Chile on The Huffington Post

Chile's World Cup Team Faces Expulsion

2009-11-26T18:35:16Z

ASUNCION, Paraguay — Chile could be kicked out of the World Cup unless Chilean club Rangers drops a court case by Dec. 3 contesting its disputed demotion to the second division of the national soccer league.

CONMEBOL, the governing body of South American soccer, said Thursday it was notified by FIFA about the possible sanction.

Jim Luce: El Museo del Barrio: Fifth Avenue on Fire

2009-11-10T10:54:51Z

Forty years ago, El Museo del Barrio was a dream contained in
a single classroom so far north that “sophisticated” Manhattanites would not
visit there after dark.

It was founded in 1969
by artist and educator Raphael Montañez Ortiz and a coalition of parents,
educators, artists, and activists who noted that mainstream museums largely
ignored Latino artists.

Last week, on a cold,
windy night, over 1,600 New Yorkers arrived to welcome the opening of the
Museum after more than a year of renovations.
The place was so alive, so hot – so on fire.

It was the
invitation-only inaugural preview and members’ reception of two shows, Voces y Visiones,
and Nexus
New York: Latin/American Artists in the Modern Metropolis.

I focus in this piece on Nexus New York, and in the Daily
Kos on the second show Voces y
Visiones.

In celebration of El
Museo’s reopening, the Empire State Building was illuminated with the museum’s
signature mango-yellow color.

“El Museo del Barrio is
at the junction of Museum Mile on Fifth Avenue and the gateway to El Barrio, a
neighborhood rich in Latino traditions,” says Julián Zugazagoitia, El Museo’s
Director and CEO.

“Our holdings and
programs span from our Puerto Rican roots to a wide range of Latino, Caribbean
and Latin American cultures,” Julián said.

I was delighted to meet
and chat with the curator of Nexus New
York, Deborah Cullen, who gave me a detailed understanding of her new
exhibition.

I was delighted to meet and chat with the exhibition’s curator, Deborah
Cullen.

“Nexus New York covers new ground for most viewers,” Deborah told me.
“The connections brought to life in our
galleries have never been concretely explored before – by bringing the actual
artworks from the times together, we are allowing them to speak for themselves
and the vibrant dialogues occurring from early in the 20th century.”

“The longstanding
intertwinement of Latin American artists in what has been thought of as
“American” modernism, their presence and impact, is very enduring, rich, and
multi-faceted,” she explained.

This landmark exhibition
examines pioneering Caribbean and Latin American artists who lived in New York
City before World War II and shaped the American avant-garde.

El Museo has unveiled a new visual
identity that reflects the vitality of its offerings and

programs. The new visual identity is the work of Miguel Sal, executed by Elvira
Moran

Between 1900 and 1942,
New York City was the site of extraordinary creative exchange where artists
could share ideas in a global context.

Nexus: New York is the first exhibition to explore the profound way
these artistic exchanges between Latino and non-Latino artists deeply impacted
art and art movements in this city and numerous countries for years to come.

Chief among them were Frida
Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Miguel Covarrubias – familiar to me from trips to the
museums of Mexico City. Works from each
of the artists’ are on show in el Museo’s Nexus
New York.

Salvador Dali, Robert
Motherwell, Wilfredo Lam, and Marcel Duchamp are also represented in the show.

The exhibition is also
deeply representative of El Museo’s mission to produce new scholarship on the
significant yet sometimes overlooked contributions made by Latino, Caribbean,
and Latin American artists.

More than 200 important
works by artists from Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, the Dominican Republic,
Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, as well as by artists working in
the United States, are presented together for the first time.

Chatting with El Museo del Barrio staff Michelle
de Leon and Mariana Salem.

The swiftly-changing
urban landscape before and between the World Wars inspired the erosion of
artistic boundaries and fostered a new climate of modernist experimentation.

Frida Kahlo’s haunting
work memorializing socialite Dorothy Hale’s 1938 suicide in New York is
included in the exhibition.

Frida Kahlo. The Suicide of
Dorothy Hale (El suicidio de Dorothy Hale). 1939.

Nexus New York focuses on key artists from the Caribbean and Latin
America who entered into dynamic cultural and social dialogues with the
American-based avant-garde and participated in the development of a new modern
discourse.

The exhibit features for
the first time ever, a fresco panel from Diego Rivera’s New Workers’ School
Cycle, completed in late 1933 after his ill-fated Rockefeller Center mural, one
of the most significant art world controversies ever to take place on U.S.
soil.

This scandal involved
Rivera’s 1933 mural Man at the Crossroads, which was destroyed in 1934 before
completion due to Rivera’s sympathetic depiction of Lenin.

Frustrated Rivera utilized
his large Rockefeller family fee to carry out the Union Square mural cycle that
clearly depicted his political ideologies, once the other project was abruptly
destroyed.

Before this controversy,
Rivera, who spent 1930 to 1934 in the United States, was honored with a solo
exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1931.

Diego Rivera. Opponent of Fascism (Adversario del
fascismo). 1933.
Photo courtesy Collection Michael Fuchs, New
York. Photo: Jason Mandella.
© 2009 Banco de Mexico Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust,
Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

An illustrated,
bilingual scholarly catalogue, distributed by Yale University Press, will
accompany the exhibition, with essays that focus on specific environments,
exchanges, or centers, and which detail the various artists’ New York milieus
and artistic development.

The renovated museum
features a new glass façade, a redesigned courtyard, modernized galleries, as
well as a new café/programming space and an expanded shop.

