No Third Term for Uribe

Reports are coming out that the Colombian courts will not allow a referendum for Alvaro Uribe to run for a third term, effectively destroying his hopes for a re-re-election, and opening the way for Juan Manuel Santos to run for election. This is a major victory for the democratic process in Colombia. More analysis once more details emerge.

....and to add to the bad news for Uribe, one of his top political allies has been arrested for colluding with paramilitary groups. The fact that more than a few of Uribe's political allies and aides have been connected to paramilitary groups leaves the stench of illegality all over Uribe, and just throws into relief how good it is that he cannot run for a third term.

An Interesting and Troubling Apology from Former Tupamaro (and Uruguayan Presidential Candidate) Jose Mujica

Uruguay is gearing up for a presidential election here, and on the eve of elections, the leading candidate, Jose Mujica, had some interesting comments to make on his view of economic policies, the role of the government, and his role in the guerrilla/political Tupamaro movement in the 1970s.

For those on the right in the U.S. who get worked up into a Cold-War-level froth over the fact that Latin America is electing leaders from the left, Jose Mujica offers just one more example of how stupid that froth is. Mujica, a 74-year-old senator and the leading candidate for president heading into Uruguay's elections in October (where a run-off is likely), offered some comments that raised eyebrows this week, including his insistence that

“If belonging to the left means defending a strong government intervention in the economy and a strong state tendency in economic affairs, that’s not for me [...] I’m more a libertarian than a man who thinks the state is the solution. My Socialist ideas support self-management and I don’t mix it with the power of the state. The job of government is to help with social distribution, to avoid the accumulation of social rust-belts which the market can’t address, and they finish being extremely dear for the rest of the community.”

This is not surprising, as the U.S. press in general has shown a remarkable ability to totally misinterpret the political spectrum in Latin America and to paint broad homogeneous strokes over what is a very heterogeneous group of leaders and political parties. This misunderstanding not just of the Latin American left, but of Latin American politics in general, is easily understood - one simply have to know that Brazil's center-right former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso and his party, the PSDB, are often described as "center-left" by otherwise-respectable news sources in the U.S.

What's (perhaps) more interesting is Mujica's admissions about the Uruguayan dictatorship this week. In addition to being a senator and presidential candidate, Mujica was a leader in the Tupamaros, the urban political/guerrilla group of the 1960s and 1970s. Although the Tupamaros did participate in kidnappings and interrogations (always without the use of torture), and killed some (including an FBI agent who was involved in training the Uruguayan military how to torture), they were effectively weakened beyond any real threat by 1972 due to increasing repression. Although virtually finished as a guerrilla group by 1973, the Uruguayan military nonetheless used the Tupamaros as its raison d'etre for establishing its own military dictatorship in 1973. Once in power, the military began repressing all social sectors and political parties, using the Tupamaros as window-dressing for its broader authoritarian goals.

However, his role in the Tupamaro political/guerrilla group has not been a major concern, and this week, he made a fascinating admission. When asked what his greatest "repentance" is, Mujica responded, "That because of the armed struggle the (Uruguayan) people were condemned to 16 years of dictatorship and we couldn’t kick them out. I failed as a militant. Besides we learnt that when you try building a society without social classes, the bureaucracy monsters appears and gobbles all ideals, and you enter a world of disillusion."

