Around Latin America

-One of the top officials of the Stroessner regime has died, and with him, hopes at getting answers for some victims' families have died as well. Alberto Cantero, who spent 10 years in prison for his role in "disappearances," passed away at the age of 75 this week, taking with him to the grave secrets of how victims of the 35-year-dictatorship were tortured and killed and where they are buried.

-In Argentina, former detention centers are facing disrepair as the Buenos Aires government has not paid for their upkeep. These centers, while no longer in use, still serve as powerful sites in retaining the memory of the horrors of the 7-year dictatorship that left upwards of 30,000 Argentines dead.

-The trial of former Costa Rican president Miguel Angel Rodriguez has begun in Costa Rica. Rodriguez is charged with corruption after he allegedly accepted bribes from a French telecommunications company while in office.

-PBS aired "Worse than War" tonight. In it, Daniel Goldhagen confronted former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt, who led the government during some of the most brutal massacres of Guatemala's decades-long civil war. You can see the Rios Montt footage from the documentary here.

-In Brazil, the poor continue to be disproportionately affected by last week's floods and landslides. The Rio state government has begun destroying favelas on lands deemed unsafe, dislocating hundreds of poor cariocas. The flood has also indefinitely shut down trips to the Christ Redeemer statue, as workers try to dig the railway and roads to Brazil's iconic statue out from all of the mud.

-Speaking of the favelas, I highly recommend this article, which details the relations between favela residents and the police who often occupy the favelas for long periods of time in the "war on drugs."

-In more bad news out of Brazil, the country is in shock after a 40-year-old worker confessed to the rape-murder of six teenage boys near Brasilia. The story comes in the wake of scandal within the Church after a Catholic priest was videotaped having sex with a 19-year-old former altar boy while others alleged they had also been abused by the priest.

-Finally, on a more lighthearted note, this is absolutely a battle I can support 100%:

The growing presence of alien spirits in the Brazilian caipirinha has led enthusiasts to attempt to "rescue" their national drink. The Save the Caipirinha campaign was launched last month with an online petition that has attracted 10,000 signatures from cachaca fans, chefs, and celebrities.

"We formally declare that we no longer wish to see our caipirinha being made with vodka or sake instead of cachaca," reads the campaign manifesto, the brainchild of the Cachaca Leblon brand. "We do not accept that this drink, which is famous and respected around the world, be disrespected in Brazil."

I couldn't agree more. When I first arrived in Brazil, "caipivodkas" were huge among young drinkers, and I was horrified. It wasn't just that it was flavorless alcohol with fruit in it; cachaca is so good as it is in Brazil that substituting it with vodka made about as much sense to me as substituting Brazilian beef with a hot pocket. I none-too-politely pointed out that I failed to understand why on earth I would consume a flavorless drink, much less one I could make in the United States, when they had such amazing cachacas that were unavailable to me in the United States. I'm glad to see the battle against caipivodkas (and caipi-sakis) gaining traction in Brazil, and will make it a point to consume many caipirinhas as a political statement next time I'm there.

I Need an LCD for My Drink

This is very likely the dumbest thing I've seen in months. For a mere forty clams, you can get some crappy vodka that has a goddamn screen on it. You can program it to say whatever you want. Amuse your friends! Ask your sweetheart to marry you with the gift of booze. I might get a bottle and never touch it (swear), but program it to read when it is picked up, "This was a test. Your intention to drink from this bottle proves you're an asshole. Get out of my house."

This probably isn't the dumbest gimmick given to a vodka bottle, but it still nears the level of dumb that I call the "Steve Miller's Lyrics Level."

I Wish I Lived in 1880!!!!

Eric at Edge of the West points us to this piece of primordial idiocy. James Hornberger argues that America's golden year was 1880 (!)

I don’t think so. I believe that it is impossible to overstate the significance of what our American ancestors accomplished in terms of a free society.


Let’s consider, say, the year 1880. Here was a society in which people were free to keep everything they earned, because there was no income tax. They were also free to decide what to do with their own money—spend it, save it, invest it, donate it, or whatever. People were generally free to engage in occupations and professions without a license or permit. There were few federal economic regulations and regulatory agencies. No Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, bailouts, or so-called stimulus plans. No IRS. No Departments of Education, Energy, Agriculture, Commerce, and Labor. No EPA and OSHA. No Federal Reserve. No drug laws. Few systems of public schooling. No immigration controls. No federal minimum-wage laws or price controls. A monetary system based on gold and silver coins rather than paper money. No slavery. No CIA. No FBI. No torture or cruel or unusual punishments. No renditions. No overseas military empire. No military-industrial complex.