The design by Gruzen
Samton Architects received an award for Excellence in Design presented by Mayor
Michael Bloomberg on behalf of the Art Commission of the City of New York.

Major support for the
exhibition was provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art, Agnes Gund,
and the Henry Luce Foundation. The lead
corporate sponsor is MetLife.

Miguel Covarrubias. Comedian (Humorista). 1927.
Photo courtesy of El Museo del Barrio, New
York City.
Photo: Jason Mandella. © María Elena Rico Covarrubias.

A dynamic artistic,
cultural, and community gathering place, El Museo is a center of cultural pride
on New York’s Museum Mile.

Since its inception, El
Museo has been committed to celebrating and promoting Latino culture, thus becoming
a cornerstone of El Barrio, and a valuable resource for New York City.

El Museo’s varied
permanent collection of over 6,500 objects spanning more than 800 years of
Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino art includes pre-Columbian Taíno
artifacts, traditional arts, twentieth-century drawings, paintings, sculptures
and installations, as well as prints, photography, documentary films and video.

El Museo del Barrio is
located at 1230 Fifth Avenue at 104th Street, across from Central Park and one
block above the Museum of the City of New York.
It is situated between the Upper East Side and East Harlem – “El Barrio.”

Photos of reception attendees by John Lee.

Easter Island Indigenous Population Considers Travel Restrictions On Immigrants

2009-11-06T14:27:10Z

SANTIAGO, Chile -- They are the face of Chilean guidebooks: giant statues made of volcanic rock scattered across Easter Island.

Constructed centuries ago, the figures are thought to represent ancestors or chiefs of the indigenous Polynesian population. It is their descendants who now inhabit the tiny triangular island nearly 2,000 miles off the Chilean coast.

Chile Outraged Over Giant Pope Statue

2009-10-22T14:32:18Z

SANTIAGO, Chile -- The neighbors couldn't help but notice the huge head of Pope John Paul II rising out of the sculptor's workshop next door.

Hidden behind the walls, the pope's left hand gripped Jesus on the cross while his right extended outward, an imitation of the gesture he had made during his visit to Santiago two decades earlier.

Chile Anti-Smoking Laws Fail To Kick The Habit

2009-10-13T15:37:06Z

Ariel Dorfman: Forever: A Letter to Obama

2009-10-09T14:03:26Z

Amnesty USA recently asked me, along with nine others, to write a letter to President Obama asking him to prosecute all those responsible for torturing in the name of the United States of America during the previous administration.

This is the letter I sent to him.

Dear President Obama:

Forever.

That's the word I want to offer you, the one word shared by the man who tortures and his victim, the one word that defines them both.

Because for the victim that moment of pain and degradation, those many moments, will never end. Torture does not happen just that once but repeats itself in the mind and in the memory the body carries beyond the water in the lungs or the contingent fist in the face. It continues to happen over and over and over.

And forever also for the perpetrator. The hand does not switch on the current, slam the mouth into feces, the ears are not willing to hear the screams, unless there is the promise and certainty that there will be no accountability, that the victimizer is safe from justice, can live, yes, forever, in the timelessness of impunity.

In almost forty years of struggling, as a writer and a citizen, against the plague and banality of torture, this is the dirtiest secret of these acts of dread, Mr. President, that I have discovered. That nobody tortures if they think they will be caught, if they think they will be exposed to public scrutiny. Nobody tortures if they know they will be laid out naked for everyone to see and judge, if they are sure that they will face in a court of law the men and women they stripped naked in some faraway, hidden room. Forever is their horizon, their alibi, their guardian demon, the basic prerequisite that secures the violence they have inflicted or are about to inflict, it is that word forever that lets them sleep at night, caress their children, look in tomorrow's mirror.

That is why the answer to the inferno of forever, both for the victim in need of healing and for the criminal who broke the law, the written law of his own land and the unspoken law of the common human bond that joins us all, that is why the answer must be the purgatorial words, perhaps heavenly words, Never Again.

They are words that the United States today needs desperately to hear. But you know well that those words, Never Again, are easy to pronounce and hard to enact. Those words require, first of all, as Amnesty International has demanded, a thorough, impartial and adequately funded investigation of the truth of how this country came to torture, how it became an international pariah. And then, those words, Never Again, require the prosecution of any and all those who ordered, condoned and engaged in these crimes against humanity.

To do anything less is to succumb to the very politics of fear that you have so eloquently identified as the primary condition facilitating this disastrous assault upon human rights. To do anything less is to invite a possible repetition of such acts of endless and corrupting pain if the future were to sadly bring once more terror to these shores.

You are blessed, Mr. President, with the chance to cleanse the world. You have been given that chance because you happen to be the one person on this earth today who can help us all modify history, because you are in the truly unique position of being able to proclaim to your country and to all of humanity that torture is not, after all, forever.

From one poet to another, and with great respect and hope and admiration,

Ariel Dorfman

Ellen Susman: Balancing Your Life and Human Rights

2009-09-23T10:55:50Z

This week the United Nations will convene world leaders to discuss topics from global warming to the spread of nuclear weapons. Among the meetings will also be the United Nations Human Rights Commission of which our South American neighbor, Chile, is a member.

Last month I was privileged to go to Chile with a small delegation from Human Rights Watch. Very often the delegations visit countries in which there are ongoing situations of human rights violations, like the wrongly named Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan or Angola to name a few in Africa. Or perhaps Kosovo, Mexico, Burma or Sri Lanka. This organization covers the world, and by focusing international attention where human rights are violated, gives voice to the oppressed, while holding the oppressors accountable for their crimes.

