The Future of Venezuela

President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, who has led his resource-rich country with his own brand of socialism, Chavismo, for 14 years, has been indeteriorating health since his cancer surgery last month. It is not clear whether he will be able to be inaugurated for a fourth term on Jan. 10, and his chosen successor waits in the wings.

If Chávez steps down or dies, what will become of Venezuela? Will Chavismo survive? What sorts of social, economic and political issues must the next president confront? Would the nation’s contentious relationship with the United States improve?

more info:

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/01/03/venezuela-post-chavez/chavez-will-leave-behind-an-economic-crisis

Confrontation or cooperation?

Could Europe form one “bloc” in the global energy market? This is evidently not the case now. EU-countries are part of the IEA (International Energy Agency), the OECD-agency which in some ways forms a “bloc” in the global oil market, but it only does so in crisis situations. The US clearly does not view its membership of the OECD as in any way a constraint upon following its own international energy policy.

The EU is of course not in the same position as the US. As we all know, it is not a country. Nevertheless, after having spent 15 years liberalising and integrating its internal energy market (a process that supposedly will be “completed” in 2014), the EU is now finally beginning to turn its attention outward. With the new “External Energy Policy” recently proposed by the European Commission, it has taken a (very modest) first step towards becoming indeed an “energy bloc”.

The idea behind the proposed new “External Energy Policy” is that the European Commission will come to “monitor” all bilateral energy deals made between EU member states and non-EU countries. Presumably in a later phase such “monitoring” will evolve into more integrated energy relations with non-EU regions.

To an “outside” observer like Alexander Mirtchev, President of the US-based Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies International (RUSI), this approach makes a lot of sense. There is no region in the world, he notes, that is more dependent on imports of fossil fuels than the EU (which imports between €500 and €600 billion worth of oil and gas each year!). So, to deal with external suppliers as one bloc, can only strengthen its position in the world market.

You can read his refreshing “American” analysis of European energy policy by clicking here.

The Last Pilgrims to Havana

HAVANA — There was a moment in history when Cuba was a beacon for the Latin American left. A now remote past when the Plaza of the Revolution was a beacon for the dozens of progressive movements that crossed the continent. "The island where utopia triumphed," many thought, the place that showed the way for revolutionaries and idealists everywhere.

Those were the days when young people kept posters of Fidel Castro in their rooms, believing that the dreams of so many years of proletarian struggle had come to fruition in the Caribbean. Our cultural centers filled with writers and artists, born from the Río Bravo all the way to Patagonia. And some of those who would later become the region's political leaders came to study in schools across the country.

more: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/07/27/the_last_pilgrims_to_havana?page=full

Moment of Truth on Trade

Immediate Action Required on Free Trade Agreements

We are on the cusp of restoring America’s position as the world leader in international trade.

This week, it was announced that the White House and Congress have reached a deal to move our three pending free trade deals — with Colombia, South Korea and Panama — to passage before August.

As U.S. Chamber President and CEO Tom Donohue announced yesterday, this is a “moment of truth.”

First, however, these agreements must pass through the Senate Finance Committee, which is holding a mock mark-up on the bills today.

More:

http://www.uschambersmallbusinessnation.com/

Latin America's Growth Expected to Reach 5-6 Percent in 2010

Latin America’s new face following the global financial crisis is tough and almost impervious to shocks but also soft and kind to the most vulnerable.

A World Bank report argues that the region’s economic demeanor is resilient, globalized, and dynamic as it zips towards 5-6 percent growth for 2010 and shows that its investments in social protection managed to shield the most vulnerable from the worst effects of the downturn.  
Presented as part of the World Bank Annual Meetings, Latin America’s semiannual economic report also reveals that the region’s recovery is ahead of the rich nation’s and compares well with the Asian Tigers’ expected growth of over 7 percent.  All in all, the crisis in Latin America & Caribbean (LAC) was short lived, as compared to other parts of the globe, thanks in part to solid macroeconomic and fiscal frameworks set in place well before the crisis struck.  
Individually, Brazil, Peru and Argentina lead the pack with 7.5 percent projected growth while Uruguay and Paraguay are expected to largely surpass the regional average. Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Mexico and Panama, in the meantime, will likely post a robust 4-5 percent growth, according to ‘Resilient, globalized, dynamic: The new face of Latin America’.

more:

http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/LACEXT/0,,contentMDK:22729568~pagePK:146736~piPK:146830~theSitePK:258554,00.html

no longer the man with a moustache and a guitar

By John Paul Rathbone

Gaining altitude: São Paulo in Brazil, a country that accounts for about half of the economy and population of Latin America

If you have flown on a regional airline in Europe or the US recently, it is quite possible you were sitting in an Embraer aircraft – designed and built in Brazil. If you have eaten grilled chicken on the Fourth of July at a barbecue in the US, the poultry could well have been provided by Pilgrim’s Pride, majority-owned by JBS, the Brazilian meat processor.