As a libertarian, as far as I’m concerned, that’s a society that is pretty darned golden.

Fantastic. I mean, when I think of 1880, I'm thinking of things like children dying from malnutrition, anti-Chinese riots, the rise of Jim Crow and the violent suppression of black rights, widespread anti-Semitism, a suffrage restricted (by law or by custom) to white males, the inability of women to own their own property, .....

Oh hell, why bother. And what do I know? I'm only a late 19th century U.S. historian after all.

I always tell my students that anyone who thinks the past was better than the present has no idea what they are talking about. 1880 was a terrible place.  You know what the best and most accurate representation of this period we have in American popular culture--Deadwood. The TV show. It's not drop dead accurate and certainly the language was different. But the filth, the violence, the drug use, the callous disregard for human life, the treatment of Native Americans, African-Americans, the Chinese, and other ethnic groups, rampant prostitution, etc.

1880 as a paradise. The closest we can get to that now is Somalia. And I wish Hornberger would move there.

Andy Stern's Resignation

SEIU President Andy Stern is evidently resigning from his post.

This is big news in the labor world. Much to my surprise, a fair number of progressive writers are covering the issue.

Stern has been the most public and vocal labor leader over the past decade. He helped make SEIU the nation's largest union through his intensive organizing efforts. He took SEIU out of the AFL-CIO when frustrated by the lack of organizing focus by the mainline union. I don't necessarily agree that creating Change to Win was a very useful idea, but I respect the ideas behind it. Moreover, he led a massive union effort to get health care reform passed.

I am curious as to what this means for labor. Can Change to Win survive without Stern? I assume the next SEIU president will continue Stern's organizing emphasis. But will that president have the same leadership role within the labor movement. Tim Fernholz suggests that Anna Burger will take over and that Stern's stepping aside might be a good thing. Stern created a lot of animosity between  himself and other labor leaders, which helped lead to Change to Win in the first place. If Burger takes SEIU back into the AFL-CIO, one has to ask what the point of Change to Win was to begin with. I would have to see this as a black mark on Stern's legacy. Nonetheless, no one can question his leadership, both within the union movement and within American politics, his commitment to rejuvenating the American labor movement and his passion for helping working-class people live better and healthier lives.

Cornyn Brings The Stupid

John Cornyn, when asked if he would vote for a gay nominee to the Supreme Court, answered, “I’d have to think about that,” he said. “As long as it doesn’t interfere with their job, it’s not a particular issue.”

I'm just wondering how being gay would interfere with the job of the judge.

Of course, given that Cornyn's opinion that a Supreme Court judge should agree with all of his own policy agenda, clearly being gay would get in the way for such a judge. Since Cornyn wants a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, I guess it would be OK for a judge to be gay if the judge was both in the closet and self-hating. Just the kind of gay person John Cornyn likes.

 

Historical Image of the Day

"Fort Pierre and the Adjacent Prairie," Karl Bodmer, 1832-34

Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura Convicted (Again) in Dorothy Stang's Murder

Excellent news:

A jury in the Brazilian city of Belém has sentenced a rancher to 30 years in prison for the murder of an American-born nun, news agencies reported.

The rancher, Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura, was convicted of ordering the murder in 2005 of Sister Dorothy Stang, from Dayton, Ohio, a longtime organizer of rural settlers and the poor in their efforts to protect their land from seizures by cattle ranchers and timber merchants.

Globo News, in Sao Paulo, reported Tuesday that the jury reached its verdict late Monday night after 15 hours of deliberations. The trial was the second appeal in the case, and the decision on Monday upheld the original conviction from 2007.

After being found guilty in 2007, Bastos de Moura, or "Bita," was acquitted in a second trial in 2008 (and for those wondering about double jeopardy, in Brazil, first-time convicts sentenced to more than 20 years are automatically given a re-trial). The third Trial took place after the state of Para's top court ruled that video evidence that Bita's defense used in the second trial was inadmissable, effectively rendering this third trial his "second" after Brazil's Supreme Court upheld the Para court's ruling. Now, it appears that Moura will actually serve time for contracting the murder of Dorothy Stang.

The conviction itself is huge, as it is one of the first times that a powerful rancher has been found guilty for his role in the murder of a land rights activist. Of course, Para sees many such murders, including just last week, and it is often commonly accepted that the wealthy landowners are often behind those murders but never see trial due to their power in the region. Certainly, Stang's case is particularly high-profile, but it is still extremely encouraging to see at least one landowner has been punished for his deeds, offering tentative hope that perhaps ranchers involved in future contracted murders will also be punished within the Brazilian courts (or at least deterred from hiring killers in the wake of Bita's sentencing). As Rebecca Spires put it, the only real chance at ending the murders in the Amazon is to go after the contractors; otherwise, the killings will most likely never cease. This is a good step in that direction, and if nothing else, Stang's case alone is an encouraging case of elites in Para not being protected by their money or status.