Our visit to Chile was an anomaly in that Chile has a very good record in human rights following the awful days of the Pinochet regime in which many people lost their lives and were "disappeared."

We had appointments and met with the Ministers of Finance, Economics and Foreign Affairs. We had a spectacular luncheon with President Michelle Bachelet . We discussed Chile's involvement in the U.N. and the stability of their country.

But the visit that made the largest impression on me was a trip to the feared Villa Grimaldi.
This detention and torture center was created and used during the Pinochet regime, and became one of the most frightening places in Santiago - a place where rape, torture and disappearances were common. Beginning around 1974, the Villa was used first as a headquarters for the Pinochet Intelligence Brigade, and then as its operations center. Operatives would bring prisoners there for initial interrogation, and then, use devices specifically designed for various types of torture. Besides electric shock, the interrogators used to submerge a prisoner's head in water, or hang them from a bar. Boiling water, beatings and occasionally drugs were also used to gather information.

The Villa administrators took our delegation for a tour and Gabriele Salazar; a survivor who managed to endure capture in this place joined us.

Gabriele's story:

Gabriele stood before us, a small sight woman with a thick black braid that hung down the length of her back. We stood around her in front of a model of the Villa under glass. Gabriele's story began with the detention of both her and her husband on Dec. 31,1975 after they came home from celebrating the New Year. Blindfolded, she was put on a bus. As the bus bounced along, her blindfold slipped a bit, and she could see the massive gates in front of her and knew that, as she feared, the Villa was her destination.

As soon as she arrived she was stripped, raped and taken to one of the torture rooms. She said that rape was common --a lmost an initiation. All women were raped upon entering, and she was no exception. Then she was taken to a torture room, placed on a metal bed and given electric shock treatment. Next, she was taken to a tiny cell.

" They concentrated on various political groups. Immediately you were tortured and put on a metal bed and electricity was applied until you collapsed. Then they threw you down into this swimming pool and put your head under the water again and again. In the bottom of the tower, they held you down and strung you up like an animal. People were kept in little houses or towers. You could hear what was going on, even if you could not see. The guards ran over people in cars. They tortured them for 3-4 hours. Normally, you did not know what happened to people."

During the first two weeks, the guards brought the prisoners beautiful lunches, but she refused to eat. It was too contradictory. They took her to a hospital when it appeared she might die from malnutrition and gave her intravenous feedings until she regained her strength. She argued about this. And said, "Why? The faster I don't eat, the faster I die."

As she gave us a tour and showed us the where the cells, the tower and rooms had been, she wept. But she said that the few guards who had shown some kindness were the ones who made you believe in humanity.

Around us, the birds chattered constantly, telling their version of what they had seen. Of the 4,500 people who came through the Villa, 25% were women.

Gabriele said that over time some prisoners would find ways to illustrate their stay. They would draw stars, birds, and trees to remind them of freedom. She said they could often smell the roses outside through small cracks in the walls, and it was a harsh fact -- relief for some and pain for others. When asked how she managed to sustain torture, she said, " You don't know how you are going to be. You just do it one minute at a time. It's not in your head. It's in your heart. There is no ideology that will sustain you -- just heart.

"I come every time people ask to this place because of them [the ones who died] -- because I am alive. I owe my life to them and all who fought. I knew as many others did, that because of your work [human rights] people knew we were here, and alive. We knew eventually there would be accountability. We knew we weren't forgotten. Human Rights helped keep us alive. It is very important. In the end, it changed me. I am whom I am because of what happened. "

Gabriele had two years of psychological treatment after she was released. She is witness for at least seven people who died or disappeared.

As we left through the main gates, the ghosts of the disappeared and departed swirled among us. It was cold. We could feel their spirits. We will remember.

Nikolas Kozloff: Honduras: Who's The Real Drug Trafficker?

2009-09-16T12:53:56Z

While the foreign policy establishment in Washington, D.C. certainly had diverse reasons for disliking Manuel Zelaya, the deposed Honduran president's criticism of the U.S.-driven drug war certainly did not help to ingratiate the Central American within the halls of power. In December 2008, just months before Zelaya was ousted from power by the military, he wrote Barack Obama and complained of U.S. "interventionism."

Audaciously, Zelaya wrote: "The legitimate struggle against drug trafficking ... should not be used as an excuse to carry out interventionist policies in other countries." The struggle against drug smuggling, the Honduran added, "should not be divorced from a vigorous policy of controlling distribution and consumer demand in all countries, as well as money laundering which operates through financial circuits and which involve networks within developed countries."

It was not the first time that Zelaya had been so outspoken. Just a month before, during a meeting of Latin American and Caribbean anti-drug officials in Tegucigalpa, he declared that drug consumption should be legalized to halt violence related to smuggling. "Instead of pursuing drug traffickers, societies should invest resources in educating drug addicts and curbing their demand," Zelaya said. Rodolfo Zelaya, the head of a Honduran congressional commission on drug trafficking, rejected Zelaya's comments. He told participants at the meeting that he was "confused and stunned by what the Honduran leader said."

From "Mano Dura" to decriminalization?

What could have driven Zelaya to confront the U.S. so openly on drug policy? In recent years Honduras has been plagued by drug trafficking and so-called maras or street gangs that carry out gruesome beheadings, rapes, and eye gouging. The small Central American nation has become a major transshipment point for Colombian cocaine. According to U.S. authorities, the drugs arrive on non-commercial aircraft from Venezuela and increasingly in speedboats from Colombia.

