghavan there are several specific legal findings of the panel ruling, including:

1. Uruguay did not violate any of its obligations under the Switzerland/Uruguay Bilateral Investment Treaty, or deny Philip Morris any of the protections provided by that Treaty.

2. Uruguay’s regulatory measures did not “expropriate” Philip Morris’ property. They were bona fide exercises of Uruguay’s sovereign police power to protect public health.

3. The measures did not deny Philip Morris “fair and equitable treatment” because they were not arbitrary; instead, they were reasonable measures strongly supported by the scientific literature, and had received broad support from the global tobacco control community.

4. The measures did not “unreasonably and discriminatorily” deny Philip Morris the use and enjoyment of its trademark rights, because they were enacted in the interests of legitimate policy concerns and were not motivated by an intention to deprive Philip Morris of the value of its investment.

This is a landmark ruling because it supports the case that it is the sovereign right not only of Uruguay but of States in general to adopt laws and regulations to protect public health by regulating the marketing and distribution of tobacco products.

It is hoped that many other countries, which have been awaiting this decision before adopting similar regulations, will follow Uruguay’s example.President Vázquez said it is time for other nations to join Uruguay in this struggle, “without any fear of retaliation from powerful tobacco corporations, as Uruguay has done.”

Nevertheless, there is still a lot of public concern worldwide about the role that bilateral investment treaties has played in curbing the policy space of countries, including for health policies. There have also been serious concerns about the rulings made by other tribunals of ICSID and other arbitration centres, which have favoured the claims of companies and imposed high monetary awards against states. In the case of Philip Morris versus Uruguay, the tribunal’s ruling was correct in supporting the state’s right to regulate in the interest of public health. But the concerns in general are still valid. Other tribunals in other cases may or may not be so sympathetic to the public interest.

This is a reduced version of the article published in www.southcentre.int.

Excerpt:

The Maersk Venturer drillship, which is drilling the Raya-1 well that set a new world record in terms of water depth, and will determine the existence of commercially viable oil and gas reserves on Uruguay's continental shelf. Credit: Ancap

By Veronica Firme
MONTEVIDEO, Jun 9 2016 (IPS)

Uruguay is just weeks away from finding out if it will have a chance to stop being totally reliant on oil imports at some point in the future, when the first offshore exploration well in national waters – which set a new world record in terms of water depth – is completed.

Since Mar. 30, the consortium headed by France’s Total has been prospecting 250 km from the Atlantic coast, in more than 3,400 metres of water, and 3,000 metres below the seabed.

The Raya-1 well in Block 14, drilled with an investment of some 200 million dollars in ultra-deep waters on the continental shelf, is hunting for commercially viable oil or gas reserves.

On Thursday Jun. 8, the representative of Total in the country, Artur Nunes da Silva, said the drilling would be done in about two weeks and the samples would be sent to France for analysis. Only then, he said, would the results be announced.

The next day, the local media reported that, according to information from the industry, only water was found in Raya-1, although that did not fully rule out the existence of oil and gas on the continental shelf.

The drilling represents a major turning-point for this South American country of 3.4 million people, because it will soon know if it has a future as an oil producer. The effort to find oil here was not stalled by the oil-price crisis, which has discouraged investment at a global level, especially in high-risk ventures such as deepwater drilling.

“When the current drop in prices began, most of the contracts had already been signed,” Víctor Bacchetta, a journalist who specialises in environmental issues and who edits Uruguay’s Mining Observatory publication, told IPS.

The contracts form part of the goals set by the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Mining’s 2005-2030 energy policy, which, although it puts a priority on strengthening renewable energies, also paves the way for exploration and prospecting for oil and natural gas.

The state oil company Ancap is responsible for implementing the policy, which also requires attempts at participating in joint ventures for exploring deposits in other countries.

Geologist Ethel Morales told IPS that the first attempts to find fossil fuels in Uruguay dated back to the 1950s, when exploratory wells were drilled in the Northern Basin, which covers some 90,000 sq km in this country of 176,220 sq km.

A screenshot from a presentation by geologist Ethel Morales, showing the contracts granted so far on Uruguay’s continental shelf, to the right. The second from the top is Block 14, awarded to French oil major Total. Credit: Uruguay Round

Exploratory wells were also drilled on the continental shelf in the 1970s, said Morales, a professor at Uruguay’s University of the Republic. But shallow water prospecting ended in 1976, after two wells were declared dry.

Besides the energy policy itself, Morales said another factor that fuelled offshore exploration was the appearance of the so-called pre-salt deposits, located beneath a two-kilometre-thick salt layer under rock, sand and deep water, to the north of this country’s continental shelf, off the coast of Brazil.

These huge deposits drew the oil corporations’ attention to the South Atlantic. Morales said Brazil’s Santos basin, where the pre-salt deposits are located, and the Uruguayan basin “share the same origins,” although their later evolution was different.

In this context, Ancap began to search for partners to drill exploratory wells in Uruguayan waters, although its spokespersons stress that the chances of finding commercially viable reserves stand at just 15 percent.

Uruguayan Minister of Industry, Energy and Mining Carolina Cosse (3rd-left) with high-level officials from the state oil company Ancap, during their visit to the drillship that is exploring for oil in ultra-deep waters 250 km off the coast of Uruguay. Credit: Ancap

The Uruguay Round 1 bidding process was launched in 2009, offering continental shelf blocks, followed in 2011 by Round 2, in which eight contracts were signed, including the one with Total.

“Up to 2012 there was no 3D (tridimensional) seismic, and now we have nearly 40,000 sq km covered in the area of greatest prospectivity, which reflects a quantitative and qualitative leap with respect to the information available,” Ancap reported in late 2015.

Oil industry analysts stress the participation in the exploration here of the world’s leading oil companies, and note that the contracts assign a large proportion of the profits to the Uruguayan state.

Ancap and the Ministry of Industry decided to launch Uruguay Round 3, whose chief aim is the same: to determine whether there is oil and gas on the continental shelf, and if there is, whether it is commercially viable.

Total’s partners in Block 14 are the U.S. ExxonMobil (which has a 35 percent share) and Norway’s Statoil (15 percent), and the state will take 70 percent of the earnings, if the presence of light crude reserves is confirmed.

But even if the results from Raya-1 are positive, between two and three dozen additional wells will have to be drilled in the 6,900-sq-km block, and some six billion dollars will have to be invested if there is mainly oil, and 20 billion if there is mainly gas.

It could take up to six years before the start of commercial production of oil or gas, according to Total.

The oil companies granted contracts in the two bidding rounds held so far have invested a combined total of up to one billion dollars in exploration and prospecting.

The most important thing, in Ancap’s view, is that “after a period of nearly 30 years with no exploration” for fossil fuels, the oil companies are interested in investing in Uruguay, at their own expense and risk.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

In Uruguay 22,414 people have been displaced by the floods that have affected the countries of the Mercosur trade bloc. Credit: Sistema Nacional de Emergencias (Sinae)

By Fabiana Frayssinet
BUENOS AIRES, Jan 4 2016 (IPS)

The flooding that has affected four South American countries has underscored the need for an integrated approach to addressing the causes and effects of climate change.

Above and beyond joint emergency response plans, global warming poses common problems like deforestation and the management of shared rivers.

Some 180,000 people have been evacuated since the worst flooding in years hit the region over the year-end holidays.

The floods caused when the Paraná, Paraguay and Uruguay rivers overflowed their banks did not respect the borders between the nations of the Mercosur (Southern Common Market) bloc, and have brought them together in a shared environmental catastrophe.

The same scenes of flooded streets, rescue teams and evacuation centres have filled the news from the provinces of northeast Argentina, cities in northern Uruguay and southern Brazil, and riverbank communities near the capital of Paraguay.“There is indifference towards environmental problems in the Mercosur. So much so that a Mercosur summit was held just recently, and this issue, which was a tragedy foretold, was not even addressed.” -- Enrique Viale

“It is difficult to avoid associating the severity of the floods with the modifications that have to do with climate change,” said Jorge Taiana, vice president of Parlasur, the parliamentary institution of the Mercosur bloc, which is made up of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela.

“A serious joint response by the region is absolutely essential with respect to the two major strategies for confronting climate change, mitigation and adaptation to its effects,” Taiana, a lawmaker from Argentina’s “Front for Victory”, the left-leaning faction of the Justicialista (Peronist) Party, now in the opposition, told IPS.

“There is indifference towards environmental problems in the Mercosur,” Enrique Viale, president of the Argentine Association of Environmentalist Lawyers, told IPS. “So much so that a Mercosur summit was held just recently, and this issue, which was a tragedy foretold, was not even addressed.”

A number of experts have blamed the heavy rainfall on the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a cyclical climate phenomenon that affects weather patterns around the world.

The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), a specialised United Nations agency, had forecast that its effects would be among the strongest seen since 1950.

On Dec. 24 the U.N. General Assembly urged member states to draw up national and regional strategies to address El Niño’s socioeconomic and environmental impacts, suggesting the implementation of early warning systems and the adoption of prevention, mitigation and damage control measures.

Viale, however, said: “The El Niño phenomenon was announced, but it isn’t the only cause.”

“The four countries (affected by the severe flooding) are the world’s biggest soy producers, along with the United States. It is not just by chance that the map of deforestation caused by soy production coincides with the map of the flooding,” he said.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reported that Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina were among the 10 countries with the highest levels of deforestation in the last 25 years. Between 1990 and 2015, Argentina lost more than 7.6 million hectares of forest.

In the Misionera or Paranaense jungle, also known as the Mata Atlantica, through which the Uruguay, Paraná and Iguazú rivers run, only seven percent of the original forest cover remains in Argentina, while this ecosystem in Paraguay and Brazil has been almost completely destroyed.

Greenpeace campaign coordinator in Argentina Hernán Giardini said in a statement that “Forests and jungles, besides concentrating considerable biodiversity, play a critical role in climate regulation, maintenance of water sources and flows and soil conservation.

“They are our natural sponge and protective umbrella. When we lose forests we become more vulnerable to heavy rains and run a serious risk of flooding,” the statement by the global environmental watchdog added.

Viale said: “This, added to direct seeding, the method used to plant transgenic soy, has turned the fields into veritable green deserts without any capacity for absorbing water.”

Soy production, which has boomed since 1990, is seen as essential to these South American economies, as soy is one of their chief export products.

As it expanded, soy also replaced other traditional crops, while pushing stockbreeding into marginal areas like jungles and forests.

Argentine environmentalist Jorge Daneri said “The expansion of the agricultural frontier, driven in particular by the expansion of genetically modified soy monoculture, the enormous deforestation of the Paranaense jungle, and the construction of dams on a giant scale by Brazil on the Paraná, Iguazú and Uruguay rivers – with many more under construction or planned – has greatly aggravated the environmental crisis throughout (South America’s) Southern Cone region.”

To address what he described as “regional ecocide,” Daneri, with the Argentine organisation “M´Biguá, Ciudadanía y Justicia Ambiental” (M´Biguá, Citizenship and Environmental Justice), called for the river basin committees of the Paraná, Uruguay and Paraguay rivers to work together.

“There isn’t a single river basin committee that includes the three Argentine provinces in question and the national state, and there is only CARU (the Uruguay River Administrative Commission), which includes Argentina and Uruguay, but not Brazil,” he said.

“This is a serious problem, because of the total lack of coordination,” he said. “We see the river basin committee as the main institution that should be focused on here. It has been clearly demonstrated that Mercosur has failed to play a serious role coordinating proactive, sustainable policies.”

Daneri stressed the urgent need for “a new environmental management and zoning system, and the reestablishment of biological corridors, as well as a system to recuperate riverbank areas through reforestation using native species of trees, and to restore native forests.”

He also proposed a reorganisation of zoning plans in every province, together with the national authorities, as well as environmental assessments of every river basin, at a regional level.

In the short term, Taiana suggested the Parlasur help coordinate contingency plans for those affected by the flooding, and in the longer term, he said local governments should study together construction projects and other initiatives financed by Mercosur.

He pointed out that the bloc has a Structural Convergence Fund to finance projects to improve infrastructure and boost the competitiveness and social development of the member countries.

“The most important aspect of these non-reimbursable funds that facilitate integration is that they acknowledge the asymmetries between member countries,” he said.

Taiana said the fund, of some 100 million dollars a year, could be invested in projects financed in border areas to mitigate or prevent flooding, like dikes or diversion channels.

“It seems to me that there are many common issues that are urgent, where the Mercosur as a whole still has a lot to do,” he said.

Daneri said “The projects needed are not cement works, they are not megadams or megadikes. It’s not about channelising rivers. Only making efforts during an emergency, or for emergencies, is a mistake.”

“Part of meeting this challenge is working towards a transition to leave the current oversimplified model of monoculture behind and moving in the direction of agroecology. The causes need to be addressed,” he added.

“The causes lie in a productive model that does not depend on nature’s cycles but on the cycles of the market, which is devastating for ecosystems,” he said.

Since July 2014, Uruguay’s state power utility, UTE, has 30 100 percent electric vans. After the success of this initiative, it doubled that number in its fleet of vehicles, and incorporated two electric cars, in November 2015. Credit: Verónica Firme/IPS

By Veronica Firme
MONTEVIDEO, Nov 17 2015 (IPS)

Uruguay is modifying its energy mix with the aim of achieving carbon neutrality by 2030, by means of a strategy that bolsters non-conventional clean energy sources through public-private partnerships and new investment. A majority of this South American country’s energy already comes from renewable sources.

“By the end of 2014, this country’s energy mix was made up of 55 percent renewable sources, compared to a global average of just 12 percent,” said Ramón Méndez, the president of the National Climate Change Response System, during a meeting on renewable energy.

Furthermore, 94 percent of electric power comes from renewables, he said, in a country which is only responsible for 0.06 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, which cause global warming.

The transformation of Uruguay’s energy mix began during the first term (2005-2010) of the current president, Tabaré Vázquez, although the country was not starting from zero in terms of renewable sources, Gonzalo Abal a physicist with the Solar Energy Laboratory of the University of the Republic of Uruguay, said in an interview with IPS.

Thanks to hydropower, a significant proportion of Uruguay’s energy already came from renewables. But hydroelectricity is vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Traditionally, the country depended on four old hydroelectric dams, three of which were built on the Negro River between the 1930s and the 1970s. The fourth is on the Uruguay River, shared with neighbouring Argentina, and was built in the 1970s.

In addition, two ancient thermal plants powered by fuel oil have served as a back-up when the hydropower supply drops or collapses due to water shortages. The last time this happened was in 2004.

This Southern Cone country of 3.3 million people has fully exploited its large hydropower sources, and began to turn towards wind power and later biomass, the two clean energies around which the greatest progress has been made, according to data provided by the experts and documents consulted by IPS.

The transformation of the energy mix required a legal framework, which included authorisation for clients connected to the low voltage grid to generate electric power from renewable sources – wind, solar, biomass or mini-dams – with a potential of no more than 150 kilowatts.

Also approved were several initiatives like the 2005-2030 Energy Policy, or the 2015-2024 National Energy Efficiency Plan, adopted on Aug. 3.

The Energy Efficiency Plan is aimed at reducing energy consumption in all industries and sectors of the economy, but especially in residential areas and transportation, which will be responsible for 75 percent of the total accumulated reduction by 2024.

In addition, the Investment Promotion Law was modified to offer tax breaks so that at least five percent of the investment in any given project goes towards renewable energy, for the goal of cleaner production.