Roger Ebert Puts Nicholas Sparks in His Place

Nicholas Sparks is lining himself up as the frontrunner in the "arrogant bastard of the year" award, after comparing himself "to Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Jane Austin, and Ernest Hemingway in one breath." That's just all kinds of stupid - it's like Justin Bieber comparing himself to Hildegard of Bingen, Beethoven, Schoenberg, Chuck Berry, and Run-DMC in one sentence.

Fortunately, as Videogum points out, Roger Ebert put Sparks in his place:

I resent the sacrilege Nicholas Sparks commits by even mentioning himself in the same sentence as Cormac McCarthy. I would not even allow him to say "Hello, bookstore? This is Nicholas Sparks. Could you send over the new Cormac McCarthy novel?" He should show respect by ordering anonymously.

Roger Ebert - as good as Nicholas Sparks is terrible.

The Los Angeles Godzilla of Anaheim

Rob Neyer is correct--Torii Hunter giving Hideki Matsui the nickname "The Los Angeles Godzilla of Anaheim" is the best nickname ever.

David Brooks, Duke, and the Rich

A lot of people have linked to David Brooks' prime piece of wankery, talking about how he rooted for Duke in last week's NCAA Championship game because as rich people, they deserve to win.

Unlike 90 percent of America, I was rooting for Duke last night. This was widely cast as a class conflict — the upper crust Dukies against the humble Midwestern farm boys. If this had been a movie, Butler’s last second heave would have gone in instead of clanging off the rim, and the country would still be weeping with joy.

But this is why life is not a movie. The rich are not always spoiled. Their success does not always derive from privilege. The Duke players — to the extent that they are paragons of privilege, which I dispute — won through hard work on defense.

Yes. I was going to say that for the first time in human history, rich people work longer hours than middle class or poor people. How do you construct a rich versus poor narrative when the rich are more industrious? 

Oh, where to start...

It's hardly surprising that Brooks is a Duke fan and alum (though he seems to have only taught there). Every thing about the man screams Dukie--wealthy, white, privileged, self-centered, condescending to the rest of the world, elitist, etc.

Only a man like this could claim and in fact believe that the rich work harder than the poor. Brooks might as well be working for the New York Times in 1890 rather than 1910 with his gospel of wealth mentality.

Only a man who has never worked in a sewer, as a logger, as a vegetable picker, as a janitor, or as a maid could claim that the rich work harder. Yes, some rich people put in long hours at the office. But that's irrelevant for making a claim over whether the rich or poor work harder--they do so because they want to and because they can. Meanwhile, the poor, who work very hard when they can find a job, work long hours because they have to feed their families and because they will be fired if they don't. And unlike David Brooks, who if he did so little work for the Times that they would fire him, they can't go get another job teaching at Duke University.

Must Read of the Day--Ebert on Malcolm McLaren, The Sex Pistols, Russ Meyer, and Himself

Dude's lived a fascinating life.

Historical Image of the Day

Key West, Florida, 1856

Rush Enters American Political Discourse (And I'm Not Talking About Limbaugh)

Senate candidate and Tea Party wingnut Rand Paul of Kentucky has taken to quoting the band Rush in his campaign speeches:

He quotes Thomas Paine as well as the rock band Rush: “Glittering prizes and endless compromises shatter the illusion of integrity.” 

Does he also use tree metaphors? 

Really, I'm kind of rooting for Paul to win the Republican primary because a) Trey Grayson could be scary on a national stage and b) the Democrats would have a good chance to take the seat against Paul. But this is making me rethink my wishes.

Confederate Soldiers as Terrorists

When I go to the CNN homepage and I see plastered on the front page a picture of Confederate soldiers with a headline reading, "Were Confederate Soldiers Terrorists?", I am a happy man. Not only is Roland Martin launching a crusade against romanticizing the Confederacy, CNN is giving him prime space to do so. The overwhelming response against Bob McDonnell's trivializing of slavery has put neo-Confederates on the defensive. The old romantic view of the Confederacy is increasingly being pushed to the edges of acceptable discourse. Not only that, but the last week has arguably seen the most serious discussion of the Civil War's impact since the Civil Rights Movement.