Prior to Zelaya's election, Honduras adopted a mano dura policy towards the maras as opposed to focusing on prevention and rehabilitation. In 2002, the country launched special anti-mara operations under a zero-tolerance strategy including the passage of stiffer laws. But the strong-arm policies led to persecution of young people simply because they bore tattoos, frequently an identifying feature for gang members, or wore baggy hip-hop style clothes. In 2005, 204 maras were detained under a special law which allowed people to be arrested merely on suspicion of belonging to gangs.

The Honduran government was even accused before the Inter-American Court on Human Rights of prison massacres of young gang members. The massacres were allegedly planned as "purges," and included one incident in the El Porvenir prison in the city of La Ceiba in which a whopping 69 prisoners including 61 mara members were murdered.

After he was elected in 2006, Zelaya pledged to negotiate with Mara Salvatrucha gangs MS-13 and MS-18 in an effort to get the narco-traffickers to hand in their arms. Offering an olive branch, Zelaya said he wanted to peacefully rehabilitate the maras and reincorporate the gangs into society.

Unfortunately for Zelaya, the violence showed no signs of abating. In a country of just 7.4 million, 710 murders were reported in the first quarter of 2006 -- 100 more than in the same period in 2005. Experts worried that if the violence continued in Honduras that it would be next to impossible to implement social development policies and the nation's democratic stability would be jeopardized. After kidnappings surged and the nephew of the Speaker of Congress Roberto Micheletti (and future Honduran President following Zelaya's overthrow) was killed, Zelaya carried out Operation Thunder -- a broad police and military crackdown.

San Pedro Sula, an important commercial city, has been in the crosshairs of drug violence. The city has been the center of activity for drug smuggling gangs who transport cocaine from Colombia to the U.S. In recent years, San Pedro Sula gangs have fought out brutal turf wars. The violence has taken on a brazen quality with assassinations curb-side and night club attacks. The local bishop of San Pedro Sula remarked to reporters, "The city has had enough blood -- every day deaths and more deaths." He added, "This is a hell...people don't want to go out at night, there's a tremendous fear."

Zelaya doubled the national police budget and claimed that his government had confiscated more cocaine than his predecessor. The President also pledged to establish a special police unit which would combat Colombian drug trafficking via the Honduran Atlantic coast en route to the U.S. Zelaya also said that the army would be sent into the streets to reinforce the police.

Zelaya's efforts however foundered amidst unending violence. In mid-2008, thousands marched in San Pedro Sula in protest over drug-related violence. Some women held photographs of their sons who had been assassinated. Realizing that his strategy was not yielding a positive result, Zelaya sent his letter to Obama and in early 2009 gave a feisty press conference at the Organization of American States in Washington, D.C.

The U.S., Zelaya said, was not doing enough to help countries like Honduras confront drug smuggling. The Honduran however backed away from his previous remarks about drug policy, saying that he merely favored an international law which would regulate anti-drug efforts. "From the U.S. to Cape Horn in Chile and the plains of Argentina there should be just one rule, and that rule should be respected and it should come out of consensus."

Zelaya did get on board with the Mérida Initiative, Washington's multi-billion dollar Drug War aid package for Mexico and the Central American nations. In January 2009, Zelaya's Security Minister Jorge Rodas Gamero signed an agreement with U.S. Amabassador Hugo Llorens for Honduras to receive $3.5 million in mostly military aid under the program.

But Zelaya meanwhile raised eyebrows when he declared his intention to turn the military base at Soto Cano--which has long been strategic to Pentagon operations in the region--into a civilian airport.

Pentagon access to Honduras

The question of Pentagon access to Honduras may have been a central one to the coup d'etat. In 2006, Zelaya and the Bush administration negotiated the future of Soto Cano air base, which is northwest of Tegucigalpa in central Comayagua department. The base was known as Palmerola back in the '80s when it hosted some 5,000 US troops. Since then it has intermittently hosted lesser numbers, as well as serving as a base for US drug surveillance flights. Zelaya insisted on its conversion to a civilian airport and following a Washington, D.C. meeting with Bush that June, the US agreed.

The payoff, it seems, was to be greater US military access to Mosquitia. Rendered by its indigenous Miskito residents as Miskitia, this is the remote area of rainforest and coastal wetlands along the Nicaraguan border in the Caribbean zone. Drug traffickers have long used its many sheltered coves with impunity. Honduran Defense Secretary Aristides Mejía said the Miskitia presence wouldn't necessarily be "a classic base with permanent installations, but just when needed. We intend, if President Zelaya approves, to expand joint operations" with the United States.

Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velázquez, the armed forces chief who would later lead the coup against Zelaya, had already traveled to Washington to discuss future plans for Mosquitia. Contradicting his colleague Mejía, Vásquez said the plan was "to establish a permanent military base of ours in the zone," including aircraft. The U.S., Vásquez added, would help to construct air strips on site.

Then-Assistant Secretary of State John Negroponte -- who was ambassador to Honduras in the '80s and would later serve as Bush's first National Intelligence director -- weighed in, saying that Honduras could not transform Palmerola into a civilian airport "from one day to the next." He made his own trip to Tegucigalpa to discuss Palmerola and the Mérida Initiative in June, 2008. Speaking later on Honduran radio, Negroponte emphasized that the airport would have to receive international certification before plans could proceed. The Spanish news agency EFE reported that Negroponte also sat down with the president of the Honduran Parliament and future de facto president Roberto Micheletti Bain. The account did not say what the two discussed.