Uruguay has 16 medium-sized and large wind farms, like this one in the northern department of Tacuarembó. The country already has 670 MW in installed wind power capacity and a similar amount under construction, which means that 30 percent of demand for electric power will be covered by wind energy by late 2016. Credit: Ana Libisch/IPS

The state power utility, UTE, is responsible for the generation, transmission, distribution and sale of electricity to the 1.2 million clients distributed throughout Uruguay’s 176,215 square kilometres of territory.

UTE has a monopoly over energy distribution but not generation, which the private sector is also involved in, which made it difficult to include power generation in the government’s energy strategy goals.

As of late 2014, Uruguay had a total installed capacity of 3,719 MW, including generators connected to the national power grid as well as stand-alone power systems, according to the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Mining.

The supply consisted of 1,696 MW of thermal energy (from fossil fuels and biomass), 1,538 MW of hydropower, 481 MW of wind power and four MW of solar power, says the National Energy Balance 2014 report.

Breaking down the installed power capacity by source, 66 percent came from renewable sources (hydroelectricity, biomass, wind and solar), while the remaining 34 percent came from non-renewable sources (gasoil, fuel oil and natural gas).

In the economy, there was a structural shift in the energy consumption mix since 2008, which has remained unchanged for the past seven years. Industry is the biggest consumer (39 percent), followed by transportation (29 percent), residential (19 percent), commerce and services (eight percent), and lastly agriculture, fishing and mining (five percent).

From 2007 to 2014, industry overcame transportation, which was pushed to second place, driving up biomass consumption. Pulp mills played a decisive role in that, because thanks to biomass they became 90 percent self-sufficient in energy, as part of the transformation that began in 2005.

In this country, “the important change came in regard to wind power – that is where changes became necessary and challenges were addressed,” Gerardo Honty, an expert with the Latin American Centre for Social Ecology, told IPS.

Wind energy is in full expansion, “and we are nearing one gigawatt (1,000 MW) of installed capacity,” said Abal.

With respect to solar energy, “we have a 50-watt plant already in operation – that’s 100 hectares of solar panels – and a second 50-MW plant has begun to be built, with investment from Europe,” said the academic.

“The rest of the plants, around 15, are smaller, between one and five MW, and are distributed throughout the north of the country,” Abal added.

Connecting with the neighbours

Uruguay is diversifying its energy sources, but it can also “expand the grid in geographic terms; if you interconnect with Argentina and southern Brazil, the probability of having an atmospheric event that leaves you without wind power in the entire area of the pampas is very low,” said the physicist.

The national power grid has interconnections with Argentina (2,000 MW) and with Brazil (70 MW, currently being expanded to 500 MW). The latter has been delayed because the two countries’ power grids operate on different frequencies, and conversion capacity must be added to overcome the problem.

In Uruguay, “the problem isn’t the electric power industry but combustion engines that cannot run on the renewable sources mentioned,” said Honty.

Transportation, especially public transit, poses the big future challenges.

The Montevideo city government is studying the possibility of purchasing autonomous electric vehicles for the sake of energy efficiency and because they do not emit greenhouse gases while at the same time they reduce noise pollution, economist Gonzalo Márquez with the department of mobility said in a forum on energy.

But no timetable has been outlined yet, he told IPS, because there are difficulties to work out like the cost and maintenance of the vehicles, the driving range of the batteries, and the subsidy for public transport, “a hidden cost that society assumes.”

Uruguay projects that when the transformation of its energy industry is complete, greenhouse gas emissions will be 20 to 40 times lower than the global average, said Méndez, the top official in the government’s climate change response office.

This country also aims to be carbon neutral by 2030. That means “our target for that year is for the CO2 (carbon dioxide) that we absorb to be greater than what our entire economy emits,” he said.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

A poster from the No Excuses campaign, organised by Conapees, el Instituto del Niño y Adolescente del Uruguay and Unicef. Photo courtesy of Conapees

By Diana Cariboni
MONTEVIDEO, Jan 5 2015 (IPS)

Karina Núñez Rodríguez was only 12 when she was forced into prostitution. Now age 50 and a mother of six, she is an outspoken fighter against sexual exploitation of children and teenagers in Uruguay, a country reluctant to recognise this growing scourge.

Her mother’s surname, Rodríguez, “has everything to do with what I am,” she says, explaining that her grandmother was also an exploited child. Karina proudly says she broke this family burden when her youngest daughter turned 12 as a smiling girl ready to go to high school.“There were nine guys who gave me a beating. I was 11 days in an intensive-care unit and three months unable to walk. Once I could, I returned to report the same crime." -- Karina Núñez Rodríguez

It was an assurance that her own children have a bright future, even though Karina still makes a living selling her body.

In Uruguay, a countless number of children, mostly girls, have their childhoods stolen, to be sold for a pack of cigarettes, a cell phone card, food, clothes, shelter or plain cash. Some are exploited by their own relatives, others by by neighbours or organised criminal networks.

One grocer threw dance parties in her shop on the paydays of local rural workers and lured the men with 12 year-old-girls from the neighbourhood. The girls would spend the night drinking alcohol and having sexual relations with adults on the premises of a nearby chapel.

A 74-year-old owner of a hotel in a beach resort paid for the travel of a 15-year-old girl, who lives hundreds of kilometres away, to have sex. Afterwards, despite sending money to her pimps, the man avoided punishment by claiming he didn’t know she was underage.

A provincial high-ranking public official organised a party with teenagers, alcohol and cocaine in a government facility, and was caught drunk while driving away with one of the girls.

And a network of lorry drivers and the fathers of two victims forced girls into sexual encounters with drivers in three different towns.

These types of cases hit the news almost twice a week. Authorities established Dec. 7 as the national day against sexual exploitation of children. But they still have no accurate statistics on this crime, punishable by up to 12 years in prison under a 2004 law. Adult prostitution is legal and state-regulated.

There are as many as 1.8 million children exploited in prostitution or pornography worldwide, according to Ecpat. Nearly 80 per cent of trafficking is for sexual exploitation and over 20 percent of the victims are children.

From 2010 to September this year, the judiciary heard 79 cases involving 127 defendants. Only 43 were convicted, according to a report published by the judicial branch.

But police reports are increasing. In 2007, there were just 20. In 2011, the number jumped to 40, in 2013 there were 70, and last year there were more than 80.

“Each case is not just one boy or girl. It can involve four or five,” says Luis Purtscher, president of the National Committee for the Eradication of Commercial and non-Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children and Teenagers (Conapees). Perpetrators outnumber victims. “In a single night, a girl can have five or 10 sexual partners,” he says.

“Being a problem whose underlying causes are the power of capitalism to seize territories and the male workforce migrations, we could hypothesise that when both the economy and the mobility grow, child sex crimes also rise in places colonised by investors,” says Purtscher.

In the last five years, Conapees has trained 1,500 public servants, including teachers, social workers, police officers and prosecutors. “We have 3,000 extra ears and eyes skilled somehow to detect and report,” he adds.

Gender violence plays a role. On a list of 12 Latin American countries, Spain and Portugal, Uruguay has the highest rate of killings of women by a former or current partner, states a recently released report by the regional Gender Equality Observatory.

To graphically illustrate the depth of the problem, Conapees published an advert in the press: ‘Very young girls’, followed by a phone number. It received 100 calls the first day and 500 the first weekend.

Karina became an activist after witnessing the suffering of girls subjected to “breaking-down practices” in brothel-bars: torture, forced and collective penetrations and beatings, “aimed to create such a bond of fear between the victim and her exploiter that she can stand night after night in a corner in Europe without even thinking to go to the police.”

Her record includes 27 crime reports to authorities. “I was instrumental in nine indictments, and I’m honoured by people who trust me and give me more evidence.” She checks the facts and relies on a network of eight friends in different cities. “Thank God we have WhatsApp,” she says with a smile.

In 2007, she and other colleagues created Grupo Visión Nocturna (Night vision group) to promote an independent stance on health-related issues and demand respect for sex workers.

Shortly after reporting to a small city’s police station that three girls were about to be trafficked in 2009, a supposed client picked her up. They travelled 20 kilometres away from town. “There were nine guys who gave me a beating. I was 11 days in an intensive-care unit and three months unable to walk. Once I could, I returned to report the same crime,” she recalls. Karina has been threatened and fears she could be killed at any time.

Making public accusations is dangerous, yet the crime and the victims are not hidden. Belgian photographer Susette Kok visited many sites in an exhibition and book and portrayed 27 adults –24 women, two transgender women and a young man— who were child victims and now, invariably, are sex workers.

“I found the exploitation easily. It is all over the place,” says Kok, who was assisted by Karina’s knowledge and web of contacts.

The “little house of love”, a group of dilapidated and unroofed walls, the floor covered with used condoms, is just next door to a church in Fray Bentos, in the southwest of Uruguay. An oxidized “container of passions” – situated in a sports field and, again, next to a church at the entrance of the western city of Young— has the door open when it is vacant.

Dozens of places like it are scattered through the area: a bench in a communal football field, a huge tree by a bridge, ironically known as “ecological sex”, shacks, clubs and “waitress bars”.

In west Montevideo, bus stations, parks, canteens and even private houses are sites of child sex offences, according to the survey “An open secret”, authored by Purtscher and other seven experts who interviewed more than 50 sources.

The area is attracting major investment and a predominantly male workforce, which could worsen the situation, but it does not have mechanisms to assist the victims. Nor does the country as a whole. A governmental programme established in 2013 is underfunded and counts just two teams.

This slow official response exasperates Karina. “When a child is exploited,” she says, “we cannot wait.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The six freed Guantánamo detainees line up to hold a Uruguayan baby. In this picture, Tunisian Abdul Bin Mohammed Abis Ourgy holds up the infant while Syrian Ali Hussein Muhammed Shaaban watches. Credit: Diana Cariboni/IPS

By Diana Cariboni
MONTEVIDEO, Dec 31 2014 (IPS)

In the summery afternoon of a beachside neighbourhood not far from the Uruguayan capital, nothing could sound more unusual than the Muslim call to prayer chanted by Tunisian Abdul Bin Mohammed Ourgy, a few days after being freed from the United States military prison in Guantánamo, Cuba.

One of the first acts of Ourgy and the five others who arrived in Uruguay Dec. 7, after 12 years behind bars, was to figure out their new coordinates and find the orientation to Mecca, the Saudi city faced by the Muslim world during prayer.Political perversities have placed on their shoulders the burden of demonstrating that prisoners at Guantánamo can be freed without the risk of turning into what, according to Washington's latest version, they never were: terrorists.

It is not surprising that anybody subjected to Guantánamo’s living conditions would find a lifeline in religion, homeland traditions and family memories.

But religion has lost none of its relevance for these men since they were suddenly introduced to a strange culture – Western but not U.S. or European— with a language different from both their native Arabic and from the English they were forced to speak with their jailers in Guantánamo.

The group of four Syrians, a Tunisian and a Palestinian is still bound by the silence imposed by Washington regarding their experiences in the prison. IPS met with them for the second time Dec. 30 in the house where the Syrians are living in downtown Montevideo. A few are already speaking some Spanish and struggling to adjust to their new reality.

Contacts with relatives have been established and the men are now looking for ways to reunite with their families, with the support of the Uruguayan government.

Syrian Jihad Deyab – well known because he protested his detention for years through hunger strikes and litigated against the U.S. force-feedings— is gaining strength and hoping to join his wife and three children soon.

His lawyer, Cori Crider, told IPS that “we had appealed Judge Gladys Kessler’s decision denying us relief from various force-feeding practices, when he was released. We have now asked the Court of Appeals to vacate that judgment on the basis that the government ceased its illegal conduct by transferring him, but that request hasn’t been decided.”

Yet “Deyab is still part of the case in which we say the video-tapes of his force-feedings should be made public,” led by 16 media organisations under the First Amendment of the U.S. constitution, and “he very much supports what the media are trying to do,” she said.

After the shock of liberation, the six men are still struggling to fully understand where they are and to match as much as possible their beliefs and expectations for a new life with Uruguay’s social norms.

Difficult, but necessary, is to reconcile the diverse social and political expectations and interests surrounding the group since the government of José Mujica decided to host them as refugees on humanitarian grounds.

With just 3.3 million people, Uruguay is “almost empty,” Palestinian Mohammed Tahamatan told IPS. He finds this is a wonderful fact.

This country was made by successive migratory waves, but it didn’t receive many new immigrants for a long time. On the contrary, it has tended to lose its own population, particularly through young people chasing better opportunities abroad.

However, the economic prosperity of the last decade attracted a modest but constant influx of foreigners: Spaniards, Peruvians, Dominicans, Indians and Pakistanis. This is something new for a society which has become excessively homogenous and whose representations of the Middle East and the Muslim world are still heavy loaded with exoticism.

“Exoticism is not good… and it comes with a certain degree of fear of Islam,” Javier Miranda, human rights director for the Presidency of Uruguay, told IPS. Awareness of this “is part of our own development as a society,” he added.

Social expressions of solidarity with the 42 refugees from the Syrian civil war who arrived in Uruguay last October, and those shown to Guantánamo’s former inmates while they were visiting a street market, are genuine.

But it is yet to be seen how much of it is determined by this sense of exoticism or by the international attention this country has gained for adopting these policies. Furthermore, as the beneficiaries are a small group of people, such solidarity entails a very low economic and social cost.

Such a reception is absent for the Peruvian, Bolivian or Dominican immigrants who escape from poverty in their countries and are not flagged by any governmental campaign. Some of them have even been victims of labour exploitation and trafficking.

For the governing party, the centre-left coalition Frente Amplio, it is vital to ensure the success of the resettlement schemes of the Syrian conflict refugees and the former Guantánamo inmates.

In both cases, Mujica cited the goal of “setting an example” for neighbouring countries. A successful integration would silence critics and ease fears of perceived or real risks. Thus controlling developments and avoiding outbursts become crucial.

Since the release earlier this month of four inmates who were repatriated to Afghanistan, there are now 132 prisoners in Guantánamo, 63 of them cleared for release. Out of the remaining 69, 10 are currently or have been on trial and 59 are labelled as dangerous by authorities who, nevertheless, recognise there is inadequate evidence to prosecute them in court.

At least one of the six men transferred to Uruguay is willing to advocate for more South American countries hosting Guantánamo’s inmates, IPS learned.

The Uruguayan experiment is also subject to U.S. expectations. The most paradoxical is to avoid the outcome that persons unfairly imprisoned for many years become, once free, active enemies of the U.S.

The same government who produced their criminal files declared in 2009 there was no evidence against them and they could be released.

The same government which forced them to fly to Montevideo shackled and blindfolded sent to the Uruguayan authorities a letter ensuring that “there is no information that the above-mentioned individuals were involved in conducting or facilitating terrorist activities against the United States or its partners or allies.”

The same government campaigning for the hosting of further Guantánamo inmates by third countries has a Congress which has banned this possibility in its territory.

Some local analysts in Uruguay have questioned which of the two versions should be believed. If Washington lied in the files, it could be lying now again, they argue.

This analysis ignores a basic guarantee of the rule of law: that it is guilt, not innocence, which must be proven.

The “war against terror” led by the U.S. since 2001 is seriously discredited in Uruguay. But its narrative has coloured public opinion. People have not expressed outright rejection of the six freed men, but opinion polls carried out this year show support of just 20 per cent for their arrival.