While directly defending the Confederacy has become harder in the past few decades, low-level Confederate romanticization has exploded. We can particularly see this with the rise of Civil War reenactors. As Tony Horwitz points out in his excellent book, Confederates in the Attic, most of these reenactors want to "fight" for the Confederates. Many of those men directly connect the Confederacy with the anti-government and veiled racist rhetoric of the conservative movement and the present-day Republican Party. Bob McDonnell responded to that with his pro-Confederate declaration. But a lot of Americans will no longer put up with these ideas as part of respectable political discourse, including Roland Martin and myself.

Martin refers to Confederate soldiers as terrorists. He particularly attacks those who responded negatively to an earlier article attacking McDonnell, comparing their rhetoric to apologists for Islamic terrorism:

If you take all of these comments, don't they sound eerily similar to what we hear today from Muslim extremists who have pledged their lives to defend the honor of Allah and to defeat the infidels in the West?

When you make the argument that the South was angry with the North for "invading" its "homeland," Osama bin Laden has said the same about U.S. soldiers being on Arab soil. He has objected to our bases in Saudi Arabia, and that's one of the reasons he has launched his jihad against us. Is there really that much of a difference between him and the Confederates? Same language; same cause; same effect.

If a Confederate soldier was merely doing his job in defending his homeland, honor and heritage, what are we to say about young Muslim radicals who say the exact same thing as their rationale for strapping bombs on their bodies and blowing up cafes and buildings?

If the Sons of Confederate Veterans use as a talking point the vicious manner in which people in the South were treated by the North, doesn't that sound exactly like the Taliban saying they want to kill Americans for the slaughter of innocent people in Afghanistan?

Defenders of the Confederacy say that innocent people were killed in the Civil War; hasn't the same argument been presented by Muslim radicals in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places where the U.S. has tangled with terrorists?

Well, maybe. I actually don't overly care for this line of argument. Were Confederate soldiers terrorists?  Not really. There were terrorist raids and such, but in general, I don't think Confederates qualify under a realistic definition of terrorism. That's hardly placing me on the side of those committed treason to defend slavery. But I like careful definition of words--and Martin is using terrorism very loosely.

Now, did slaveholders commit terrorism against their slaves? Absolutely. And did they continue these actions for a century after the war ended?  Yes indeed. I'd just prefer Martin make this distinction.

More Terrible Travel Writing: Costa Rica

Our love of travel writing here is well known. It's really not hard to find the whole format generally offensive when the New York Times (again) runs stories like this one on Costa Rica's Caribbean coast. In a narrative that is all too common in travel writing, Gisela Williams extols the virtues of the Caribbean for serving as an "untamed" playground for (white) foreigners, where the nature and beauty are there only for tourists, and the citizens virtually disappear.

Williams is right about the beauty of the coast. I spent several months in Costa Rica and traveled throughout the country, and when others tell me they're going, I most strongly recommend seeing the Caribbean Coast. It has amazing beaches (including black-sand), there are reefs where you can snorkel, the forest is beautiful, and the food (more Caribbean than Spanish) is amazing - indeed, it was the best food I ate in Costa Rica. Williams talks about this beauty, but to her, it's not something that the locals have done a great job in protecting and keeping alive; it's a static environment "For soul-searching world travelers...to plant roots and stay," and an extremely expensive one at that. One of the hotels she mentions has rates that "start at $200 a night, and includes breakfast." Wow - breakfast included? For only $200? I'm sorry - if you're spending that much money on hotel anywhere in Costa Rica, you are either A) out of your fucking mind, or B) so racist and frightened of locals anywhere that you're willing to shell out that much money by jerks who know they can prey on your xenophobic fear by offering you "security" and "luxury." Williams also talks to some of the people who own these hotels, quoting: a French ex-pat and luxury hotel owner; two American ex-pats who own a fancy restaurant; two more American ex-pats from Minnesota; and one local who was a tour guide.

What - couldn't interview more of the locals? I'd say that's to be expected of American travel writers writing about most countries, but there is no excuse on the Costa Rican Caribbean - nearly everybody speaks Spanish and English. I traveled there when I lived in Costa Rica; you can't avoid English if you try. Indeed, Afro-Caribbeans and race in Costa Rica are inextricably linked; the coast is (not coincidentally) the poorest part of the country. I'd frequently talk to Ticos in San Jose who simultaneously insisted that there was no racism in Costa Rica, and then would talk horribly about the "Caribbean coast" and how "caribenos" (i.e., black people) were causing all of the problems in the rest of the country. And in the time I spent there (I stayed in Cahuita, just north of Cahuita national park; Williams stayed in the more-expensive and "touristy" Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, south of the park), I only saw locals, and had some great conversations with them about the area, reggae, the food, just anything and everything. And I realize that that may sound patronizing on my part (trust that it may have been naive, but was not patronizing), but these conversations were almost always accidental, and begun by locals who were pleased to see a new face in the village; in short, they were more than willing to share their knowledge, culture, stories, and opinions - suffice to say, their take on racism in Costa Rica was much different from those in the valley who denied there was racism in Costa Rica. And you didn't even have to work too hard to learn these things. Indeed, it was those kinds of encounters that made my time in Cahuita one of the best times I had in Costa Rica.