What's interesting here is the notion that the Tupamaros are somehow the ones who are to blame for the (bloodless) military coup in Uruguay. Again, by 1972, the Tupamaros' "guerrilla" activities had effectively been halted as the military had begun cracking down under a democratically-elected president who was increasingly ineffective and a puppet to the military. Only in 1973, a year after the effective end of the previous phase of Tupamaro methods, did the military come to power. I don't know the full scholarship on what caused the Uruguayan military to take control, but from what I've read, the military only used the Tupamaros as a pretext for its own designs on power, something that I think the timeline supports. I don't know if this is an ego-trip on Mujica's part, or if it's genuine sincerity (it seems like the latter, though those two items aren't mutually exclusive, either), but I find it fascinating and mildly disturbing that a participant in the leftist movements of the 1970s is apologizing for the military's actions, actions over which he didn't really have control. Did the Tupamaro movement heighten the tension in Uruguay? Sure. But asking them to apologize for their "causing" the dictatorship is like asking Chile's Unidad Popular to apologize for causing Pinochet's dictatorship, or for the workers and students and Joao Goulart to apologize for Brazil's dictatorship. It's not just that it makes no sense; it's not even that it therefore asks participants in those movements in the past to have been able to predict the future in 1963 or 1973 or 1971. It's that it in some way puts the responsibility for the thousands of murders, tortures, and disappearances at the doorstep of groups that, at the time, felt they were doing what they had to do to fight for social and economic justice. Regardless of whether or not you agree with the actual policies and methods of the left in Latin America in the 1960s, 1970s, or even today, to lay the responsibility of those tortures and murders at their feet strikes me as not only offensive, but absurd.

Of course, this isn't what is raising eyebrows in Uruguay (it's his comments on Argentina's Kirchners, about whom he has little nice to say). And to be clear, I don't think that anybody else from the Latin American left in the 1960s and 1970s is going to be offering this kind of "apology." Still, I find it interesting and unique, and more than a little offensive to those whose actions were certainly part of broader processes that led to repressive, authoritarian regimes, but who were in no way singly "responsible" for those regimes or their subsequent actions.

Is the PT Looking towards Obama's Model of Campaigning?

If the Brazilian presidential elections were held today, Serra of the right-center PSDB (Partido Social Democratico Brasileiro) would win, as he is well in front of runner-up Dilma Rousseff, of the PT, and in a run-off, would decimate her if the elections were held today.

However, the elections aren't held today, and, unlike in the U.S., the campaign won't really get going until 2010 begins. (I know, I know - campaigning only in the year of the election seems novel and strange in the United States, but there you have it), and a lot of factors could enter into the equation. Rousseff hasn't really geared up in campaigning yet, and Serra's numbers are in large part because he's a known name who's generally respected (he lost to Lula in 2002, before the PSDB swung even further right in the 2006 elections and being severely repudiated for that swing). Plus, there are always dark horse candidates, specifically former Minister for the Environment Marina Silva, who left her post last year. She is running next year for Brazil's Green Party (Partido Verde), and who is already causing a bit of a buzz with the possibility of being Brazil's first black president and woman president, which, in the wake of the wonder and marvel in Brazil at the U.S.'s election of Obama, may make voters a bit more emotional and wistful for their own "change they can believe in."

While Obama could hover over the elections vaguely as issues of politics, rhetoric, and racial identities play out in next year's elections, it turns out he's already having a more immediate impact on Brazil's 2010 elections. It seems the PT has contacted the firm responsible for Obama's internet campaign in a hopes of having them help the PT in getting the word out on the PT and on Dilma.

Leaders from the Workers Party met with Ben Self from the Blue State Digital agency, the brains and architect behind the successful digital publicity strategy displayed by president Obama during his 2008 campaign.

According to O’ Estado de Sao Paulo, Lula da Silva’s party is intent in mounting a propaganda strategy through Internet to promote the most certain presidential postulation of Dilma Rousseff, currently cabinet chief, and who Lula da Silva has virtually hand picked as his successor. [...]

Obama’s “on line” strategy has been closely followed by Lula da Silva and his advisors who last week inaugurated the president’s own blog with incredible success.

This is really interesting, and only in part because the PT is looking to Obama and the U.S. for lessons on how to employ newer technologies in elections. From a Brazilianist's standpoint, it's an interesting answer to the question that has dominated the PT since the 1980s, and especially since 2002: what will a post-Lula presidency PT look like? One of the biggest challenges facing the PT has been that Lula has been its leader since it was formed out of the metal-workers' movement against the dictatorship in Brazil in the late-1970s. Lula has been the PT's face, its leader, its ideologue, and its communicator; at the same time, he has made clear that he would be finished with politics after his presidency, and there has been real concern within the party and among its supporters about what would happen to it - could it survive without Lula at the helm?