Washington insisted on banning any image of the release. Yet the world has already seen the first pictures of these men in the street, at the beach or holding a baby, as featured in this story.

These photos counterbalance the only produced so far by the U.S. military apparatus: the exasperated faces of the inmates with shaved heads and long beards.

Dressed like any Uruguayan men, it would be so easy for them to just blend into the crowd and live their lives in privacy. But they are media celebrities and subjects of surveillance for the intelligence services of a number of countries.

Under all these circumstances, nobody should expect 100 per cent success, not the least because they are traumatised. However, political perversities have placed on their shoulders the burden of demonstrating that prisoners at Guantánamo can be freed without the risk of turning into what, according to Washington’s latest version, they never were: terrorists.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Detainees in orange jumpsuits sit in a holding area under the watchful eyes of Military Police at Camp X-Ray at Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, during in-processing to the temporary detention facility on Jan. 11, 2002. Credit: public domain

By Diana Cariboni
MONTEVIDEO, Oct 13 2014 (IPS)

Uruguayan President José Mujica bought time for his plan to host six prisoners of Guantánamo, handing over the decision to the winner of the incoming elections. But time is a scarce resource for the inmates of this United States military prison on Cuban soil.

The resettlement of a Palestinian, a Tunisian and four Syrian detainees in Guantánamo is a hot potato for Mujica while his party, the centre-left Broad Front, struggles to pull ahead in the final stretch to general elections set for Oct. 26.“The U.S. is letting them out because they pose no danger to the U.S. or Uruguay or any other country… They are accused of absolutely no wrongdoing and have never been charged with any crime.” -- Laura Pitter of HRW

Out of 149 inmates currently in Guantánamo, a prison established by George W. Bush (2001-2009) to function beyond the law, 79 are cleared for release at least since 2010, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which has gone to court on behalf of some of the detainees.

Mujica agreed in March to settle six inmates of this group – following a request by U.S. President Barack Obama — some of them suffering from very poor physical and mental health.

Mohammed Abdullah Taha Mattan, a 35-year-old Palestinian, is considered at high risk. Diagnosed with major depression, he has engaged in several hunger strikes in the last few years. Born in the West Bank, he was 23 when Pakistani security services arrested him and rendered him to the U.S. According to one of his attorneys, Lauren Carasik, there is not a single piece of evidence against him.

“The travesty of Guantanamo is that some of the men were rounded up not because of reasonable suspicions, but instead because areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan were blanketed with leaflets offering a bounty for ‘suspected terrorists’, sparking a frenzy of lucrative but wrongful accusations,” said Carasik in an op-ed published by Al Jazeera last year.

The CCR claims that 86 percent of the 789 men and teenagers once jailed in Guantánamo since January 2002 were essentially sold at times when the U.S. military offered bounties of around 5,000 dollars per capture.

Syrian Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a married father of four, has also been protesting via an intermittent hunger strike since February 2013. He suffers from extreme weakness and requires a wheelchair. With no charges against him, Washington cleared him for release in 2009.

Dhiab’s case gained notoriety this year when his attorneys challenged the force-feeding method applied by Guantanamo’s jailers against him and other hunger strikers. U.S. judge Gladys Kessler ordered the disclosure of 28 classified videotapes recording the forced cell extraction and forced feeding of Dhiab.

In a statement read by his lawyers in court, Dhiab claimed that he wanted the U.S. public “to see what is going on at the prison today, so they will understand why we are hunger-striking, and why the prison should be closed.” In August, one of his attorneys said he was “just a skeleton”.

Dhiab had lived with his family in Afghanistan, where he ran a business, but had to flee to Pakistan when the war began after 9/11, according to British human rights NGO Reprieve. A few months later, the Pakistani police arrested him and rendered him to the U.S., possibly in exchange for payment.

In a letter urging the U.S. government to proceed with the transfers to Uruguay, the lawyers of the six detainees said in June that a Uruguayan delegation had interviewed the inmates at Guantánamo and extended to them invitations to resettle, “which they gratefully accepted”.

Mujica, a former guerrilla who served 14 years in inhuman conditions, is one of the many critics of Guantánamo. In recent months, he has repeated that the detainees would move to Uruguay as “free men”.

But Washington usually requests that the receiving country monitor the transferred men and ban them from travelling abroad, measures which are beyond Uruguay’s refugee legislation.

In other words, the same fears which have prevented shutting Guantánamo for good, releasing the innocents and bringing evidence-based suspects to U.S. courts have also obstructed the transfers to Uruguay.

The U.S. “needs assistance from other countries in order to close Guantanamo because, as appears to be the case in Uruguay too, irrational fear about transferring detainees to the U.S. is being used for political gain in the U.S. elections,” said Laura Pitter, Human Rights Watch’s senior national security researcher.

“There is no reason whatsoever to fear letting these men come to Uruguay,” she told IPS by email. “The U.S. is letting them out because they pose no danger to the U.S. or Uruguay or any other country… They are accused of absolutely no wrongdoing and have never been charged with any crime.”

In an August interview with this reporter, the director of the Presidency’s Human Rights office, Javier Miranda, said Uruguayan society “harbours some fear of Muslims, and this is part of our growth. Some people have shown this assimilation of Islam and terrorism, which is an utterly false assumption.

“Those men who spent 12 years in a hole in Guantánamo, almost as disappeared persons, have the same right to a shelter as the Syrian refugees,” added Miranda, who successfully supervised the Oct. 9 arrival of a first group of 43 civilians who had fled the Syria civil war and were living in hard conditions in Lebanon.

But the Mujica administration’s failure to publicise the details of this second humanitarian operation and the legal plight and health of every one of the six inmates fuelled rather than assuaged public mistrust.

While 66 percent of one survey’s respondents supported the resettlement of Syrian refugees, the number who rejected the arrival of Guantánamo detainees rose from 50 percent in April to 58 percent in September.

Last month, The New York Times reported that Vice President Joe Biden had called Mujica, “pressing him to resettle the men”. Montevideo swiftly denied any pressure, and stated only Mujica had the authority to decide when the inmates should arrive. But the move paved the way for a heated electoral debate on this issue.

The centre-right opposition National Party, which is polling in second place, took advantage of this inconsistency and accused the government of acting “under pressure of imperialism”.

According to Pitter, Uruguay would do a great service “acknowledging that they recognise the human dignity and human rights of these men, and righting a grave injustice that the U.S. has perpetrated upon them for many years.”

The U.S. will hold elections in November. If the governing Democratic Party fails to retain a majority in the Senate, Republican opposition could add further obstacles to closing Guantánamo.

In the face of this political dysfunction, the best hopes to end the humanitarian crisis will continue to rest on the good will of third countries.

In Uruguay, the Broad Front is confronting its most competitive elections since it first came to power in 2004. After repeating that he alone would decide about Guantánamo, Mujica backtracked last week and announced he would hand over the decision to the incoming elected president.

If the Broad Front wins the election, a few inmates can still dream of travelling to South America before the end of the year. But if the winner is the National Party, Washington might have to re-open the agreement with the new government, no earlier than March 2015.

And for some of the prisoners, it could be too late.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Russian President Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi, President of Brazil Dilma Rousseff, President of China Xi Jinping and South African President Jacob Zuma take a family photograph at the 6th BRICS Summit held at Centro de Eventos do Ceara' in Fortaleza, Brazil. Credit: GCIS

By Diana Cariboni
MONTEVIDEO, Jul 18 2014 (IPS)

While this week’s BRICS summit might have been off the radar of Western powers, the leaders of its five member countries launched a financial system to rival Bretton Woods institutions and held an unprecedented meeting with the governments of South America.

The New Development Bank (NDB) and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement signal the will of BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) to reconcile global governance instruments with a world where the United States no longer wields the influence that it once did.“The U.S. government clearly doesn't like this, although it will not say much publicly.” -- Mark Weisbrot

More striking for Washington could be the fact that the 6th BRICS summit, held in Brazil, set the stage to display how delighted the heads of state and government of South America – long-regarded as the United States’ “backyard”— were to meet Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.

At odds with Washington and just expelled from the Group of Eight (G8) following Russia’s intervention in the Ukrainian crisis, Putin was warmly received in the region, where he also visited Cuba and Argentina.

In Buenos Aires, Putin and the president of Argentina, Cristina Fernández, signed agreements on energy, judicial cooperation, communications and nuclear development.

Argentina, troubled by an impending default, is hoping Russian energy giant Gazprom will expand investments in the rich and almost unexploited shale oil and gas fields of Vaca Muerta.

Although Argentina ranks fourth among the Russia’s main trade partners in the region, Putin stressed the country is “a key strategic partner” not only in Latin America, but also within the G20 and the United Nations.

Buenos Aires and Moscow have recently reached greater understanding on a number of international issues, like the conflicts in Syria and Crimea, Argentina sovereignty claim over the Malvinas/Falkland islands and its strategy against the bond holdouts.

Meanwhile, the relationship between Washington and Buenos Aires remains cool, as it has been with Brasilia since last year’s revelations of massive surveillance carried out by the National Security Agency against Brazil.

Some leftist governments –namely Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador— frequently accuse Washington of pursuing an imperialist agenda in the region.

But it was the president of Uruguay, José Mujica –whose government has warm and close ties with the Barack Obama administration— who better explained the shifting balance experienced by Latin America in its relationships with the rest of the world.

After a dinner in Buenos Aires and a meeting in Brasilia with Putin, Mujica said the current presence of Russia and China in South America opens “new roads” and shows “that this region is important somehow, so the rest of the world perhaps begins to value us a little more.”

Furthermore, he reflected, “pitting one bloc against another… is not good for the world’s future. It is better to share [ties and relationships, in order to] keep alternatives available.”

Almost at the same time, Washington announced it was ready to transfer six Guantanamo Bay detainees to Uruguay, one of the subjects Obama and Mujica agreed on when the Uruguayan visited the U.S. president in May.

Mujica has invited companies from United States, China and now Russia to take part in an international tender to build a deepwater port on the Atlantic ocean which, Uruguay expects, could be a logistic hub for the region.

But beyond Russia, which has relevant commercial agreements with Venezuela, the real centre of gravity in the region is China, the first trade partner of Brazil, Chile and Perú, and the second one of a growing number of Latin American countries.

China’s president Xi Jiping travels on Friday to Argentina, and then to Venezuela and Cuba.

“The U.S. government clearly doesn’t like this, although it will not say much publicly,” said Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

“With a handful of rich allies, they have controlled the most important economic decision-making institutions for 70 years, including the IMF [International Monetary Fund], the World Bank, and more recently the G8 and the G20, and they wrote the rules for the WTO [World Trade Organisation],” Weisbrot told IPS.

The BRICS bank “is the first alternative where the rest of the world can have a voice.  Washington does not like competition,” he added.

However, the United States’ foreign priorities are elsewhere: Eastern Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

And with the exception of the migration crisis on its southern border and evergreen concerns about security and defence, Washington seems to have little in common with its Latin American neighbours.

“I wish they were really indifferent. But the truth is, they would like to get rid of all of the left governments in Latin America, and will take advantage of opportunities where they arise,” said Weisbrot.

Nevertheless, new actors and interests are operating in the region.

The Mercosur bloc (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay) and the European Union are currently negotiating a trade agreement.

Colombia, Chile, México and Perú have joined forces in the Pacific Alliance, while the last three also joined negotiations to establish the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

In this scenario, the BRICS and their new financial institutions pose further questions about the ability of Latin America to overcome its traditional role of commodities supplier and to achieve real development.

“I don’t think that the BRICS alliance is going to get in the way of that,” said Weisbrot.

According to María José Romero, policy and advocacy manager with the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad), the need to “moderate extractive industries” could lead to “changes in the relationship with countries like China, which looks at this region largely as a grain basket.”

Romero, who attended civil society meetings held on the sidelines of the BRICS summit, is the author of “A private affair”, which analyses the growing influence of private interests in the development financial institutions and raises key warnings for the new BRICS banking system.

BRICS nations should be able “to promote a sustainable and inclusive development,” she told IPS, “one which takes into account the impacts and benefits for all within their societies and within the countries where they operate.”

UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah Bin Zayed Al Nahyan and his Uruguayan opposite number Luis Almagro at an Apr. 28 press conference in Montevideo. Credit: Presidencia de Uruguay

By IPS Correspondents
MONTEVIDEO, Apr 29 2014 (IPS)

The visit by United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah Bin Zayed Al Nahyan to Uruguay, Paraguay and Peru brings to an end 10 days of unusually intense diplomatic activity by the Gulf nation in Latin America.

On Monday Apr. 28, Al Nahyan met with his Uruguayan counterpart Luis Almagro before he was received by President José Mujica. On Tuesday Apr. 29 he continued on his tour to Paraguay and Peru.

The minister is visiting the region as part of the delegation of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, vice president and prime minister of the UAE, who visited Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Chile, in that order, from Apr. 20 to 26.

The agenda for dialogue in Uruguay included the opening of an embassy by this South American country in the UAE.

In a press conference with Almagro, Al Nahyan said “I look forward to the opening of a Uruguayan Embassy in Abu Dhabi in the near future. This will serve to increase dialogue between the UAE and Uruguay on a range of issues, and to support an expansion of business links.”

Uruguay is particularly interested in drawing investment from the UAE in the projected deep-water Atlantic port in the eastern department or province of Rocha.

Almagro, who visited the UAE in 2011, said that country had experience in participating in similar port projects in Brazil, the Dominican Republic and Peru.

The foreign ministers also reported a project involving cooperation in horse breeding genetics and renewable energy, although the two countries have not yet signed concrete agreements in these areas.

Al Nahyan stressed the need for an adequate legal framework, which according to Almagro is in the final stage of drafting and will include an agreement to avoid double taxation.

“Our countries also share a strong interest in renewable energy and cooperation on climate change issues,” said Al Nahyan.

He added: “We commend Uruguay for its efforts to spread important messages about climate change to the world and I look forward to welcoming Uruguay’s participation in the Abu Dhabi Ascent meeting, which will support preparations for the 2014 Climate Summit,” to take place Dec. 1-12 in Peru.

The May 4-5 Abu Dhabi Ascent meeting will draw senior U.N. officials, ministers, bankers, and representatives of business and civil society, to promote commitments towards reaching a new global climate treaty in 2015.

The UAE supports Uruguay’s candidacy for a seat on the U.N. Security Council for 2016-2017, Al Nahyan also stated.

In addition, the conversations focused on multilateral relations between the Arab world and Latin America, and particularly sensitive Middle East issues such as the Palestinian question.

Almagro returned Sunday Apr. 27 from an official tour to Jordan, Palestine, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

In his meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, the two governments indicated an interest in opening embassies.

In Montevideo, Al Nahyan expressed appreciation for Uruguay’s efforts, which he said formed part of “growing international support for the cause of the Palestinian people.”

Meanwhile, during his tour through four key Latin American countries – Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Chile – Prime Minister Al Maktoum met with each president and signed agreements in important areas.

With Chile he signed an accord to avoid double taxation on income and wealth of air transport and naval companies.

In Argentina, a memorandum of understanding was reached for the peaceful use of nuclear energy.

With the Brazilian government, Al Maktoum signed an agreement in defence for technology sharing, cooperation in training and instruction, weapons, crisis management and logistical support.

With Mexico, where he began his tour on Apr. 20, Al Maktoum signed a declaration on the conclusion of the negotiations of the Accord for the Reciprocal Promotion and Protection of Investment between the two countries.