In December 2008, US Ambassador Llorens actually made a tour of the remote Miskito Coast with the local press and spoke about the narco threat to the region. Two months later, the Honduran armed forces named Laguna de Caratasca, near the regional capital of Puerto Lempira, as the site for the new naval installation with construction underway.

It may be significant that the impetus for closing Soto Cano came from Zelaya, while that for opening Laguna de Caratasca came from Vásquez. Perhaps, the general gambled that his enthusiasm for militarizing the Miskito Coast and generally opening Honduran territory to the U.S. military would keep him in Washington's good graces despite a messy little putsch. And with the Sandinista Daniel Ortega once again in power in Nicaragua, a U.S. military presence in the border zone may once again be perceived as an imperative in Washington -- as it was in the 1980s.

Narcotics and propaganda

Charges of complicity in narco-trafficking make for convenient propaganda ammunition on both sides of the Honduran conflict. After the coup, the de facto government issued a request to Interpol for an arrest warrant for Zelaya and many of his officials. In addition to the usual charges of supposed constitutional violations, the request made accusations of the Zelaya administration's involvement in drug trafficking. Interpol declined to issue the warrant, citing sovereign immunity and not addressing the allegations.

Meanwhile the Havana-based website Cuba Debate sports a scanned version of what purports to be an undated document from the Honduran Defense Ministy that names one "Roberto Michelleti Bain" (with an evident mis-spellng) on a list of several Honduran nationals with international drug trafficking connections. His "connection" is named as the Calí Cartel and his area of operations is named as Yoro. In the '80s, when the Calí Cartel was at its peak of power, Micheletti was a member of the local council in Yoro department, in the north of the country near the Caribbean coast. He would later sucessfully run for congress from Yoro.

The same report quoted Andrés Pavón of the Honduran Committee for the Defense of Human Rights (CODEH), who accused Gen. Vázquez of working with narco-traffickers in league with corrupt elements of the DEA.

Vázquez and his chief collaborator in the coup, air force chief Gen. Luis Prince Suazo, are both graduates of the U.S. Army's School of the Americas. Leaders of the popular resistance in Honduras also allege that Negroponte -- now ostensibly retired from public life -- made a quiet trip to Tegucigalpa in the weeks before the coup, where he met with Gen. Vázquez and other coup plotters.

This article was co-written with Bill Weinberg, the author of Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico (Verso 2000). His website is World War 4 Report.

Nikolas Kozloff is the author of Revolution! South America and the Rise of the New Left (Palgrave, 2008).

Michael Giltz: Toronto Film Fest Day 1: Peasants, Cats, Goats, Nymphs and War

2009-09-11T02:24:06Z

The Toronto Film Festival kicked off on Thursday. This is my first time at the festival after covering Cannes for a decade. I have a good feel for a lot of the other festivals: Sundance is over-crowded and people get into a frenzy over a lot of films that end up not mattering the day after the festival ends. Venice and Berlin and a lot of other cities have good to very good festivals located in marvelous cities. But Cannes is still the Wimbledon of festivals and Toronto is still the other one that matters most. Come to Toronto and you can catch the hottest films from Cannes, fall releases looking for a platform to tout themselves and Oscar hopefuls.

It's also often called the friendliest and easiest film festival to attend. Day 1 sure backed that up. Getting my press badge was a breeze and oh, by the way, here's a free pass to ride the subways and buses throughout the entire festival. (Thank goodness I only bought a day pass when coming in from my friend's home.) And when a trailer before every film thanks the volunteers, the audience actually burst into applause to thank the volunteers. Only in Canada!

Since Toronto is a vibrant city (my mom's family is from here), you don't get that isolated, everyone around you is talking about cinema vibe of Cannes. You do see festgoers with their badges on the streets near the main cinemas. But you can walk a block away and breathe in auteur-free air whenever you want. And the stress level is way down: I got into every screening I wanted, even though showing up at the last minute for the final film of the day meant I had to sit in the front row. So here are the five films I saw on Day 1.

HUACHO ** 1/2 out of **** -- This is almost the prototypical festival film, one that is intriguing but will never see the light of day outside the fest circuit. Director Alejandro Fernandez Almendras makes his approach clear early on. It's a day in the life of a hardscrabble family in Chile. The morning starts for everyone -- mother, son, grandmother and grandfather -- and then we spend about a reel (20 minutes) seeing the day each of them had. The grandmother makes cheese and then sells it on the side of a street. The mother works for the lady of a grand estate who chides her for not managing her money better and refuses to give her an advance; the mother then returns a dress she's been wearing (she never takes off the tag) to get some quick cash. The little boy spends his day at school yearning to play on a PSP; the other boys call him "peasant." And the grandfather struggles to put up a fence in a field and then has a drink at his local. Very familiar territory, but there's enough detail and specificity to maintain your interest, which is saying a lot when you're talking about a rather routine day and what I assume are mostly untrained actors. The price of milk goes up so the grandmother tries to raise her prices, only to lower it back down by the end of the day so she isn't stuck with cheese. The little boy finally gets to play a video game (one of those dancing game machines at a video arcade) but he gets so few chances to play he's terrible. The grandfather tells long stories but no one ever listens. It all adds up to a more humane, involving film than it might otherwise have been.