This effort to use the internet as a means of promoting not just its candidate, but its platforms and its ideas, seems to me to be a serious attempt to ground the PT as a party unto itself, rather than as "Lula's party." Who knows how this will play out - like the presidential elections of 2010, there's just too much time still to come and too many unknown factors to make any concrete guesses. Still, it's a fascinating move on the part of the PT, both for what it could mean for next year's election, and for what it could mean for Brazilian politics more generally.

Rigoberta Menchú and the Guatemalan Presidential Elections

This article on why Mayan, indigenous human rights activist, Nobel Peace Prize and presidential candidate Rigoberta Menchú finished 6th out of 12 in the Guatemalan election (garnering 3% of the total vote) is fascinating. It gets into traditional political reasons why she fared relatively poorly (it was her first time running, she’s never been a candidate for anything before, etc). However, what’s of real worth in the article are the reasons for her low performance based on politics of identity, gender, and race.

Many people tend to assume that “Mayans” are one culture, one people, one language, unified in the way that the Incas or the Nahua (of which the Aztecs were but a part) were. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although Spaniards who tried to enter the Yucatan and Central America in the 16th and 17th centuries often described the Mayan “empire” (based, in part, on the massive constructions at places like Chichen Itza and Copan), they Mayans were never unified. They have remained, through the centuries, very loosely bound linguistically, and there hasn’t been the level of political unity and organization that could constitute an “empire”. This isn’t to say the Mayans have ever lacked political organizational skills – they simply weren’t a broad, unified group that covered lots of territory in a single ruling entity. This is pretty common knowledge to those who study Latin America, yet the broader misperception persists, despite the Mayans in Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador having very different dialects and even languages, cultural practices, and political organzation and beliefs.

The article does a great job in making clear the diversity within the ethnically Mayan groups, whether it’s distinguishing the linguistic variations from one tribe to another; bringing up how gender norms and the patriarchal system in many Mayan communities, particularly among the elderly, may have worked against her; or discussing how Menchú is seen as an outsider despite being Mayan, simply because she has tended to be more involved in the international human rights movement, travelling often, than staying in Guatemala in her community.

I agree with the article’s assessment that, should she choose to run in 2011, she may have a better chance, simply because she’ll have more experience and knows better what she needs to do (though I find the article’s mentioning of the Mayan Calendar’s prediction for something amazing in 2012 to be a little….colonialist – in the sense of “ah, those indigenous traditions” – it’s not intentional perhaps, but if you’re going to mention some central aspect of their cultural beliefs, why include that one?). Still, it’s a good article that does a fine job dissecting why she may have only gotten 3% in a country that’s officially 40% indigenous.

Political Violence in Guatemala

Despite the Guatemalan civil war (which resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead indigenous peoples in a state-led campaign of genocide, among other things) having ended more than 10 years ago, there are signs that things may actually be getting worse in many ways. While the murder campaigns against indigenous peoples have subsided (though the poverty and racism has not), political violence is at an all-time high since 1996. Clara Luz López, a candidate for city council in Casillas, was shot and killed on her way home, bringing the total of political deaths to 40 up to now, with another 11 days before the election (September 9). Things are so bad that Álvaro Colom, one of the top presidential candidates, has a doctor who specializes in bullet wounds with him at all times, and travels only by helicopter.

Much of the violence comes from the rising involvement of drug lords in politics. Eager to see their influence spread to the political realm, many involved in the higher levels of the drug trade have resorted to violence to intimidate or remove opposition. The fact that the drug lords have managed to gain so much power in the post-civil war period is just one more way in which the U.S. drug policies have failed. Drug producers and transporters have continued to remain steps ahead of the law, and combatting the production instead of the consumption has neither slowed down consumption nor production, instead creating even greater violence in Latin America and elsewhere, including Afghanistan, where heroin production is growing astronomically again. Yet we continue to ignore the problem, while Guatemala once again is descending into a climate of terror and fear. There's no telling how the election will go, or if this violence will abate, but things are definitely bad in Guatemala, and there's no proof they are going to get better anytime soon.