Diego Cánepa. Credit: Office of the Presidency of Uruguay

By Pavol Stracansky
VIENNA, Apr 17 2014 (IPS)

The Uruguayan government has made a controversial move to regulate the production and sale of cannabis. The government believes that this will help in the fight against drug-related crime and in dealing with public health issues.

The move has been condemned by the UN’s International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), whose president Raymond Yans accused the country’s government of having a “pirate attitude” for going against the UN’s conventions on drugs."It is not our aim that anyone follow us or do what we have done."

Diego Cánepa, secretary of the office of Uruguayan President José Mujica, tells IPS that he believes a regulated marijuana market was the right decision for his country.

Q. How do you feel about your country being labelled “pirates” by the INCB for legalising the marijuana market?

A. Well, the INCB is just one UN body and it is just one opinion. They have a special mandate and that mandate is not to decide what approach each individual country should follow. We have had a discussion over the correct interpretation of the UN drugs conventions. We believe, and we have the evidence to show this, that our interpretation is correct. We followed the original spirit of the convention and we hope that the step which we have taken is the right one to create better control of the marijuana market in our country.

Prohibition was a big mistake in the last 40 years, so we believe that a strictly regulated marijuana market is the best way to fulfil the spirit of the UN drugs conventions.

Q. Do you get frustrated when you hear people from other countries talking about how what you are doing is wrong, for example from countries which have a much more conservative, hard line approach to drugs?

A. We very much respect every opinion. It’s an open discussion. We do not think that we have the whole truth in our hands. We listen very carefully to the opinions of other countries but we defend our sovereign right to do what we think is right for our own country and our people. And we believe that in terms of our health policies this is the best option for Uruguay.

We don’t want to be a model for other countries over this, we just think that this is the best way for our country and we will defend our right to take this option. But we are open to discussion. We think that prohibition is not the answer and overwhelming evidence has shown that it is a mistake. We don’t want to have this kind of policy. We need to have the right to explore a different approach to drugs.

Q. If you find that after a couple of years things are not going well with the legalisation or that you are not seeing the kind of results you want with regards to public health, would you be prepared to go back to a ban on drugs?

A. I think the question is different. First of all, a few years is not enough. You need at least eight, nine or ten years before you can draw any conclusions. We need to have a lot of evidence over a long time period to really understand what effects this policy is having.

Looking at public health, violence, drug consumption – all the evidence shows us so far that by regulating the market and making visible what has until now been an invisible market means that you can control that market better, and control trafficking and then you have less violence. But I think that if that doesn’t happen in ten years then we will have another debate on this. But I do not think we would go back to banning [marijuana]. We would need to find another answer.

Q. Are you happy when you see other countries doing things which are similar to what you have done? For example states in the U.S. which have legalised commercial marijuana sales.

A. Actually, what they have done in Colorado is much more than what we have done. There you are free to buy and sell what you want. They have a different model to us. But there are 18 states in the U.S. where marijuana can be bought for medical purposes. But that is just an euphemism because we know that the majority of people use marijuana not with a medical purpose but with a medical excuse.

We see that an individual state in the U.S. is operating this way with no federal overrule on it so it is impossible to not accept that there is a big, open debate on this when you have different countries around the world taking different approaches to the problem.

Q. Could you see other countries following your lead and regulating their marijuana markets?

A. I really don’t know and it is not our aim that anyone follow us or do what we have done. We do not want to be a model for any other country. We respect everyone else’s policies but we think that this is the best model for our country.

“We are making history: Uruguay approves the regulation of marijuana” reads this poster by an advocacy group that lobbied for state regulation and control of marijuana. Credit: Courtesy Proderechos.

By Inés Acosta
MONTEVIDEO, Jan 12 2014 (IPS)

Uruguay, about to become the first country in the world where the state will fully regulate production, sale and distribution of marijuana, will spend the next few months selecting a good quality strain of the crop that can be sold at a price similar to current illegal prices.

Uruguayan President José Mujica signed law 19.172 on the regulation of marijuana on Dec. 23. But it won’t go into effect until April, 120 days after it was approved by Congress on Dec. 10, and once the government has established specific regulations for the new legislation.

Since the 1970s, consumption and possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use have not been penalised in this South American country of 3.3 million people sandwiched between Argentina and Brazil. But cultivation, sale and distribution of the drug have been illegal up to now.

When the 44-article law enters into force, the entire sector will be under the regulation and oversight of the Institute for the Regulation and Control of Cannabis, a new government institution created by the law.

But there is much to do before April. Among the most important steps are to decide the type of marijuana to be planted, who will grow it and at what cost, and what price it will fetch in the pharmacies.

The registries of users and others involved in the different marijuana-related activities also have to be created, as well as the so-called cannabis clubs, to ensure the traceability of the legal strain of marijuana.

Social organisations and activists are studying the best way to produce competitively-priced high-quality marijuana while involving small and medium Uruguayan producers and preventing foreign companies from taking over the activity.

The aim of the law is to “put the availability of marijuana for users in the hands of, or under the control of, the state,” Senator Roberto Conde of the left-wing governing Broad Front told IPS.

“A free market of marijuana or other drugs is not being created here,” Conde explained. “People will have access to marijuana by planting it themselves, in cannabis clubs, or from pharmacies, by presenting their ID card.”

Legal marijuana – up to 40 grams a month (around 40 joints) – will only be available to residents of Uruguay who have signed up for a federal registry.

Individuals will be allowed to grow up to six plants or 480 grams a year.

“That is what is technically estimated as reasonable, to keep someone from falling into problematic use of the drug,” the senator said.

Martín Collazo, with the Proderechos human rights group, said public health will be the area that most benefits from the law. “Eighty-five percent of users of illegal drugs in Uruguay only consume marijuana,” which means the illegal market could shrink by a similar percentage, he argued.

“Contact with the clandestine market facilitates access to other substances, like cocaine or ‘pasta base’ [a cheap cocaine derivative], which are sold in the same places,” said Collazo, who also belongs to the Responsible Regulation coalition, made up of organisations and personalities in favour of the regulation of marijuana.

The price of marijuana to be sold in authorised pharmacies has not yet been set. Collazo estimates that the price per gram should be between 1.00 and 1.50 dollars – the current cost of illegal cannabis.

“There is a big comparative advantage in terms of quality, because illegal marijuana is very bad,” the activist said. But he warned that it can’t be more expensive than on the illegal market, “because there would be a segment of the population that would continue to buy it on the black market.”

Proderechos has been working with agronomists and economists since November, and has formulated production models that confirm that marijuana could be produced in Uruguay at that price.

The Drug Policy Research Centre based in Santa Monica, California says illegal production and sale of drugs is more expensive because of the high costs of security, transport and protection of merchandise.

Collazo believes practice will show to what extent that is true. If marijuana has to be cheap, he said, the quality is likely to be inferior to what is sold in the Netherlands, where the drug is legally sold in special coffee shops.

“But we don’t have to reach that level of quality in the first year,” he said. “This has to be seen as a gradual process of developing the chain of production.”

He explained that the production of one ton of good-quality marijuana could cost around 250,000 dollars – between 0.25 and 0.30 cents per gram – “in a low-tech setting, with one or two harvests a year.”

The expert said that in the current clandestine market, the marijuana comes from Paraguay, and includes “leaves, stems, really bad quality flowers, and additives like ammonia, which are put on the compact bricks to keep them from drying out in transportation.

“Now we’re talking about selling buds,” without leaves or stems, which, “even if they are not big and beautiful are an excellent quality flower,” he said.

“We are generating our own information, with the support of different professionals, and we are coming up with proposals that we will formally present later,” Collazo said.

The aim, he said, “is to generate production schemes that can easily be followed by small and medium producers at a reasonable cost, and that will put marijuana on the market at a price similar to those on the black market.”

There are already people planting marijuana in Uruguay, producing supposedly standardised varieties.

Regarding the possibility of guaranteeing traceability of the drugs circulating in the new regulated market, Collazo suggested “trying to get growers who produce for the pharmacies to always plant the same strains.

“If the growers take the authorised strains and use cuttings from the mother plant, they’ll always have the same crop, genetically,” he said.

That traceability would only be lost when producers introduce new varieties, he added.

Collazo said it would be easy to maintain traceability in sales through pharmacies in the tightly regulated and controlled new market.

But “other solutions would have to be studied for people who grow their own pot, and for the cannabis clubs, because those are much more difficult to control,” he added.

Senator Conde, on the other hand, said it would be easy “because from a scientific point of view, the advances made today are so huge that molecular traceability of the substance is possible, and in Uruguay we have sufficiently developed technology, and whatever we don’t have, we can ask for.

“Instead of setting a price, a fee will be set for users to pay for the public service of making a product that is chemically controlled from every point of view available to users,” he said.

Conde added that whether or not the state will subsidise marijuana in any form “is being debated” in the government.

“This will be decided within the 120 days we have for creating the regulations for the law. I don’t know if a subsidy will be necessary to implement it. If it is, it wouldn’t be an isolated subsidy, but just one more cost in our overall health policy,” he said.

There are between 18,000 and 20,000 habitual consumers of marijuana in Uruguay, and between 79,000 and 100,000 people who use it a few times a month.

Science Faculty researchers carrying out a paleomagnetic study in Valentines, Uruguay in 2008. Credit: Courtesy Leda Sánchez

By Pablo Tosquellas
MONTEVIDEO, Dec 3 2013 (IPS)

The Uruguayan government, which recently passed a law on large-scale mining, does not actually have a clear idea of the country’s mineral wealth and has only just now proposed a geological study to find out.

For decades, geological studies have been low priority in this farming country of gently rolling hills, where there are neither mountains, volcanoes nor geological faults.

That was until the appearance of plans by Aratirí, a subsidiary of the Indian mining company Zamin Ferrous, to extract some 18 million tonnes of iron ore a year from a huge open-pit mine in the central Uruguayan district of Valentines, on the border between the provinces of Treinta y Tres and Florida, 234 km north of Montevideo.

The plans unleashed a heated debate in this small country wedged between Argentina and Brazil.

And when the controversial new set of mining rules that regulate large-scale mining projects was passed in early September, many claimed they were tailor-made for Aratirí.

Only in late October did the left-wing Broad Front government decide to hold an international tender for a geological survey of the country, for which seven companies submitted bids.

Pier Rossi, the head of the national mining and geology office, Dinamige, told Tierramérica* that up to now, the state had left the exploration of possible mineral resources up to private companies.

The aim of this study is “to detect magnetic anomalies to define the areas of interest, without waiting for private firms to do the work,” Rossi said.

The information from the magnetic and radiometric aerial survey will indicate “the ages of evolution of the minerals in the rocks” in order to assess their value, added Rossi, a geologist by profession.

“Once all of the information is in, the state will be in a position to negotiate on an equal footing with the companies,” he said. “Then I will be able to decide when and how the work will be carried out.”

But even with a geological survey, the state is unlikely to have the capacity to oversee what the companies do, said Leda Sánchez, a professor in the geology department of the Science Faculty at the University of the Republic.

“The state is responsible for ensuring that things are done properly, but it is a vicious circle of problems. Without good geology, there is no good mining,” Sánchez said.

Among the shortcomings pointed out by the professor is the impossibility of establishing clean-up plans that mining companies must comply with after they are done working in a given area.

Rossi said “we’re not going to fix what hasn’t been done in 60 years. We have to redefine everything.”

Even without the new data, Sánchez disputed the “extraordinary volumes” claimed for the Aratirí iron deposit, which she told Tierramérica is “actually small.”

“The dimensions seem big to us because we’re a small country. We aren’t a mining country per se. Uruguay will continue to be a livestock-producing country,” she said.

There are 12 million head of cattle and 7.8 million sheep in this country of 3.3 million people.

The mining industry chamber is also opposed to the term “large-scale”.

It is not possible to have a “mega” project in Uruguay given the size of the territory, one of the heads of the chamber, who asked not to be identified, told Tierramérica.

The law applies to any mining projects of over 400 hectares. “If you think of it in terms of cattle, only 200 calves can be raised on that much land, and no one refers to ‘large-scale’ livestock production,” the businessman commented.

One of the aspects of the law that the mining chamber has the most problems with is that the mining permit and contract with the government are only granted once the companies have invested in exploration.

In the past, the permits were issued prior to the exploration work. The chamber says that only one out of 1,000 exploration efforts are successful.

The source with the chamber said the state “has no idea” about the country’s mineral resources. “They only have hypotheses,” he said, pointing out that Uruguay doesn’t even have a mining engineering degree programme.

Professor Sánchez said the companies that mine for gold, limestone, iron ore, semi-precious stones and other mineral products should make a contribution to the University of the Republic, “because they are the ones who take” the country’s geology students.

“As an academic institution we are not prepared for the influx of students we are receiving,” she said. According to Sánchez, what is needed is not only economic support from the private sector, but also academic interaction.

The professor also complained that the government had put into effect a law on large-scale mining without increasing the budget of the Science Faculty.

When Congress discussed “taxes on mining companies, no one remembered that the geologists receive their training at the University of the Republic, which is under-funded,” she said.

The University of the Republic, the oldest and most prestigious higher education institution in the country, is tuition-free.

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

Location of the projected terminal (in pink) on the coast of Rocha, between La Paloma (bottom left) and Cabo Polonio (upper right). Credit: Comisión Interministerial del Puerto de Aguas Profundas

By Pablo Tosquellas
MONTEVIDEO, Nov 6 2013 (IPS)

The small South American country of Uruguay could become a major logistics hub in the Southern Cone due to the deepwater port that the government is planning to build in a tourist area on the Atlantic ocean.

The project is controversial, because it would convert an undeveloped natural tourism zone in the department (province) of Rocha in the southeast of the country. And it would also compete with terminals in the country’s two giant neighbours: Brazil and Argentina.

There is already ongoing tension over trade issues between Uruguay and Argentina, and the ports of Buenos Aires and Montevideo have been rivals since Spanish colonial times.

According to government sources consulted by IPS, the terminal will be built in stages, and because of its geographic location and its natural depth of 20 metres, it is being offered as a lower-cost shipment point for minerals and grains from neighbouring countries.

Enrique Pintado, Uruguay’s minister of transport and public works, told IPS that the project should be a kind of “cooperative” effort among all countries in the region, to save on shipping costs so that products reach their destination, mainly China and Southeast Asia, “with less distorted prices.”

According to a document from the Inter-ministerial Commission on the Deepwater Port, the terminal could generate 50 percent savings in logistics costs for certain trade flows from the region to Asia, and could eventually handle 50 million tons a year of cargo.

The minister said the capacity of other ports in the region is “saturated”, like Santos in the southeast of Brazil, which is Latin America’s biggest container port, which means “the waiting time for loading and unloading merchandise is excessive.”

The key to the success of the new port is its natural depth, according to Pablo Genta, under-secretary of transport and a member of the Inter-ministerial Commission.

Today, ports on the Atlantic that are about 12 metres deep can handle 60,000 tons of cargo per vessel. The port in Rocha could more than double that capacity, by serving ships carrying up to 160,000 tons, Genta told IPS.

The port of Santos handles more than 100 million tons of cargo annually.

“The port of Montevideo, in the best years, handles 12 million tons,” Genta said. “And the Buenos Aires terminal just barely reached 11 million tons last year.”