DOGTOOTH *** out of **** -- How often can a film have you wondering what the hell is going on but at the same time maintain your interest without frustration? I probably knew too much about this movie, so if you're willing to see a really eccentric movie with a plot straight out of an absurdist play, skip my review and wait to see it. Are you still reading? Here's a little more: two parents in Greece have kept their three children completely isolated from the world. The kids never leave the compound of their off-the-beaten-track home and have been fed tales of the vicious kitties that tear people apart just outside the perimeter. (Yes, "kitties.") But sex will out: the boy is old enough (at least in his late teens) that the parents pay a woman to come in and sleep with him (rather mechanically) while the two sisters lick each other on various parts of the body in exchange for gifts. The children are constantly coming up with games (who can leave their fingers under the hot water tap the longest) and the parents devise ever stranger ways of explaining away terms they don't want the kids to know (the word "sea" is used to describe a leather chair, for example). This could play as a surreal comedy: a couple of scenes find one girl improvising moments from videos of Rocky II and Flashdance she sneakily watched. It also plays as deeply disturbing, with the parents pushed to extremes to protect their kids from the world they fear. The audience I saw took it very seriously indeed. But play it at midnight in New York and it would seem a very different film. Fascinating. I want a second viewing to make sure it doesn't just play once, but it's hard to shake and the cast is right in tune with the wavelength of the film.

THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS * 1/2 out of **** This George Clooney comedy is based on the true-ish stories of the US military's exploration of psychic abilities and the paranormal as potential weapons for war. It's spun into a far too elaborate story of a journalist (Ewan McGregor) who stumbles on Clooney and the loony story of psychic research prompted by hippie and career soldier Jeff Bridges. There are modest laughs in the film but it has a convoluted structure and takes forever to tell a very slight tale of LSD, competing psychics and McGregor's wary acceptance of this story. It doesn't help that the backdrop of 9-11 and prisoner torture takes some of the larkiness out of the goofy tone of the film. Clooney is game and McGregor was lucky casting: the tons of jokes about Jedi warriors naturally have an added spin here. Not much else does.

NYMPH *** for cineastes only out of **** - Not quite sure why I stayed with this one. The Thais sure do love their endless tracking shots and obscure storylines. This one has a girl attacked by men in the jungle who turns into (or was?) a woodland nymph and gets her revenge. Then the film proper begins, with a cute girl who is cheating on her shlubby photographer husband with her much cuter boss. She and her husband head into the jungle for a vacation. But he literally becomes a tree-hugger and either wanders off or is swallowed up by a tree. She heads home distraught but doesn't tell anyone when he shows up unexpectedly, even though the police are searching the jungle for him. Why doesn't she say anything? Because she's imagining it? I knew better than to expect any real answers. But I was held by the visuals and an ominous score filled with the sound of creaking, groaning wood. As an aside, every print of a film includes a marker when a reel is ended, traditionally used to tell the projectionist they should be ready to change reels. It's usually a dot in the upper right hand corner and they appear every 20 minutes on every print. Once you notice them, you can't believe you've been watching movies and never spotted them before. This movie's eerie mood was heightened by the BIGGEST reel marker I've ever seen: it was a gigantic, scrawled 14 or perhaps E14 that covered the entire middle of the film. It was so prominent, I thought at first it was some sort of subliminal message we're meant to spot. But no, it's just the wackiest reel change symbol I've ever seen.

CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH *** despite the weak finale -- This Chinese film tackles the Rape Of Nanking and like the fine Katyn of last year, it's basically a catalog of horrors, presented soberly and well. How do you critique it, I felt at first. Though the horrors pile on, the film takes a few interesting tacks. First, it's shot in beautiful black and white. Second, we see much of the film through the eyes of a Japanese soldier, who is distraught by the horror around him. Since the Japanese soldiers generally partake in one horrific act after another, this was a welcome attempt not to paint them as pure Evil (which frankly would detract from the horrors that occurred -- they were committed by real people, not monsters, which makes it worse). A few brief English language characters are all so poorly and awkwardly voiced, you'd swear the actors were dubbed. I felt a strong emotional connection even as I felt the movie didn't try and manipulate me too much (stock characters of noble woman, cynical whore, and plucky child notwithstanding). They hit a good finale with the Japanese soldiers celebrating their victory with a martial parade. But that's undercut by a soft coda in which the film tries to underplay the misery of what we've seen by emphasizing too much the guilt of our Japanese hero and the potential for a happier future for at least one Chinese survivor. It rings false after a film that rang mostly true. Still, there was decent applause for the movie at the end, the strongest of the day.

Johann Hari: This Film is an Idiot's Version of Naomi Klein's Masterpiece

2009-09-06T20:28:26Z

Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine is one of the most important political books of the past decade. She takes the central myth of the right -- that since the fall of Soviet tyranny, free elections and free markets have marched hand-in-hand together towards the shimmering sunset of history -- and shown that it is, simply, a lie. It is a major revisionist history of the world that Milton Friedman and the market fundamentalists have built.

In the new Depression, with their vision lying in smoking rubble, it is a thesis whose time has come -- yet its film, alas, has not. The new "adaptation" of the book for Channel 4 by Michael Winterbottom is garbled and mumbled to the point of meaninglessness.

Klein argues that human beings consistently and everywhere vote for mixed economies -- a mix of markets and counter-balancing welfare states. The right has been unable to accept this reality, and unable to defeat it in democratic elections. So in order to achieve their vision of "pure capitalism, cleansed of all interruptions," they have waited for massive crises -- when the population is left reeling and unable to object -- to impose their vision.