And if you perhaps drank a Budweiser at that barbecue, nowadays that is a slice of Brazil as well. The iconic American beer brand belongs to Anheuser-Busch InBev, the $37bn Belgian-headquartered company, most of whose top managers call Brazil home.

These are just three of the growing band of Latin multinationals dubbed “multilatinas”. It is no accident they hail from Brazil, which accounts for roughly half of Latin America’s economy and population. But multilatinas are common to Spanish-speaking Latin America as well.

more

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/43677f8c-f658-11df-846a-00144feab49a.html#axzz16mBbcxkJ

The "Reina Pepiada"

The "Reina Pepiada" is one of the most popular arepa dishes in Venezuela: a lip-smacking combination of shredded chicken, mayonnaise and petit pois stuffed into a grilled cornmeal arepa with slices of soft avocado. 

Like the doner kebab in Britain, the Reina Pepiada - or Reina Pepeada in some places - is a firm favourite with drinkers and ravers who flock to late nightareperas after the bars and clubs shut to soak up the alcohol with a "Reina" or two, preferably drizzled with spicy hot sauce. 

But even after fifty years at the top of the arepa food chain few people know that this local delicacy is named after Venezuela's first international beauty queen Susana Dujim. 

A stunning morena with jet black hair and a smile that could light up a city, Dujim was crowned Miss World in London in 1955, becoming the first South American to ever hold the title. 

Venezuelans all over the country were immensely proud of her achievement but none more than the Alvarez brothers from Trujillo State who had recently opened an arepera on Gran Avenida between Plaza Venezuela and Sabana Grande in the capital Caracas.

continua:

http://venezuelanfoodanddrinks.blogspot.com/2009/01/la-reina-pepiada-curvy-queen-of-arepas.html

How Castro and Chavez lost the 2010 elections

Lots of foreign leaders have reason to regret the outcome of the U.S. midterm elections, from the Norweigan Nobel peace prize committee to Russia's Dmitry Medvedev. But if there is one big un-American loser from Tuesday's vote, it's got to be Raul Castro.

For months the Cuban dictator and his semi-retired brother Fidel have been waging a charm offensive aimed at the Obama administration and Congress. They've sent some political prisoners into exile; invited American journalists to Havana; and encouraged Cuba's Roman Catholic cardinal to lobby for them in Washington. Fidel even denounced anti-semitism.

Their purpose has been obvious: to obtain the easing of U.S. sanctions on Cuba at a time when the country's economy is desperately in need of help. In particular, the Castros have been hoping for a lifting of the ban on American tourist travel -- something that they calculate could bring in a flood of U.S. beach visitors and hard currency. Legislation to do just that has been pending in Congress.

Republican gains in the House of Representatives, and Marco Rubio's election as Florida's next Republican senator, almost certainly mean the Castros won't get their wish.

more info:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2010/11/how_fidel_castro_and_hugo_chav.html

A newly united opposition hopes that a legislative election will at least start to dent the president’s monopoly of power

IT MAY be only a legislative election, in a country where all power lies with Hugo Chávez, the president. But both Mr Chávez and his opponents see the vote for the 165-seat National Assembly on September 26th as crucial to their future. Mr Chávez, though not a candidate, has turned it into a plebiscite on himself. Most government campaign posters feature his image. He is criss-crossing the country. “The revolution has just one voice,” declared Marcos Díaz, the governor of Mérida state, during a televised campaign stop. Redshirted state employees chanted “with Chávez everything, without Chávez nothing”.

Having ill-advisedly chosen to boycott the parliamentary election in 2005 on the ground that it feared it would not be free or fair, the opposition has had to watch as a rubber-stamp assembly passed laws restricting private business and concentrating ever more power in the executive. If the opposition’s Venezuela Unity alliance fails to win enough seats to provide a counterweight, it fears that Venezuela will slide ever-faster towards dictatorship.

http://economist.com/

Disappearing dollars

An oil producer’s strange foreign-exchange squeeze

WITH the price of oil at record highs over the past few years, oil-exporting countries have enjoyed a bonanza. So the last thing you might expect to be scarce in Venezuela is foreign exchange. But for mysterious reasons, dollars are in short supply—and that threatens slowly to strangle the economy.