The port of Montevideo as seen from the Cerro neighbourhood. Credit: Daniel Stonek/CC BY 3.0

Uruguay wants to attract a significant portion of the grain and mineral cargo that Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Paraguay ship to China and Southeast Asia.

But the under-secretary stressed that Uruguay’s own future production justifies the plans for the port. He was referring to the Aratirí mining project in the centre of the country, where the Indian company Zamin Ferrous hopes to extract 18 million tons of iron ore a year which would be transported to the coast through a slurry pipeline.

Economic, topographical and marine hydrology studies are currently being carried out, as well as physical-chemical studies to establish an environmental baseline, with the aim of putting it out to tender in 2014.

A law passed in January approved construction of the port in the department of Rocha, in an area that contains the beach resort towns of Mar del Plata, El Palenque and San Francisco.

The port is to cover an area of 3,027 hectares, for which land will have to be expropriated. In July, the government called for expressions of interest from potential users of the terminal.

The coastline of Mar del Plata, El Palenque and San Francisco is sparsely inhabited. The white sands and waves and natural vegetation form part of a 46-km stretch of beach between La Paloma, Rocha’s main resort town, and Cabo Polonio, a remote beach village that is inaccessible by road, has no electricity or running water, and is home to a colony of southern sea lions and South America’s most important mobile sand dune area.

Opponents of the port, especially the Movement for a Sustainable Uruguay (MOVUS), argue that there is no clear evidence that neighbouring countries will be interested in using the port.

The only obvious freight use, they say, is by the planned Aratirí open-pit mine, which does not yet have all the permits it needs, and has run up against strong social and environmental opposition.

Legal action has been taken to challenge the approval of construction of the port.

Minister Pintado argued, however, that Uruguay cannot fail to take advantage of the fact that Asia “has been shifting its interest in investment and business westward and is breaking down the North-South economic logic.”

In the mid term, he said, the port would handle shipments of grains and bulk liquids, especially oil and its by-products.

The authorities estimate the cost at one billion dollars – an investment that will be made in stages, “like the layers of an onion,” Pintado said. Different terminals will be built as neighbouring countries and the private sector express interest.

Corporación Navíos SA, a shipping company that operates under the free-zone procedure in the port of Nueva Palmira at the confluence of the Uruguay and Paraná rivers, has closely followed the process and hopes to invest in the Rocha terminal, perhaps by means of a public-private contract.

The firm stores and transports freight that arrives in river barges from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.

Ruben Martínez, general manager of Corporación Navíos, told IPS that many of the company’s ocean-going ships set out with “incomplete” loads.

“There is merchandise, like iron ore, that requires larger vessels, which need a stop off at another port to complete their load,” he said. For that reason, he added, the activities in the ports of Nueva Palmira and Rocha could complement each other.

Paulina Nuza, Ernestina Ochoa and Petra Ermillo Martínez (left to right) discussing issues raised at the global congress of domestic workers in Montevideo. Credit: Victoria Rodríguez/IPS

By Inés Acosta
MONTEVIDEO, Oct 29 2013 (IPS)

“We have come together to join forces, to be heard, because we want to speak for ourselves,” said Ernestina Ochoa, a Peruvian domestic worker, at the close of the founding congress of the International Domestic Workers Federation in the Uruguayan capital.

Uruguay was chosen to host the Oct. 26-28 meeting because it was the first country to ratify Convention 189 of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), which establishes basic labour rights that the great majority of domestics around the world do not enjoy. The congress was attended by union leaders from more than 50 countries.

But even in Uruguay or other Latin American countries with ground-breaking national laws aimed at protecting domestic workers, enforcement is a major problem. And in Asia and the Middle East, the situation is much more critical.

“For many years only non-governmental organisations spoke for us, through studies and research…but we domestic employees and our unions have done the day-to-day hard slogging,” said Ochoa, vice president of the International Domestic Workers Network (IDWN), which changed its name to Federation at the congress.

“Now we have said ‘enough’s enough’, let’s found a large federation that unites us, let’s work together to organise ourselves, defend our rights, create unions, improve the laws and help countries where there are no laws, empower domestic workers, train leaders and have a voice vis-à-vis governments and employers,” she said in an interview with IPS.

The IDWN was founded after the first global congress of domestic workers was held in 2006 in Amsterdam. The umbrella organisation, which currently has member unions in 87 countries, was established to fight for the adoption of ILO Convention No.189 on Decent Work for Domestic Workers (C189), which went into effect in September.

Map of progress made by domestic workers. Credit: Courtesy of Human Rights Watch (click to enlarge)

At that time, Ochoa said, they had no idea how much they would grow. She said it had become necessary to create a federation to achieve independence, especially in negotiations with global institutions.

Progress has been made in many Latin American countries, such as Uruguay. But most countries in the world do not have legislation on domestic workers, the Peruvian trade unionist lamented.

C189 establishes “the first global standards for the more than 50 million domestic workers worldwide – the majority of whom are women and girls, and many of whom are migrants,” says the report “Claiming Rights: Domestic Workers’ Movements and Global Advances for Labour Reform”, presented at the congress in Montevideo.

“According to the ILO, almost 30 percent of the world’s domestic workers are employed in countries where they are completely excluded from national labour laws,” adds the study published jointly by the IDWN, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), and Human Rights Watch.

The report says live-in domestic workers, girls and migrants face a heightened risk of abuse. And while child labour declined in other sectors, child domestic labour actually grew by nine percent from 2008 to 2012.

Nisha Varia, senior women’s rights researcher at Human Rights Watch, said change was slow in Asia and the Middle East.

And she told IPS that while advances have been made in Latin America, the challenge in this region is in translating the new legislation into actual improvements in the lives of domestic workers.

The basic rights established by the C189 include weekly days off, limits to hours of work, a minimum wage, overtime compensation, and social security.

So far, C189 has been ratified by Bolivia, Germany, Guyana, Italy, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Philippines, South Africa and Uruguay.

The report also notes that the Philippines, as well as Argentina, Brazil, Kenya, Spain and Venezuela, which have not yet ratified the convention, adopted labour reforms that protect domestic workers.

Graciela Espinoza, with the Uruguayan union of domestic workers, STUD, said “we still have to put our house in order,” referring to her country, despite the adoption of a law on domestic labour, the ratification of C189, and three collective bargaining agreements negotiated with employers.

“There have been many improvements,” Espinoza told IPS. “But there are still domestics who are not officially recognised as workers, and until they are, we have to continue fighting.

“The day society as a whole recognises our work as domestic employees will be the day when we can say: we have reached one goal, now we have to move on towards the next.”

The trade unionist said the most significant changes have been seen since 2006, when a law on domestic labour went into effect, and especially in 2008, when the first national collective bargaining agreement was signed. “That was when the revolution happened in Uruguay,” Espinoza said.

The proportion of domestic workers registered in Uruguay’s social security system climbed from 32 percent in 2004 to 66 percent today. And over half of the registered domestics have labour accident insurance.

Her colleague Lucía Gándara said that “even though Uruguay was the first to ratify C189, rights here are violated, including the right to organise,” which protects labour activists from being fired or abused by their employers because of their trade union activity.

“Domestic workers who form part of the STUD secretariat cannot attend meetings if they are held during their working hours, because they are fired,” Gándara said.

As Espinoza explained, “we work in isolation from each other, a situation that works against us as a union; for example we cannot carry out an occupation of a building – we can’t occupy a family’s house – as a protest measure.”

“The most we can do is explain to the employer the rights and duties of domestics, and that’s what we’re doing. In these cases, the domestics sometimes continue working, and in others they’re fired,” she said.

Despite the lingering problems faced by domestics here, Paulina Nuza, a member of Peru’s Training Centre for Domestic Workers (CCTH), told IPS that “Uruguay is a model.”

“Domestic workers in Peru do not earn decent wages and do not have the same conditions as other workers,” she said. “Although there is a gender equality plan that says that 50 percent of the one million domestic workers in the country are to be insured by 2017, not even six percent of us are currently insured.”

Female cannabis plant. Credit: Bokske/CC BY 3.0

By Emilio Godoy and Inés Acosta
MEXICO CITY/MONTEVIDEO, Sep 27 2013 (IPS)

In Latin America, where marijuana is the most widely consumed illegal drug, there is basically no home-grown research into its effects and properties. But possible legalisation in Uruguay and the Mexican capital could open the door to new studies.

“We can’t close our eyes to serious research in other parts of the world,” Rodolfo Rodríguez, a scientific researcher at the department of pharmacology in the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) medical school, told IPS.

Rodríguez, who has been studying different psychotropic substances for 45 years, is one of six experts making up the Marijuana and Health Group at the National Academy of Medicine who are completing a theoretical study on the medicinal and therapeutic effects of Cannabis sativa.

One of Rodríguez’s interests is to learn about the drug’s effects in patients with chronic or terminal diseases, such as fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis, or certain kinds of cancer.

The results of their work, set to come out in October or November, will inform the debate that Mexico City authorities are holding with a view to legalising the medical use of marijuana.

The left-wing city government of Miguel Mancera and the Mexico City legislative assembly are assessing the health, economic and security aspects of legalisation.

“It’s a plant with more than 400 chemical substances and more than 70 cannabinoids,” Rodríguez said. “When it is consumed, the effects aren’t only due to the delta-9 [tetrahydrocannabinol or THC, the primary psychoactive ingredient in marijuana], but to the combination of all of the chemical compounds.”

Marijuana is mostly grown in the western and southern states of Mexico, largely to supply the lucrative U.S. market. Tens of thousands of small and large farmers and rural workers depend on the illegal crop for a living.

It is used by four million people in this country of 118 million, making it the most widely consumed drug, followed by cocaine, according to the health ministry’s National Addiction Survey 2011.

In Uruguay, far to the south, it is also by far the drug of choice, consumed by slightly over eight percent of the population. But almost all of the marijuana used in the South American country is smuggled in from outside, especially from Paraguay.

Consumption and possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use are not penalised in Uruguay, a country of 3.3 million people sandwiched between Argentina and Brazil.

And the lower house of Congress has approved a draft law that would legalise and put the production, distribution, and sale of marijuana in the hands of the state. It is expected to make it through the Senate shortly and be passed into law, with the votes of the ruling left-wing Broad Front party.

More than 6,000 studies on the properties and effects of cannabis were published in scientific journals from 2010 to 2012, according to NORML, an organisation that advocates the legalisation of marijuana.

Uruguayan biologist Cecilia Scorza, assistant researcher at the Clemente Estable Institute for Biological Research, said “it’s not worth working on something that has been studied for so long, because it would not be original research.

“With marijuana, there can be differences in terms of the quantity of the active ingredient. But it’s always the same ingredient, and the effects are the same too,” she told IPS.

She pointed out that this is not at all the case for the cheap cocaine derivative known in South America as basuco, paco or pasta base, which poses a great potential risk to the user’s health.

The drug’s impact on the region and the lack of scientific research on it have made it a prime focus of studies. “In 2005, we began to research the chemical composition of the drug and its pharmacological effects on the central nervous system,” Scorza said.

But she said it would be original to study the chemical composition of the marijuana that has begun to be produced in Uruguay, “because it would give us a notion of what people will be consuming under the new law.”

Psychologist Gabriela Olivera, a technical adviser to Uruguay’s National Secretariat on Drugs, said research was indispensable to help users stay safe.

The draft law foresees the provision of “information and education that would make it possible, for example, for a person in certain health conditions who consumes marijuana to know that if they use such and such a quantity there is an active ingredient that could provide benefits, but would also have negative consequences,” Olivera told IPS.

To carry out experiments with psychoactive substances, a permit is currently needed from the National Secretariat on Drugs, which only exceptionally makes available a small quantity from drugs that have been confiscated.

“That makes systematised research impossible,” Olivera said.

Once it is passed, the law will create the Institute for the Regulation and Control of Cannabis (IRCCA), whose mission will include advising the government and providing scientific evidence.

The evidence would involve “all aspects, from the chemical composition of the marijuana that will be sold, to the effects on people, depending on its different uses – medicinal or recreational,” Olivera said.

In addition, the Technical Forensic Institute, the Technical Police laboratory, and the Chemistry Faculty of the University of the Republic are designing a research protocol on the potency of THC and other components of the marijuana that is trafficked illegally today, the director of the Uruguayan Observatory on Drugs, Héctor Suárez, told IPS.

Research on the varieties produced and sold legally would be regulated once IRCCA was up and running, he said.

In Mexico City, meanwhile, even if the medicinal use of marijuana is legalised, patients would not start receiving prescriptions overnight, Rodríguez said.

“We are not prepared for that,” the UNAM researcher said. “We have the knowledge and the infrastructure, but it would imply an educational process in health institutions.”

Treatment with marijuana “cannot be within reach of just any doctor, and learning about it can take months or even years,” he added.

Marijuana grown for medicinal purposes. Credit: Coleen Danger/CC by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Aug 30 2013 (IPS)

The U.S. Justice Department on Thursday issued surprise guidance directing its attorneys not to sue states that have moved to decriminalise the recreational use of marijuana, so long as those states implement strict regulatory regimes.

The announcement marks a turnaround for the administration of President Barack Obama, who in January refused to explicitly support cannabis legalisation. Yet analysts are also suggesting that the new policy stance will have significant repercussions for countries that have been at the receiving end of the U.S. “war on drugs”.

“This action is of enormous significance, especially in Latin America, where the United States has for decades been the chief cheerleader for and major exporter of its own punitive drug policy,” John Walsh, a senior associate for drug policy at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a rights group, told IPS.

“Latin American and other countries have felt bound by various treaties not to experiment with regulatory approaches that they think could do a better job, so the significance here is in providing space in the knowledge that the U.S., at least, is not in a position to pressure them anymore.”

Indeed, the United States is seen as the major architect of three United Nations treaties that codify four decades’ worth of “prohibitionist” anti-drugs policies. While these policies today constitute the global norm, some analysts suggest it is currently breaking down."As the so-called 'war on drugs' enters its fifth decade, we need to ask whether it, and the approaches that comprise it, have been truly effective."
-- Eric Holder

In the United States, strict “mandatory minimum” jail sentences have brought the federal prison population to record numbers in recent years. Of the country’s 219,000 inmates – called “historically unprecedented” numbers – half are locked up on drug-related and overwhelmingly non-violent charges.

Earlier this month, U.S. Attorney-General Eric Holder rescinded mandatory minimum sentence guidelines for a range of crimes, including non-violent drug offences.

“As the so-called ‘war on drugs’ enters its fifth decade, we need to ask whether it, and the approaches that comprise it, have been truly effective,” Holder stated on Aug. 12, “and … to usher in a new approach.”

“Affirmatively addressing” priorities

Thursday’s announcement will remove several significant hurdles for lawmakers and entrepreneurs in the states of Washington and Colorado, where in November voters approved the legalisation of the production, distribution and use of non-medical marijuana. Such policies would be among the most permissive anywhere in the world, but they also directly contradict federal law.

In the context of this discrepancy, in recent years the Justice Department has continued to carry out irregular raids and harassment of growers and distributors of medical marijuana even in the 21 states that have formally authorised the physician-prescribed use of the drug. (Sixteen states have also decriminalised first-time offences for small amounts of cannabis.)

The new guidelines now direct federal attorneys not to pursue litigation so long as marijuana is not being sold to minors or funnelled into states that have not legalised its recreational use.