And yet, Williams decides not to include any of the locals (to whom she could have easily spoken, as the language barrier would be nearly non-existent) or mention anybody other than the man whose profession revolves around entertaining gringos like her. Even she's aware of this. It would be one (still typically offensive) thing if Williams hadn't encountered this, but she herself comments on the number of "English-speaking Afro-Caribbeans" living there. She's knows they're around; she just isn't interested in including their views, opinions, and voices in her narrative of the Caribbean coast in Costa Rica, which is pretty absurd when you stop and realize that the majority of the Caribbean coast's residents are Afro-Caribbean. There was absolutely no excuse for the writer to not talk to/cite some of the actual locals, rather than French and American ex-pats. But this is travel writing at its finest - places are only exciting for their "exotic" qualities, and the locals are just another part of the scenery, without their own voices, providing services just for tourists.

Historical Image of the Day

"Park Street, Boston," Karl Zerbe, 1942

Kissinger Linked to Assassinations

Remind me why Henry Kissinger is respected today?

As secretary of state, Henry Kissinger canceled a U.S. warning against carrying out international political assassinations that was to have gone to Chile and two neighboring nations just days before a former ambassador was killed by Chilean agents on Washington's Embassy Row in 1976, a newly released State Department cable shows.

Whether Kissinger played a role in blocking the delivery of the warning against assassination to the governments of Chile, Argentina and Uruguay has long been a topic of controversy.
Discovered in recent weeks by the National Security Archive, a non-profit research organization, the Sept. 16, 1976 cable is among tens of thousands of declassified State Department documents recently made available to the public.

'You can instruct'' the U.S. ambassadors ''to take no further action'' on the subject of Operation Condor, said the Sept. 20 cable by Harry Shlaudeman, assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs, to Shlaudeman's deputy.

The next day, on Sept. 21, 1976, agents of Chilean Gen. Augusto Pinochet planted a car bomb and exploded it on a Washington, D.C., street, killing both former Ambassador Orlando Letelier, and an American colleague, Ronni Karpen Moffitt. Letelier was one of the most outspoken critics of the Pinochet government.

It is nice having hard evidence implicating Kissinger. It'd be nicer if he stood trial for the murders and died behind bars.

Historical Image of the Day

Ticker tape parade, Broadway, New York City, 1928

University of Wisconsin Dumps Nike

It's been a long time since we've heard about the anti-sweatshop movement. Student groups of the late 90s were all over labor conditions. Sadly, most student-activists today don't think too much about working-class issues. Their commitment to the environment should be lauded, but they don't seem to have much consciousness about the people making the products they buy. Another way of putting this is that I like having organic peanut butter in the school cafeteria too, but it doesn't mean much if the people on the peanut farms live in shacks.

However, there are exceptions. I was surprised to read today that the University of Wisconsin has terminated its contract with Nike because Honduran factories that make Nike shoes refuse to pay workers severance pay after the factories closed. That's a real victory that will cost Nike millions.

Of course, Wisconsin now has to find a shoe company with better factories. I'm not sure they exist. However, the only thing that's going to make companies treat workers in better (except for government regulations, which ain't going to happen in Honduras) is consumer pressure. And a double kudos to the students who remain committed to improving the lives of working-class people.

Nike continues to claim blamelessness, saying that they subcontract their shoes and clothing out and thus have no responsibility for working conditions. This is a morally baseless argument. Obviously, the subcontractors would do more for their workers if Nike forced them to. Nike's major reason for not directly employing the manufactures is to avoid responsibility for them and to create ever greater profits on the backs of poorly paid, overworked, and exploited workers in the developing world.

On the True Importance of Twitter

While not quite the technological revolution that many predicted it would be (yet), the Twitter event is clearly more than ephemeral - hell, even retrograde luddites like me are on it. I realize that Twitter has been an increasingly useful mechanism for relating news, ranging from reports in Iran during protests last year to people spreading the word on political stories via Twitter. That said, I'm pretty sure the best function of Twitter is posts like this:

So glad to be awake and out of my dream where I was in an arranged marriage with Frank Zappa, where my only joy was playing saxophone.

Critics have accused Twitter of being narcissistic, an overload of private information, and trivial. Perhaps it is, but when triviality can offer images as awesome as the one above, I'm all for it.