Hugo Chávez, the country’s left-wing president, imposed exchange controls back in 2003, during a crippling strike by the management and workers of Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), the state oil company. But he also fixed the exchange rate, from 2005 at 2.15 to the dollar even though inflation has since ranged from 14% to 31% a year. This triggered an import boom.

The exchange-control board, known as Cadivi, never supplied all the hard currency the economy required (of the $38.4 billion spent on imports in 2009, only $22.3 billion came from Cadivi, for example). But until recently, the government tolerated a parallel foreign-exchange market known as the permuta, which involved trading government bonds. These could be bought in bolívars and sold for dollars, or vice versa, through brokerage houses. The relation between the two prices became the free-market exchange rate.

more

http://www.economist.com/node/17043041?story_id=17043041

Venezuela, More Deadly Than Iraq, Wonders Why

Some here joke that they might be safer if they lived in Baghdad. The numbers bear them out.

A front-page photo in El Nacional showed homicide victims in a Caracas morgue.

In Iraq, a country with about the same population as Venezuela, there were 4,644 civilian deaths from violence in 2009, according to Iraq Body Count; in Venezuela that year, the number of murders climbed above 16,000.

Even Mexico’s infamous drug war has claimed fewer lives.

Venezuelans have absorbed such grim statistics for years. Those with means have hidden their homes behind walls and hired foreign security experts to advise them on how to avoid kidnappings and killings. And rich and poor alike have resigned themselves to living with a murder rate that the opposition says remains low on the list of the government’s priorities.

Then a front-page photograph in a leading independent newspaper — and the government’s reaction — shocked the nation, and rekindled public debate over violent crime.

more info:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/world/americas/23venez.html?_r=1

Venezuela's Soaring Murder Rate

Oliver Stone Still Doesn't Get It

By Larry Rohter

Larry Rohter is a graduate of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, where he majored in history, economics and political science, and also has a master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of International Affairs, where he specialized in Modern Chinese History and Politics. From 1977 to 2008 he was primarily a foreign correspondent in Latin America and Asia, first for Newsweek and then for The New York Times, where he is now a culture reporter. He is the author of “Deu no New York Times” (2008: Objetiva), a Portuguese-language best-seller in Brazil, and “Brazil on the Rise,” which will be published September 1 by Palgrave Macmillan.

One month ago, I incurred the wrath of Oliver Stone for stating the obvious in an article I wrote: his new movie South of the Border, ostensibly a “documentary” about Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and a group of supposedly like-minded South American colleagues, is so riddled with errors, misrepresentations, fabrications and fraudulent statistics as to be useless except as an example of over-the-top propaganda. At the screening for the movie that I attended, I counted more than two dozen assertions that are demonstrably incorrect, but chose, in the limited space available to me, to focus on but a handful.

more:
http://hnn.us/articles/129458.html

Venezuela's politics

Commune-ism

Yet another method to entrench the president's power

WHEN Jorge Urosa, the archbishop of Caracas, said recently that Hugo Chávez was installing a “Marxist-communist” regime in Venezuela, the country’s leftist president called him a “troglodyte” and accused him of “instilling fear in the people.” Yet Mr Chávez, an avowed socialist, is openly seeking to introduce what looks like a novel form of communism. After taking over the courts and provoking an opposition boycott of legislative elections, he is now targeting state and municipal governments, currently the last bulwark against his rule among elected officials. By forcing them to compete for resources with pliable “communes”, he may starve them to death.

In June his legislative allies approved on first reading a draft bill creating the commune, a “socialist local entity…on the basis of which socialist society is to be built,” with legislative, judicial and executive functions. The communes are supposed to be partly self-sufficient, thanks to a “socialist productive model”, outlined in a separate bill, that will replace the existing capitalist economy. But in practice, the state will provide most of their resources, determine which communes can register, and impose “development” laws and decrees.

More info
http://www.economist.com/node/16595071

The Worst of the Worst

Bad dude dictators and general coconut heads.

BY GEORGE B.N. AYITTEY
JULY/AUGUST 2010
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/issues/180/contents/

A continent away from Kyrgyzstan, Africans like myself cheered this spring as a coalition of opposition groups ousted the country's dictator, President Kurmanbek Bakiyev. "One coconut down, 39 more to harvest!" we shouted. There are at least 40 dictators around the world today, and approximately 1.9 billion people live under the grip of the 23 autocrats on this list alone. There are plenty of coconuts to go around.