While the Justice Department memorandum will provide increased legal certainty for those involved in these new experiments in regulation, it goes much further than offering mere grudging promises not to interfere. Rather, officials suggest that de-criminalisation of marijuana could ultimately be more successful than criminalisation in achieving a menu of stated federal policy aims.

“A robust system may affirmatively address those priorities,” the memo states, “by, for example, implementing effective measures to prevent diversion of marijuana outside of the regulated system and to other states, prohibiting access to marijuana by minors, and replacing an illicit marijuana trade that funds criminal enterprises with a tightly regulated market in which revenues are tracked and accounted for.”

Long-time critics of the United States’ punitive approach to drugs interdiction have lauded the move, noting the heavy toll that communities in and out of the country have been forced to pay for drugs policies originating in Washington.

“Existing policies that rely heavily on criminalising drug use undermine human rights and have entailed serious costs in terms of violence and abuse,” Maria McFarland, deputy U.S. programme director at Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group, said Friday.

“It’s encouraging that the Justice Department memo recognises that a regulated drug distribution system may be helpful in reducing the power and wealth of criminal groups. Violent organised crime, well financed by revenues from illicit drug markets, poses a real threat to human rights and the rule of law globally. It’s crucial that governments look at alternative ways of regulating not only drug use but also the drug trade.”

New paradigm?

Several Latin American countries are already actively looking at such alternatives. Most notable is Uruguay, which earlier this month approved draft legislation that would both legalise and nationalise the production and distribution of marijuana.

Several possible regulatory approaches are also being discussed in the Mexican Congress, while leaders in several other countries, from Colombia to Guatemala, are also increasingly exploring alternatives.

“Other governments have been less outspoken than Uruguay but they are nevertheless watching what happens there very closely, hoping to learn from Uruguay’s experience and see how similar approaches may work in their own countries,” WOLA’s Walsh says.

“As a result of the new U.S. decision, these countries will now enjoy greater political space to pursue similar legalisation proposals of their own.”

Such moves have been bolstered by a recent landmark series of reports by the 35-member Organisation of American States (OAS). Those reports (available here and here) were notable in appearing to explicitly advocate for alternatives to the longstanding U.S.-led model of criminalisation.

“Decriminalisation of drug use needs to be considered as a core element in any public health strategy,” one of the reports states, noting in particular that “it would be worthwhile to assess existing signals and trends that lean toward the decriminalisation or legalisation of the production, sale, and use of marijuana.”

At a summit in Guatemala in June, the OAS member states approved the reports’ policy vision of drug use as a health rather than criminal issue. Over initial U.S. resistance, they also agreed to devote a General Assembly next year to coming up with a new drugs-related action plan.

“We are potentially on the cusp of the collapse of the existing international counter-narcotics regime,” Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, told IPS when the OAS reports came out. “And it looks like the Latin Americans could be the ones to pull the plug.”

May 2013 protest march in downtown Montevideo against large-scale mining. Credit: Inés Acosta/Tierramérica

By Inés Acosta
MONTEVIDEO, Aug 26 2013 (IPS)

A bill that would regulate large-scale mining operations is making its way through Uruguay’s two houses of parliament, despite a lack of political consensus and vocal opposition from environmental organisations and other sectors of civil society.

The proposed legislation, submitted by the executive branch and backed by the ruling Frente Amplio (FA) or Broad Front coalition, declares that large-scale mining would serve the “public interest”. But critics charge that the bill was drafted to serve the interests of the Aratirí project planned by the Indian mining group Zamin Ferrous, aimed at the production of 18 million tons of iron ore annually, with a promised investment of three billion dollars.

Opposition to these plans by environmentalists, farmers and other residents of the areas that would be affected by the mining operations is becoming increasingly louder. In the last demonstration against large-scale mining in Uruguay, held on May 10, more than 10,000 participants marched down 18 de Julio Avenue, the main thoroughfare in downtown Montevideo.

Meanwhile, in a survey conducted by the Radar consulting firm, which asked the question, “Are you in favour of open-pit mining activities in Uruguay, such as the Aratirí project?”, 46 percent of respondents said that they were opposed, 28 percent were in favour, 12 percent had no opinion on the matter, and 14 percent said they knew nothing about the subject.

The Aratirí project would occupy 4,300 hectares and encompass five open-pit mines on 500 hectares, associated logistics facilities, a processing and beneficiation plant, and a 212-km concentrate slurry pipeline to transport the ore to a deepwater export terminal that the company plans to build on the Atlantic coast, in an area where tourism plays a major role in the local economy.

But the entire undertaking, including the “buffer zones”, will take up 14,505 hectares in three departments in central and eastern Uruguay: Durazno, Florida and Treinta y Tres. The project also includes the installation of five new high-voltage power lines to supply power to the mining facilities and the port.

Opposition has also taken the form of proposals and local campaigns to declare the departments of Treinta y Tres and Lavalleja, in eastern Uruguay, and Rivera and Tacuarembó, in the northeast, as “mega mining-free” territories. In Tacuarembó, where there are requests for prospecting permits involving 300,000 hectares of land, activists say they have collected the number of signatures necessary to demand the calling of a referendum, under Uruguayan law.

“Tacuarembó has no tradition of mining. It is a region of very fertile land, with tremendous capacity for producing living things, and it lies over the Guaraní Aquifer. Its natural conditions are much better suited to producing biodiversity,” farmer Daniela Pírez of the Tacuarembó for Life and Water committee, which headed up the collection of signatures, told Tierramérica*.

The new bill, which would modify the current Mining Code, contains “provisions and exceptional benefits that are aimed at enabling the (Aratirí) project,” according to the Movement for a Sustainable Uruguay (Movus).

“This law has a first name and a last name: Aratirí. That’s where the whole thing started, regardless of whether there may be other mining projects,” Senator Sergio Abreu of the opposition National Party told Tierramérica.

Frente Amplio senator and former minister of industry Daniel Martínez denied the accusation. The proposed law “was conceived in the framework of large-scale mining in general, because there are many projects coming into Uruguay, and the idea was to have a special law that would demand greater environmental protection measures and ensure more resources for the state,” he told Tierramérica.

For the moment, however, the other mining projects in the country are one tenth the size of Aratirí, according to the Uruguayan Chamber of the Mining Industry.

The Aratirí project will represent the biggest foreign direct investment in the country’s history. According to the company, its implementation will generate gross value added of around 1.5% of GDP throughout the 20 years of its life cycle and 1.4 billion dollars in exports annually.

The company also claims that it will create 1,500 direct jobs, 10,500 indirect jobs and between 3,000 and 4,000 jobs during construction.

With regard to taxation, the bill expressly establishes that mining and related activities will not be eligible for the application of promotional tax regimes that grant corporate income tax (IRAE) exemptions.

But it does allow the application of exemptions for various other taxes, as established in the law on investments, which could add up to between 700 million and one billion dollars for the Aratirí project.

The bill also stipulates that prospecting, exploration and environmental assessment costs incurred prior to the concession, which are directly linked to the large-scale mining project covered by the respective contract, can be shown as losses in the first business year in which production begins or amortised on a fixed instalment basis over a five-year period.

Martínez believes that the new bill establishes “a very significant increase in the tax burden,” although “this project has exemptions which may or may not be debatable. Any investment in the country has exemptions for the value-added tax on imports and the IRAE.”

Another controversial aspect is the plan for the closure of the mines. As far as Movus is concerned, no precise limits have been set. Moreover, “Aratirí told the Senate committee that its plan is for these enormous craters to be filled with rainwater over a period of 80 years.”

“Uruguay Natural” or Natural Uruguay, the “brand” used to promote the country abroad as a tourism destination, does not seem compatible with large-scale mining activity.

Martínez, however, stressed that “there are people who confuse Natural Uruguay with an agrarian country, a country of poverty and exploitation, and there is nothing that contaminates more than poverty. Either we diversify productive activities and pursue advances in sectors with higher technology and value added, or we will be a poor country forever.”

Journalist Víctor Bacchetta, of Movus, does not believe that this small South American country has the potential to be a “mega mining” nation.

“Uruguay is poor in mineral resources. It does not have the huge reserves of countries like Chile or Peru. Aratirí is proposing 12 years of extraction activities, according to what can be gathered from its Environmental and Social Impact Assessment, and after that it will all be over,” Bacchetta told Tierramérica.

“This makes the project even more absurd for Uruguay, because it is a country with a privileged ecosystem in terms of its fertile land and water resources, which are not found in the (Andes) mountains, where nothing else can be done,” he added.

The government has still not approved the environmental impact assessment for the project. The company has also said that it will wait for the final outcome of the legal text before signing a contract with the government to initiate operations.

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

Excerpt:

Ahmad Alhendawi, the U.N. secretary general's special envoy on youth, speaks with participants in the programme Jóvenes en Red (Youth Net) from Manga, a working-class neighbourhood on the outskirts of Montevideo. Credit: David Puig/UNFPA

By Raúl Pierri
MONTEVIDEO, Aug 13 2013 (IPS)

Shortcomings in the educational system in Latin America and the Caribbean fuel inequalities that remain hurdles to access to the labour market and safe sex for a large part of the region’s youth.

Around half of the region’s sexually active youngsters have never used any form of birth control, and an estimated 20 percent of children in the region were born to mothers between the ages of 10 and 19.

The HIV/AIDS rate, meanwhile, has declined but remains high: some 250,000 Latin Americans aged 15 to 24 are living with HIV.

These statistics were reported at the first session of the Regional Conference on Population and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean, running Aug. 12-15 in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay.

Marcela Suazo, regional director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), said the problem is that “there is insufficient access to sex education in the region.

“Sex education is still missing from the basic national curriculum in many public schools, although some private schools are providing knowledge and information,” she told IPS.

Suazo said that as medical care continues to advance, education and information on sexual and reproductive rights remain limited, which makes it difficult for young people to receive adequate attention.

The UNFPA official took part in a forum Monday to mark World Youth Day – observed Aug. 12 – ahead of the regional gathering.

This week’s meeting, which is assessing the progress made in implementing the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in Cairo in 1994, is organised by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and the Uruguayan government, with support from UNFPA.

Suazo also said sex education continues to face prejudices.

“Adults behave differently with people who we consider young and less prepared, who are thus treated in a prejudiced manner,” she said.

But even when good sexual and reproductive services exist, many young women do not use them because they fear they will be judged because of their sexual behaviour, she said.

“We need to overcome this barrier because it’s directly related to teen pregnancy, to the reproduction of poverty and inequality, which is a pending challenge for Latin America and the Caribbean,” she stressed.

Limitations on the sexual and reproductive rights of young women in Latin America directly influence their chances of completing their studies and avoiding poverty.

In this region, between 15 and 40 percent of young women say their first sexual experience was forced, while nearly 30 percent of adolescent girls are married before the age of 18.

The U.N. secretary general’s special envoy on youth, Ahmad Alhendawi, also stressed the importance of sexual education.

“We believe it’s fundamental for young people to know more about their bodies,” he told IPS. “Every six minutes a young person is affected with HIV/AIDS and this is unacceptable. These are dangerous numbers. We believe by providing tools and information we’ll be able to tackle this issue.”

According to figures from the ICPD high-level task force, the region is experiencing the largest youth cohort in history: Of the 600 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean, more than 26 percent are aged 15 to 29 – a demographic boom that should be harnessed, experts say.

But youth unemployment is the expression of a gap between education and the labour market.

“The education system is not equipping young people with the skills and the knowledge that they need to enter the labour market. This mismatch is daunting and shrinking young people’s chances to get decent job opportunities,” Alhendawi said.

“Globally, 73.4 million young people are unemployed, and this is a number that requires all of us to respond quickly to this problem,” he added.

Alhendawi underlined the importance of increasing investment in this age group, and called on governments and private institutions to provide financial services to enable young people to set up their own businesses, so that they can stop being job-seekers and become innovators and job-creators instead.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, only 10 percent of young people work in the formal economy, Suazo noted.

Young people “are the first to lose their jobs when there are cutbacks,” she said. “And when they want to get a formal sector job, they face requisites, like five years of experience, when they are just coming out of the university.”

Besides, she added, “we are facing a new industrial-technological revolution. Education systems should be reviewed so that they allow the development of the necessary skills, capacities and knowledge for young people to take part in this innovation.”

The UNPFA official acknowledged that education has improved in certain respects in Latin America. For example, 95 percent primary school enrolment has been achieved.

“But when we look at the secondary and university levels, the numbers start to come down considerably,” she said.

“Primary education does not manage to develop the necessary competence and skills for people to take part in development processes in productive areas,” she said.

The secretary general of the Ibero-American Youth Organisation (OIJ), Alejo Ramírez, urged governments to put a priority on youth when it comes to spending.

“The economic growth seen in Latin America in recent years has helped develop many sectors. But the youth, who are hardest hit by unemployment and inequality, are the last to be reached by public spending,” he lamented.

Only an estimated 20 percent of social spending benefits people under the age of 30, he said.

The OIJ also presented the First Ibero-American Youth Survey. Ramírez told IPS that the study’s main finding was that two out of three young people believe that in five years they will be better off, “pointing to a strong degree of optimism.”

Latin American governments have increasingly been working to lessen inequality in the region, but new data suggests their efforts vary widely in quality and impact.

Latin America has for decades been considered one of the world’s most unequal regions, with chasms between the richest and poorest in each country. At a World Bank discussion here on Monday, however, researchers suggested that these gaps have been closing over the past several years – surprising many analysts.“There is no doubt that fiscal policy, the structure of taxes, can be a powerful mechanism to change the distribution of wealth in a society.” -- Jaime Saadera-Chanduvi of the World Bank

Still, major work remains to be done in spreading these reforms to all members of society.

“The main reasons for these high levels of inequality have had to do with corruption, lack of functioning justice systems and rule of law,” Jennifer Johnson, a senior associate of the Latin American Working Group, an advocacy group, told IPS. “As yet, the gains that have been made have not reached the marginalised populations.”

Increasingly, researchers have been looking into what Latin American governments have and haven’t been doing over the past decade to achieve lower levels of poverty and inequality.

“These questions don’t go away,” Stephen Younger, an economics professor at Ithaca College, said Monday at the World Bank. “People are always concerned about the equity implications of a policy, and that includes fiscal policy.”

Early results from a study released last week highlight a wide variety of public policy choices confronting Latin American governments regarding poverty reduction and income redistribution. The report looks at Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, Peru, Mexico and Uruguay.

“The idea of the project is not only to measure the result of what’s going on with regard to inequality, poverty and social development in Latin America,” Nora Lustig, a professor of Latin American economics and co-author of the new study, said at a panel discussion last week.

“Rather, it is to look more deeply at how this process has been happening and, particularly, how much effort governments themselves are really making.”

That analysis has now identified Argentina as the most effective Latin American country at reducing inequality. Particularly useful in this regard have been measures such as direct cash transfers, when governments give money directly to poor citizens.

Lustig and her colleagues found that this approach has helped to reduce poverty levels in Argentina by more than 60 percent.

Yet in other countries, such an approach has not been nearly as effective. In Peru and Bolivia, for instance, cash transfers have only reduced poverty by around seven percent.

According to Lustig, this discrepancy can be explained by simple spending levels.

“Peru spends much less money in all these transfers,” she told IPS. “It also had to do with who the transfers are targeted at, but it mainly has to do with spending.”