Klein's story begins with the market fundamentalists' show-room: Chile. Milton Friedman, the apostle of pure unfettered capitalism, sent many of his finest students to Chile for years to spread the message that markets must be allowed to work their pristine logic unhindered by governments. They persuaded virtually nobody. Their parties were thumpingly defeated, and the democratic socialist Salvador Allende was elected instead. So the CIA backed an anti-democratic coup by the fascist general Augusto Pinochet -- and Friedman swiftly stepped in to design "the most extreme capitalist makeover ever attempted anywhere," as Klein puts it.

All subsidies for the poor were scrubbed away, prices were sent soaring, and unemployment reached unprecedented levels. Friedman told Pinochet to go further and cut harder. The wishes of the people could be safely ignored, because "the shock of the torture chamber terrorized anyone thinking of standing in the way of the economic shocks," she notes. "Attacks on union leaders were often carried out in close coordination with the owners of the workplaces." Even Margaret Thatcher tacitly admitted this vision could never be tried in a democracy. She wrote to Friedrich Hayek that much as she longed to create a similar economic outcome in Britain, "I am sure you will agree that, in Britain with our democratic institutions and the need for a high degree of consent, some of the measures adopted in Chile are quite unacceptable."

So the right-wing vision of total markets -- slice away all social protections and let the corporations rule -- was born with the iron fist of state violence as its conjoined twin. In most of the places it has been tried, they have been there, inextricably stuck together. Klein tracks them across continents: in post-Soviet Russia, for example, Boris Yeltsin could only impose this extreme vision by blowing up the Parliament (with most of the elected representatives trapped inside), shredding the country's young democracy, and starting a vast distraction-war in Chechnya that killed 100,000 people. In post-Tiananmen China, the Communist party could only turn their country into a vast export credit zone with massacres and mass imprisonment that made ordinary Chinese workers too terrified to ask for even the most meager rights. Indeed, across the planet, "some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era... were in fact committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public to prepare the ground for the introduction of free-market reforms."

Where this uber-corporate vision has not been imposed by force, it has been imposed by blackmail at a time of crisis. One of the ugliest examples Klein exposes is the use of the tsunami -- a quasi-Biblical wave that washed away 250,000 people -- as a pretext to impose a Friedmanite vision. In Sri Lanka, mega-corporations had long been desperate to clear the old beach-dwelling communities of fishermen away and open up the coastline to much-more-profitable foreign tourism. But the people liked their homes, and their careers, and did not want to hand their beaches over. So these proposals prompted a wave of militant strikes and mass protests. They were then put to the Sri Lankan people in an election -- and defeated by a landslide.

But then a wave washed it all away, and "underneath the rubble and carnage was what the tourism industry had been angling for all along -- a pristine beach, scrubbed clean of all the messy signs of people working, a vacation Eden." The Sri Lankan government was told that it would only receive the vast reconstruction loans they needed from the World Bank and IMF if they agreed to a "restructuring" programe -- which consisted of everything the Sri Lankan people had just rejected at the polls. Reeling from the shock, the Sri Lankan government agreed. They banned people from returning to their beachfront homes, declaring a "buffer zone" for indigenous people -- but not for the hotel trade, who were free to do as they please. So money donated nominally to help tsunami victims was actually used to inflict a "second tsunami" on them, handing over their land to foreign corporations and ending their historic lifestyles forever.

Similar programs of extortion have been inflicted on other peoples reeling in shock. As the people of South Africa were fighting the last battles against Apartheid, the successor ANC was forced to haggle with the IMF and World Bank for their loans. The conditions? Ditch all the social protections included in your Freedom Charter, and leave the economic structures of Apartheid in place. As the people of Poland emerged blinking from the horror of Soviet Communism, the Solidarity government was forced to gut their social democratic vision and impose a bitter dose of 'shock therapy' that cut the country even further to the bone. In both countries, the will of the people was explicitly ignored.

Klein's account of this "disaster capitalism" is written with a perfectly distilled anger, channeled through hard fact. So what on earth happened to the film?

Winterbottom has taken her simple thesis and mangled it beyond recognition. He serves up only a cold porridge of archive footage and disconnected soundbites that have some vague connection to the book, without the connecting spine of her explanations. It is though an idiot has explained the book to another idiot, who then made a film. Incredibly, the film doesn't mention the words 'debt', 'IMF', or 'World Bank' a single time. It's a bit like adapting Jaws and taking out any mention of sharks.

This film should have been another Inconvenient Truth. Instead, it's just deeply inconvenient -- and a shocking squandering of a masterpiece.

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here . You can email him at johann -at- johannhari.com

To read Johann's latest article for Slate, click here.
Read more: Chile, Debt, Depression, Salvador Allende, Naomi Klein, Mixed Economies, Apartheid, Conservatism, Michale Winterbottom, Capitalism, Pinochet, Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, Communism, Freedom Charter, Channel 4, Margaret Thatcher, Anc, Shock Doctrine, Cia, World Bank, Tianamen, Imf, Milton Friedman, Soviet Union, World News

Aryeh Neier: Senator Edward Kennedy Made Human Rights Part of US Foreign Policy

2009-08-27T18:31:24Z
Among the many achievements of Edward M. Kennedy during his long tenure in the United States Senate, one that may be overlooked is his central role in making the promotion of human rights internationally a significant factor in American foreign policy for the long term.