The cost of all that despotism has been stultifying. Millions of lives have been lost, economies have collapsed, and whole states have failed under brutal repression. And what has made it worse is that the world is in denial. The end of the Cold War was also supposed to be the "End of History

 
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743284550?ie=UTF8&tag=fopo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0743284550

Raising the toll on the transport sector

Transport is the new focus of the European Union in its battle against greenhouse gas emissions. The European Commission made a key move in late April by publishing a ‘European strategy on clean and energy-efficient vehicles’. It encourages the modernisation of vehicles, investments in research and fostering incentives for the market uptake of new technologies including electric cars. The strategy was underpinned by the simultaneous publication of a report from the European Environment Agency (EEA), pointing to the lack of improvement in reducing emissions from the EU’s transport sector and calling for urgent action. However, taking on the transport sector will not be easy. To avoid a head-on confrontation with the powerful car and transport lobby, Brussel has tended to focus on supply side measures, such as the promotion of new technologies. But if Brussels really wants to tackle the transport sector’s growing level of emissions, our Brussels correspondent Hughes Belin notes, it also needs to look at people’s mobility habits – a political no-go area. Barroso, concludes Belin, is in for a bumpy ride.

To read his article.
http://www.europeanenergyreview.eu/index.php?id_mailing=83&toegang=fe9fc289c3ff0af142b6d3bead98a923&id=2049

The wrecking of Venezuela

The wrecking of Venezuela


Venezuelans are starting to fall out of love with their president. Will they be allowed to vote him out of power?

WITH his bellicose bombast, theatrical gestures and dodgy jokes, Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s president for the past 11 years, has turned himself into one of the world’s most recognisable and controversial rulers. His fans salute him as a saviour for the downtrodden of the planet, a man who is leading a grass roots revolution against American imperialism and its local sepoys. But to many others, including this newspaper, he has come to embody a new, post-cold-war model of authoritarian rule which combines a democratic mandate, populist socialism and anti-Americanism, as well as resource nationalism and carefully calibrated repression.This model has proved surprisingly successful across the world. Versions are to be found in countries as disparate and distinct as Iran, Russia, Zimbabwe and Sudan. In one way or another, these regimes claim to have created a viable alternative to liberal democracy.

more info:
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=16109302&source=hptextfeature

Make the OAS relevant

Make the OAS relevant

BY JOHN KERRY and ROBERT MENENDEZ

Last month, when even our key Latin American allies supported the creation of an alternative to the Organization of American States that included Cuba but excluded the United States and Canada, alarm bells went off in Washington -- and rightfully so.

This was not your traditional statement of frustration with U.S. policy, but rather an indictment of the OAS -- the institution charged with helping all countries in the hemisphere speak with a unified voice.

We agree that the OAS is an embattled institution. It has had its wins and its share of losses -- as well as missed opportunities. However, as others have said about the United Nations, if it did not exist, it would have to be created. Our task is to make the OAS better, not irrelevant.

Read more:
 http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/03/17/1532935/make-the-oas-relevant.html#ixzz0iRET1sOv

Venezuelan billionaire fends off Chavez

Continua:

http://www.laempresaprivada.com/blog222.pdf

A Food Fight for Hugo Chavez

A Food Fight for Hugo Chavez

With his popularity sagging, Venezuela's fiery President is seizing supermarkets from owners. But can he keep stores stocked?

Caracas - It's 10 a.m., and tempers are already flaring at the Cada supermarket in Caracas' San Bernardino neighborhood. The store has just taken delivery of two pallets of 4- and 11-pound sacks of sugar. With dozens of shoppers swarming around him, Rigoberto Fernández tries to pass out the bags one by one. The clerk hands a smaller one to a gray-haired woman, but she flings it back. "How dare you tell me I can't have one of the larger bags?" she screams. The sack splits open, spilling sugar everywhere.

Within 10 minutes, the shipment has vanished. "I am so fed up with these food shortages," Fernández mutters as he sweeps up the mess. "People get desperate and start behaving like animals."

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez's response to the food shortages: find a scapegoat, in this case supermarket owners. On Jan. 17, the mercurial leader expropriated six Exito stores, controlled by France's Groupe Casino. A month later he seized Cada, another Casino chain, with 35 supermarkets and eight distribution centers.

more info:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_12/b4171046603604.htm