Argentina comes out as a “shining star”, Louise Cord, a sector manager with the World Bank’s Latin America and Caribbean office, said at the unveiling of the results. “And yet we have to all wonder about the sustainability of this fiscal framework.”

According to the study, Argentina has funded the majority of its public spending since the early 2000s through “distortionary taxes” and “unsustainable revenue-raising mechanisms”.

In nearly all countries throughout the region, so-called indirect taxes, on goods and services as opposed to on people and organisations, are seen as problematic for the poor. Such practices have been shown to wipe out all the effects of direct taxes and direct cash transfers, especially in Brazil and Bolivia.

“There is no doubt that fiscal policy, the structure of taxes, can be a powerful mechanism to change the distribution of wealth in a society,” Jaime Saadera-Chanduvi, director of poverty reduction and equity at the World Bank, said Monday.

“It’s critical to understand how taxes and benefits can be shaped through the distribution of incomes and, through that, increase standards of living.”

Economic blossoming

By 2009, nearly a third of the Latin America population had moved into the middle class, with just an estimated 10 percent chance of falling back into poverty.

“Despite these important gains, there is still room to move forward and I think a study like this highlights that,” said Cord.

According to some advocates, Latin American governments need to focus particular attention on corruption, in order to ensure that social policies are not used for political gain or other manipulation.

“States must begin to analyse poverty reduction initiative through coordination with marginalised sectors that have traditionally been excluded from these policy discussions,” Kelsey Alford-Jones, the director of the Guatemala Human Rights Commission, a Washington-based advocacy group, told IPS.

“They need to focus on models that meet needs identified at the local level,” he said.

Alford-Jones notes that U.S. economic policy, “including the imposition of structural adjustment programmes and free trade agreements, has played a major role in the perpetuation of poverty and inequality.”

Meanwhile, the United States is currently looking for ways to more closely engage with the rising economies of Latin America. Over the past week, both Vice-President Joe Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry made highly visible trips to the region.

Biden noted during his five-day trip that he had seen an “economic blossoming” in the region.

“What the United States needs to do is be far more flexible and less inclined to favour the demands of transnational organisations,” Laura Carlsen, director of the Mexico City-based Americas Program for the Center for International Policy, a Washington think tank, told IPS.

“In particular, it also needs to look more carefully at what’s happening to the weakest countries.”

A growing number of international lawsuits has highlighted an emerging global crisis: the nature and effects of investment treaties signed between governments, which are allowing private companies and investors to sue countries for millions or even billions of dollars.

Martin Khor

The most recent cases involving investment treaties include a 1.8-billion-dollar judgment against Ecuador obtained by a U.S. oil company, a two-billion-dollar suit filed against Indonesia by British mining company Churchill, cases taken against Uruguay and Australia’s public health measures by tobacco companies, suits threatened against India by several multinational companies, and even the seizure of an Argentine warship in a Ghanaian port on behalf of a U.S. investment firm.

The lawsuits were taken by companies and investors claiming that their investments, including potential profits, had been affected by a range of government policies, including non-compliance with contracts or new health, environmental or economic regulations.

Most of these arbitration cases are taken up in the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), at the Washington-based World Bank headquarters.

The tribunal system is widely criticised for its lack of professionalism and transparency, its conflicts of interest and the secrecy of its cases and outcomes.

The treaties are of two main types ­ the bilateral investment treaties (BITs) signed between pairs of governments (of which there are now around 3,000) and the investment chapter contained in bilateral or regional free trade agreements (especially those involving the U.S.).

Many of these agreements have investor-to-state dispute systems, under which a private company or investor can directly sue governments in an international tribunal by claiming that their property or profits have been expropriated or adversely affected by a violation of contracts or by recent policy measures.

For instance, an ICSID tribunal in October awarded a judgment in favour of U.S.-based Occidental Petroleum against Ecuador for 1.8 billion dollars. In addition, Ecuador has to pay 589 million dollars in backdated compound interest and half of the costs of the tribunal, making its total penalty closer to 2.4 billion dollars. The government had annulled a contract with the company because the latter violated a clause that it would not sell its rights to another firm without permission. The tribunal agreed the violation took place but judged that the annulment did not constitute fair and equitable treatment to the company.

The ease with which investors are able to bring and win cases against governments for a wide range of issues is due to the nature of the investment agreements.

First, the definition of investment, which is the subject of the treaties, is usually very broad, covering direct investment, portfolio investment, loans, franchises, licences, contracts, intellectual property and other assets. Investors can bring up cases claiming that their rights to any of these have been violated.

Second, the treaties grant national treatment, fair and equitable treatment and protection to investors. The definitions of these are so flexible that investors are able to claim their rights are violated for a wide range of reasons.

Third, many of the treaties prevent governments from controlling or regulating inflows and outflows of capital, and some restrict or disallow governments from imposing performance requirements on foreign companies.

Fourth, the treaties prohibit expropriation of the investments. The definition of expropriation is very broad: it includes direct expropriation such as takeovers of property but also “regulatory takings”, or the implementation of new policy measures that affect the potential revenue and profits of the investors.

Fifth, some of the treaties allow for investors to directly sue governments in international tribunals, including the ICSID.

Sixth, the arbitration system is riddled with major weaknesses that are not found in normal courts. According to international expert on trade and investment issues, Chakravarthi Raghavan, “The ICSID panels are constituted of lawyers who sometimes are on panel, and sometimes suing for firms against governments, and don’t have any obligation to disclose conflicts of interest. It is time that BITs and (the) ICSID system and these quite arbitrary ‘arbitration’ panels are exposed.”

Seventh, the BITs’ arbitration cases are shrouded in secrecy. They are not held in the open, and the existence or results of cases are not officially made known.

Eighth, it is difficult for a country to exit from a BIT even if it has decided that the bilateral treaty is against its interests, as many BITs have a “survival clause” that the treaty remains in force for 10 or 15 years even after the exit of a country or its expiry.

Governments, especially in developing countries, are also increasingly concerned. Faced with a multitude of lawsuits, several governments have recently taken action to review or revise their investment treaties.

South Africa, after completing a review of its BITs, has decided not to sign any new BITs, will attempt to exit from or re-negotiate existing ones, and will formulate a new model BIT.

Australia, in April 2011, announced it would not agree to including investor-state dispute settlement provisions in its BITs and free trade agreements.

A year later, in April 2012, India announced it was reviewing its BITs, especially their dispute resolution component, after facing the threat of suits arising from a Supreme Court order nullifying the award of 2G contracts to several foreign telecommunication companies.

And some Latin American countries including Ecuador, Venezuela and Bolivia have expressed their serious concerns about BITs and announced their exit from ICSID.

With so many problems arising and so many cases being taken against countries, the review and reform of investment treaties should be accelerated at both national and international levels.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Martin Khor is the executive director of the South Centre, Geneva.  For further analysis see South Centre, Issue 69.

Wind farm in Sierra de los Caracoles, in the department of Maldonado, southeast Uruguay. Credit: Courtesy of UTE

By Inés Acosta
MONTEVIDEO, Aug 28 2012 (IPS)

Uruguay needs to reinforce and expand its electric power grid to absorb the 1,200 megawatts of wind energy that it plans to generate by 2015.

This wind power target forms part of a larger goal for the same year: to generate half of the energy consumed in the country from renewable sources.

Investment in the production of wind energy is undergoing a major boom. And as a result, the state-owned electric power company, UTE, is faced with the need to improve Uruguay’s power transmission infrastructure.

At the moment, wind energy contributes only one percent of the small South American nation’s electricity, with three wind farms that generate a total of 43 megawatts in the southeast: one publicly owned farm in the department (province) of Maldonado and two privately owned facilities in the department of Rocha.

When the 1,200 megawatt target is met, wind energy will account for 29 percent of the electricity supply, UTE chairman Gonzalo Casaravilla told Tierramérica*.

Six contracts have already been signed and 12 more will be signed soon for the generation of 930 megawatts in facilities to be installed over the next few years, reported Casaravilla.

These ambitious plans encompass 21 new wind farms in 11 departments in the northwest, west, centre, south and southeast of the country.

According to Casaravilla, construction of these new facilities will begin at the end of the year and be completed in 12 to 18 months. In addition, UTE plans to generate another 180 megawatts through an agreement with the Brazilian state-owned electric power company, Eletrobras.

While the entire country offers good wind energy potential, the density of its electricity grid is not as homogeneous.

“The grid was designed many years ago to take electricity to where the people are, not to bring electricity from those places,” explained the director of the National Energy Office at the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Mining (MIEM), Ramón Méndez.

Uruguay has the highest rate of electrification among all the countries of Latin America, with 98.8 percent service coverage. But with a population of just under 3.3 million people and almost half of them concentrated in the capital, Montevideo, there are large stretches of very sparsely populated areas. In these areas, “the electric power lines are designed solely to satisfy the needs of those few customers,” said Méndez.

And when big wind farms are installed, “much longer lines are needed to connect to a sufficiently powerful first node to discharge all of that energy,” he added.

This means that the ideal wind energy project is one that is located “in a place where there are good winds and good electric grid infrastructure at the same time.”

This has turned out to be the main challenge. “In the beginning it was easy because there was room everywhere, but as distributed generation gradually became denser, it became more difficult to select appropriate locations,” explained Casaravilla.

Two of the 18 wind farm projects proposed and approved faced difficulties in connecting to existing networks in the sites originally chosen, in the departments of Tacuarembó and Florida. But both were relocated to areas with better connections, he noted.
“We have managed to find locations for all of the projects for which bids were presented in the tender held by UTE. There were really very few places remaining with leftover capacity,” he added.

As a result, UTE plans to develop the power grid infrastructure needed for the installation of new wind energy facilities in the next ten years. “We have plans to expand the grid in the north, to make it possible to continue incorporating distributed generation in accordance with the demand,” said Casaravilla. Over the next five years, around one billion dollars will be invested in power lines and substations.

Right now, however, six companies want to build eight wind farms in Pueblo Peralta, in the northern department of Tacuarembó. This would involve a total investment of 20 million dollars, which would allow for the generation of 300 megawatts in an area “with excellent wind potential,” Ricardo Pretz, the director of one of the companies, PTZ Bioenergía Uruguay, told Tierramérica.

The winds in this site “will make it possible to install wind turbines with much longer blades, to produce more energy. The result will be much more profitable projects, allowing UTE to buy the electricity at lower prices,” argued Pretz, whose company forms part of the Brazilian group PTZ Bioenergy.

Unfortunately, in this particular area of the country “there are no possibilities of connection to the grid, because the closest substation is saturated,” he said. The companies are determined to stick with this location, however, and have met with Casaravilla and Energy Minister Roberto Kreimerman for this purpose.

Casaravilla said that “today we cannot offer a solution, because we need to see how the contracts already signed develop.” The country will need to continue installing wind farms after 2015 “and we will have to study the best way to do it,” he added.

Méndez does not believe that the current limitations of the power grid have dampened private sector interest in wind energy, which he described as “enormous”. “During this term of government alone (which began in 2010) we have surpassed 6.5 billion dollars in investment.”

For each tender held, around 20 projects have been proposed through various international companies. “Contracts are negotiated for periods of 20 years, and thanks to this boom in the market, we have managed to obtain very good prices, 50 percent below average prices in Europe,” he said.

This results in costs of “around 60 dollars per megawatt-hour, with no subsidies of any kind, which is a key issue,” he stressed. These investments will make it possible to reduce the country’s electricity costs by an estimated 30 percent by 2015, he added.

Uruguay’s current energy policy was adopted in 2008 for the next 25 years; in 2010 it was endorsed by all of the country’s political parties.

The changes began in the electricity sector with the first incorporations of wind energy (in 2008 there was a single turbine) and the large-scale incorporation of biomass, said Méndez.

“In a short time we achieved very significant change, given that we ended last year with a 46 percent share of renewable sources in the energy mix as a whole,” he reported.

Hydroelectricity accounts for 20 percent, waste biomass represents 12 percent, firewood makes up another 12 percent, and the remaining two percent is contributed by biofuels, solar power and wind energy.

Achieving a 50 percent share of renewable sources by 2015 is an “extremely ambitious” target, said Méndez, since renewable energies currently account for less than 12 percent of the global energy mix.

The development of renewable energy is key for a country that has no hydrocarbon production and depends on imported crude oil for its fuel supply. In this area as well, however, there are an increasing number of international companies exploring for oil and natural gas in different geological formations in Uruguay.

* 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.

A boy and his mother watch through glass as a green sea turtle receives treatment at the Karumbé rehabilitation center. Credit: Victoria Rodríguez/IPS

By Inés Acosta
MONTEVIDEO, Jul 24 2012 (IPS)

A record number of sea turtles are turning up on Uruguayan beaches along the Atlantic Ocean and Río de la Plata this Southern hemisphere winter, suffering from cold shock and hypothermia.

While specialists are still investigating the causes, they speculate that an abrupt change in sea temperature may have prevented the green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) from migrating to warmer waters.

At press time, close to 100 turtles found on the beaches of Uruguay’s southern and eastern coast had been taken to marine rescue centers.

The green sea turtle, classified as an endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), normally grows and develops on the coasts of Uruguay and then migrates to Brazil in the winter in search of warmer waters.

The turtles are commonly spotted on the rocky points along the Atlantic coast in the departments (provinces) of Rocha and Maldonado, although they can also be found on the beaches along the Rio de La Plata or River Plate, a wide estuary that flows into the sea.

Adult specimens can grow to up to a meter and a half in length and weigh up to 500 kilograms. But the green sea turtles that visit the coasts of Uruguay are juveniles, measuring around 40 centimeters in length.

“There have been records in the past of beached turtles due to cold winter temperatures, but the average was around 10 turtles during the entire winter,” Andrés Estrades, a specialist at the Karumbé sea turtle center, told Tierramérica *. “We had never reached such a high number before, and the cold weather has only just begun.”

Karumbé (which means turtle in the Guaraní indigenous language) was born in 1999 as an initiative undertaken by a group of young researchers, students, biologists and veterinarians, aimed at the conservation of Uruguay’s marine species, with a special emphasis on the study of turtles.

A Karumbé turtle rehabilitation center and a small museum are located on the grounds of the Villa Dolores Zoo in Montevideo.

So far this winter, the center has taken in 32 rescued turtles, young specimens between the ages of two and 12 years and weighing between four and 15 kilograms, said Estrades. A team of Karumbé volunteers is working hard to diagnose their condition and help them to recover.

The rest of the roughly 100 rescued turtles have been distributed among similar centers in Rocha and Maldonado, and around 20 have been discovered dead.

According to Karumbé, an average of 120 sea turtles are found beached in Uruguay every year. Half of them have swallowed plastic objects, 15 percent have become entangled in garbage or fishing nets, another 15 percent are suffering from cold shock, and the remainder are victims of different diseases.

Karumbé has launched an information and awareness campaign on Facebook, in order to explain to the public what they should do if they find a sea turtle stranded on the beach. The main recommendations are to not return the turtles to the water, to keep them warm with blankets or warm water, and to contact the specialists.

On Jul. 16, 50 specimens had appeared in a period of just three days. At the Karumbé center in Montevideo, two foreign students were working as volunteers alongside veterinarian Virginia Ferrando to treat them.

The pools and tanks could not hold the large number of turtles arriving, and the heaters were also unable to keep the water temperature high enough. Visitors to the zoo – of whom there were many, since it was the second week of school vacation – were met with the surprise of a rehabilitation center full of action and overflowing with turtles.

Two youngsters who had come to deliver a rescued turtle observed the process: first the turtle was placed in a pool of warm water, and then it was examined in order to make a diagnosis.

“Some of them are already doing quite well and with a bit of liquid feed and heat they can fully recover,” Ferrando told Tierramérica. The turtles are also being studied to determine if they had contracted some sort of disease before they were beached.

“Most of them appear to be in good physical condition. We have 32 at the center, and half of them are floating, which means they have some other problem, like pneumonia, a viral infection or plastic in their intestines. We are assessing them, and this will require more work,” said Estrades.

The turtles will have to remain at Karumbé until spring, when the weather conditions are adequate for them to be released back into the sea.

“Every turtle we release is an event. We would like to acquire some satellite monitoring equipment to see if we are doing things right,” he added.

Karumbé, which is represented on the board of directors of the International Sea Turtle Society, is participating in a doctoral thesis study through an agreement with the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Gustavo Martinez, a Brazilian researcher, is studying the year-round permanence and seasonal migration of sea turtles on the Uruguayan coasts and their movements to Brazil.

“Many of them migrate, but others stay,” explained Estrades.

One hypothesis regarding the large number of beached turtles this year is that the specimens that had travelled farther inland along the Río de Plata did not make it back to the ocean in time, “and when the water temperature dropped suddenly, they went into cold shock,” he said.

The sea water temperature is currently 10 degrees. While this is not a record low temperature, it is below the average for this time of year, which is 12 degrees. According to Estrades, this difference could be fatal for some turtles.

“We are seeing changing trends in maximum and minimum temperatures, possibly due to climate change. We had a rather warm autumn, and winter arrived very suddenly. This might have disoriented the turtles,” he said.

The specialists have also observed “a sort of tropicalization of the Uruguayan coast: the water is becoming increasingly warmer, and animals that are unusual for this region are appearing.” One example is the hawksbill sea turtle, for which there were no previous records of sightings in Uruguayan waters.

The hawksbill sea turtle commonly inhabits the warmer waters off the coast of Brazil, but in 2007, a specimen turned up in Uruguay, followed by a number of others in the following years. In 2011, six of them were found, “all of them very weak and full of plastic,” said Estrades.

* 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 Inés Acosta and - -
MONTEVIDEO, Feb 29 2012 (IPS)

Uruguay took a giant step towards more democratic media when it passed a law on community radio broadcasting in 2007. But although regulations for the law were approved in late 2010, many broadcasters are now off the air and waiting to be assigned a frequency.

Community radio operator at La Cotorra. Credit: Courtesy of La Cotorra FM

“It establishes a community radio broadcasting sector which is assigned one-third of the radio spectrum in every frequency band,” he said. A draft decree on digital television being prepared by the government also “reserves one-third for community broadcasters.”

Martín Prats, head of the Honorary Advisory Council for Community Radio Broadcasting (CHARC) as the representative of the Ministry of Industry, told IPS the law “establishes a transparent process for assigning frequencies in different parts of the country, which is the stage we are at. It is a process that has just begun; the results will be more visible next year.”

Based on the law, a census was carried out in 2008 to assign frequencies to community radio stations that were already on the air. A total of 413 projects applied, but only 92 of them met the legal requirements.

This process ended in 2010, and it was only in 2011 that calls were opened for applications in different parts of the country to assign frequencies to radio stations that had not necessarily been on the air before.

Stations that apply – on the understanding they must not broadcast until they have been approved by the competent authorities – are scrutinised by CHARC, after which public consultations are held. If selected, they must wait to be assigned a frequency.

So far, calls for applications have been issued in five of the country’s 19 provinces, and the most headway has been made in Durazno, in the centre, Flores in the southwest and Lavalleja, in the southeast. In these provinces public hearings have already been held, and the stations are awaiting the assignment of frequencies.

“The plan is to finish the application process throughout the country this year. It’s a very gradual process,” said Prats. Only one frequency is made available in each geographic location, which “to a certain extent limits the aspirations of applicants,” but the political goal is “to regulate use of the spectrum.”

In 2013, “when the spectrum has been regulated, further calls for applications will be issued,” he said.

In March, public hearings will be held in the eastern provinces of Treinta y Tres and Cerro Largo.

José Imaz, of the Coalition for Democratic Communication and a member of the La Cotorra FM radio station in the Cerro neighbourhood of Montevideo, told IPS that “the law has set some very important precedents in terms of the democratisation of speech, which have been taken up in various decrees.”

But implementation of the application procedure “is excessively slow, and a major hurdle for future calls.”

Prats acknowledged there were administrative difficulties. “CHARC is an honorary body,” and therefore suffers from a “lack of resources,” he said.

Mega FM, a radio station in Vergara, a town of 4,000 people in the province of Treinta y Tres, had been broadcasting since 2008, one of the station’s members, Cristián Rodríguez, told IPS.

Two other community radio stations were also operating in Vergara. They all applied for frequency assignment and are awaiting a public hearing in March. “All three stations have shut down, they are all off the air,” Rodríguez said.

But “local people miss them, because Vergara is a small town and is accustomed to relying on the community radio stations,” he complained.

While it is unable to broadcast, Mega FM is posting on its web site videos of music concerts, sports events and other local activities on YouTube.

It is noteworthy that the Uruguayan law does not stipulate power limits for the frequencies, Kaplún said. “The limits will be set according to need and advisability.”

However, putting this guideline into practice raises difficulties. “The frequencies assigned in the first round are short range. Use of a 30-metre antenna and a power of 30 watts were established as general principles.”

In rural areas, where more wave bands are available and higher power is needed, “this general rule for frequency concession does not seem reasonable,” Kaplún said.

In contrast, in the capital city it is not easy to assign new frequencies on a spectrum that is overcrowded with private and public radio stations. “The spectrum should be redistributed, but this option was not chosen; instead, gaps in the spectrum are being used so as not to displace commercial and public broadcasters. This is untenable,” said Kaplún.

In Imaz’s view, the state should promote community radio stations and provide “economic aid for their installation, as well as distributing official advertising more widely to include community stations as well as commercial broadcasters.”

Prats said that in order to achieve “better implementation of the law, more economic and administrative resources should be allocated to CHARC.”

In future, he said, community radio stations “face a challenge: to be committed to playing a role in and for the community, without broadcasting political or religious propaganda.”

* This article was produced with the support of UNESCO.

Excerpt:

Uruguay took a giant step towards more democratic media when it passed a law on community radio broadcasting in 2007. But although regulations for the law were approved in late 2010, many broadcasters are now off the air and waiting to be assigned a frequency.

Community radio operator at La Cotorra. Credit: Courtesy of La Cotorra FM

Law 18.232 on Community Radio Broadcasting Service, promoted by civil society organisations, “is innovative and is regarded as one of the best of its kind,” Gabriel Kaplún, head of the degree course in communication sciences at the state University of the Republic, told IPS.

“It establishes a community radio broadcasting sector which is assigned one-third of the radio spectrum in every frequency band,” he said. A draft decree on digital television being prepared by the government also “reserves one-third for community broadcasters.”

Martín Prats, head of the Honorary Advisory Council for Community Radio Broadcasting (CHARC) as the representative of the Ministry of Industry, told IPS the law “establishes a transparent process for assigning frequencies in different parts of the country, which is the stage we are at. It is a process that has just begun; the results will be more visible next year.”

Based on the law, a census was carried out in 2008 to assign frequencies to community radio stations that were already on the air. A total of 413 projects applied, but only 92 of them met the legal requirements.

This process ended in 2010, and it was only in 2011 that calls were opened for applications in different parts of the country to assign frequencies to radio stations that had not necessarily been on the air before.

Stations that apply – on the understanding they must not broadcast until they have been approved by the competent authorities – are scrutinised by CHARC, after which public consultations are held. If selected, they must wait to be assigned a frequency.

So far, calls for applications have been issued in five of the country’s 19 provinces, and the most headway has been made in Durazno, in the centre, Flores in the southwest and Lavalleja, in the southeast. In these provinces public hearings have already been held, and the stations are awaiting the assignment of frequencies.

“The plan is to finish the application process throughout the country this year. It’s a very gradual process,” said Prats. Only one frequency is made available in each geographic location, which “to a certain extent limits the aspirations of applicants,” but the political goal is “to regulate use of the spectrum.”

In 2013, “when the spectrum has been regulated, further calls for applications will be issued,” he said.

In March, public hearings will be held in the eastern provinces of Treinta y Tres and Cerro Largo.

José Imaz, of the Coalition for Democratic Communication and a member of the La Cotorra FM radio station in the Cerro neighbourhood of Montevideo, told IPS that “the law has set some very important precedents in terms of the democratisation of speech, which have been taken up in various decrees.”

But implementation of the application procedure “is excessively slow, and a major hurdle for future calls.”

Prats acknowledged there were administrative difficulties. “CHARC is an honorary body,” and therefore suffers from a “lack of resources,” he said.

Mega FM, a radio station in Vergara, a town of 4,000 people in the province of Treinta y Tres, had been broadcasting since 2008, one of the station’s members, Cristián Rodríguez, told IPS.

Two other community radio stations were also operating in Vergara. They all applied for frequency assignment and are awaiting a public hearing in March. “All three stations have shut down, they are all off the air,” Rodríguez said.

But “local people miss them, because Vergara is a small town and is accustomed to relying on the community radio stations,” he complained.

While it is unable to broadcast, Mega FM is posting on its web site videos of music concerts, sports events and other local activities on YouTube.

It is noteworthy that the Uruguayan law does not stipulate power limits for the frequencies, Kaplún said. “The limits will be set according to need and advisability.”

However, putting this guideline into practice raises difficulties. “The frequencies assigned in the first round are short range. Use of a 30-metre antenna and a power of 30 watts were established as general principles.”

In rural areas, where more wave bands are available and higher power is needed, “this general rule for frequency concession does not seem reasonable,” Kaplún said.

In contrast, in the capital city it is not easy to assign new frequencies on a spectrum that is overcrowded with private and public radio stations. “The spectrum should be redistributed, but this option was not chosen; instead, gaps in the spectrum are being used so as not to displace commercial and public broadcasters. This is untenable,” said Kaplún.

In Imaz’s view, the state should promote community radio stations and provide “economic aid for their installation, as well as distributing official advertising more widely to include community stations as well as commercial broadcasters.”

Prats said that in order to achieve “better implementation of the law, more economic and administrative resources should be allocated to CHARC.”

In future, he said, community radio stations “face a challenge: to be committed to playing a role in and for the community, without broadcasting political or religious propaganda.”

* This article was produced with the support of UNESCO. (END)

The leaders of South America’s Mercosur trade bloc decided to set up a committee to facilitate the incorporation of new members, adopt a mechanism to defend democracy in case of a coup, and ban vessels from the Malvinas/Falkland Islands from docking in member countries’ ports.

Mercosur leaders express solidarity with Argentina's historic claim to the Malvinas/Falkland Islands. Credit: Office of the Uruguayan president

At Tuesday’s summit, the presidents of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay also signed a free trade agreement with Palestine, seen as mainly symbolic, and expanded the list of products from outside the bloc that will pay import tariffs.

In their speeches, the Mercosur (Southern Common Market) leaders acknowledged the contradictions and hurdles faced by the region’s largest trade bloc, while stressing the need to continue to forge ahead with the process of integration.

At the bloc’s headquarters in Montevideo, host President José Mujica met Cristina Fernández of Argentina, Dilma Rousseff of Brazil and Fernando Lugo of Paraguay, as well as Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and Rafael Correa of Ecuador, whose countries are in the process of joining as full members.

“Our path is full of contradictions and difficulties,” Mujica said. “Woe to us if the contradictions disillusion us and we abandon this project. We would soon become a leaf in the wind, in this world of colossal forces.”

The Uruguayan president emphasised that the bloc represents not only economic, but political, integration. “Without politics, there will be no Mercosur in the long run, and there will be no convergence, because this is not only an economic equation.

“Alas for us if we fail to understand that the underlying issue is a question of power, and that this question makes it necessary to move towards convergence,” he said.

Mujica also confirmed the creation of a high-level committee to analyse the admission of Venezuela and Ecuador as full members.

Venezuela, whose admission process began in 2006, is only awaiting approval by the Paraguayan Congress, where legislators opposed to the left-leaning Lugo hold a majority. For its part, Ecuador formally requested full membership on Tuesday.

Chávez said the incorporation of his country as a fifth full member has been blocked “by just five lawmakers” in Paraguay.

“These people who have been opposing (Venezuela’s admission) for five years, I don’t know if they are aware of the harm they are causing, not to Venezuela, but to everyone, to the Paraguayan people themselves,” he said. “There are only five people who don’t want it. I think that behind them there must be a very powerful hand, moving who knows what mechanisms of pressure,” he maintained.

Chávez underlined that Venezuela’s incorporation would mean “opening Mercosur to the Pacific.

“We are members of OPEC (Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Companies), we have gas and energy reserves, we have things to contribute,” he added. “We have to expedite this, spurred on by the global crisis that is threatening us.”

Lugo also referred to the case of Venezuela and the resistance put up by a handful of legislators in his country.

“This government of Paraguay is respectful of its institutions, but it is making an effort to strengthen integration. The incorporation of Ecuador and Venezuela would work in favour of our bloc,” he said.

Rousseff, meanwhile, highlighted the agreement reached at the summit “to expand the list of products included in the common foreign tariff” applied to imports from outside Mercosur, and to adopt various mechanisms to foment intra-bloc trade.

Correa, for his part, stressed the signing of the “Montevideo Protocol”, a mechanism providing for a mutual response in defence of democratic institutions in case of a coup d’etat in any of the member countries.

The summit agenda, which was to include public ceremonies, such as the signing of the agreement with Palestine – signed in private in the end – was interrupted by the tragic news of the death of Argentina’s deputy trade secretary, 33-year-old Iván Heyn. The newly appointed official was found hanged in his room in the Montevideo hotel where most of the Argentine delegation was staying. The police said his death appeared to be a suicide, but that the investigation continued.

When Fernández was notified, she was so upset that her private doctor was called to attend to her.

Malvinas/Falklands

The summit also approved a resolution to close the bloc’s ports to vessels flying the Falkland Islands flag. The islands, known as the Malvinas in Argentina, have been held by Britain since the 1830s, and were the subject of a brief war between the two countries in 1982, when Argentina sought to assert its sovereignty over them.

In a column posted on the Uruguayan president’s web site Tuesday, Mujica explained his decision to ban the boats from docking in Uruguay, arguing that his country’s foreign policy has always been based on national interests, but also on the principle of solidarity with the region.

Mujica said solidarity with Buenos Aires also benefited Montevideo. “Uruguay’s political history shows that every time relations with Argentina have soured, the economy and labour have been enormously impaired,” he wrote.

Fernández expressed her appreciation for the member countries’ decision to block boats from the Malvinas.

The Malvinas “are not just an Argentine cause, but a global cause, because (the British) are taking oil and fishing resources, and when they need more resources, whoever is the strongest will go to find them whenever and however,” she said, as Rousseff nodded.

“When they sign something involving the Malvinas, they are doing so as if the Malvinas belonged to them. There are many countries here with great natural wealth, and this wealth must be defended. Let’s be smart enough to understand that, by taking care of each other, we are taking care of ourselves,” she added.

At the end of the summit, Mujica handed over the rotating six-month presidency of the bloc to Fernández.