Kennedy had reacted strongly to reports of the great cruelties that accompanied the coup in which General Augusto Pinochet took power in Chile on September 11, 1973. He immediately proposed a sense of Congress resolution calling for a cutoff of economic and military assistance to the Chilean government until human rights protections were restored. Over the next two years he worked with a group of members of the House of Representatives, led by Representative Don Fraser of Minnesota, to adopt legislation requiring the United States to deny military aid to governments practicing gross abuses of human rights; to establish a State Department post of Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights; and to publish annual reports on the human rights practices of governments worldwide. Advised by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, President Gerald Ford vetoed the legislation, but Kennedy led the way in persuading Congress to override Ford's veto. The legislation that Kennedy sponsored still shapes U.S. foreign policy more than three decades later.

Most of the leading U.S.-based human rights organizations - such as Human Rights Watch, Human Rights First, Physicians for Human Rights and the Committee to Protect Journalists - were established in the late 1970s or the early 1980s, after the Congress adopted Kennedy's proposals. The fact that there was legislation already on the books requiring the United States to promote human rights played a role in their emergence and made it possible for them to become influential bodies. Though Kennedy himself has passed from the scene, the movement that he helped to create can be counted on to continue the struggle that he initiated.
Read more: Chile, Augusto Pinochet, Senate, Human Rights, Henry Kissinger, Gerald Ford, Ted Kennedy, World News

Vickie Karp: Third Screen: Adam Richman, Food Athlete

2009-08-26T11:36:08Z

Caught up with Adam Richman, star of Man v. Food on the Travel Channel, Wednesday nights at 10pm, to talk food, towns, people, history, and to ask ...

How fat is your crew? How do you really feel about that place that serves Philly cheese steak wrapped in a slice of pizza? What do you think it says about France that they serve such puny portions? And how close did you come to winning a t-shirt and a guitar when you ate the Johnnie B. Goode sandwich in Boise, Idaho?

Richman is a stand-up Brooklyn boy who fondly remembers the original Nathan's hot dog stand in Coney Island, the old Horn and Hardart's automats of NYC, the cheesecake at Lindy's, and the kasha varniskes at Ratner's.

Tonight on Man v. Food, it's a multi-pound sundae at the Creamery in San Francisco. Other nights, it will be 14-inch-wide pancakes with pineapple,coconut and Macadamia nuts in Oahu, Hawaii and reindeer sausage in Alaska. But it will always be big, Really big. Serious non-stop all-American big.

"Lulu's cinnamon buns weigh three and a half pounds," he explains in a recent entry on his Vlog about an episode that took him to the heartland. "The exact dimensions of Raisa Gorbachev's hat."

Now that's something I did not know. Here's more ...

TS: Tell me about eating that sandwich with "Shut Up Juice" in Little Rock, Arkansas. According to the literature, there's a 70% failure rate. I also want to hear about the Four Horsemen Burger with the "ghost chiles."

Richman: The Four Horsemen is a little scary. There's jalapeno, habenero. You have to get the peppers right. People are so fiercely passionate about their food. I know, I know, in the grand scheme of things, who cares? But there's civic pride in the food. It's not to be trifled with. The Four Horsemen is not a little spicy. The peppers can make an ordinary man crumble.

TS: Why the word "ghost"?

Richman: Probably because it killed people. Kidding. Some of the "Ghost chile" ingredients are not only used in cooking. They're also used to keep wild elephants at bay. So clearly anyone who eats it has less common sense than an elephant. Since I have, it means I'm coming out on top of the elephant. Also, they always say if you want to look skinny, stand next to fat people. So I'm standing next to the elephant on this.

TS: What's the worst thing you ever had to eat?

Richman: In my private or professional life? Wow. I'd have to say goat. There was this goat dish in Texas. Someone had already eaten all the meat out and brought me the rest. It was pretty narly. And I don't want to malign my gracious hosts, but the aforementioned "ghost chiles" are awful. Bloody awful. I say this as a caveat to any chile head -- please, from the bottom of my heart, don't. They are so caustic chemically it surpasses the mere uncomfortability of eating something spicy and brings to it levels of All Quiet on the Western Front.

TS: There's a lot of poetry in the naming of local food.

Richman: There's a donut place in Portland, Oregon called Voodoo Donut. They're like Telly Sevalis. They say things like "Why don't you hang a fang on that?" There's another place called Every Picture Tells A Story Donut. That's pretty good. Let's see. We mentioned Shut Up Juice. Four Horsemen. There's Pastrami From Hell. The unfortunately named Quadruple Bypass Burger. Baseball's Best nachos. Goober burger. And now a few dishes bear my name. They've added a dish to the menu at Pappy's Smokehouse in St. Louis called "The Adam Bomb." When you eat one, you can see all of Madagascar. And now I hear the San Francisco Creamery might add a sundae in my honor.

TS: There's a live chat after tonight's show. It's 10:30ET at www.travelchannel.com/TV_Shows/Man_v_Food. What do people talk to you about?

Richman: I did a live chat from St. Louis. It's a nice way to connect. I try to use social media as much as possible. I meet all these great people in towns all over the country and I never have enough time to really talk with them. You've got to understand, it's freaky as hell when anyone refers to you as a celebrity. This time a couple of years ago, people didn't want me to sign a parking ticket. Now, it's hats, shirts, cars, cleavage. It's crazy to me. So any opportunity to humanize the experience is great. People I don't know come up and punch me in the arm. Hard.

TS: How did the show come about for you?

Richman: I had been slugging it out in regional theater for five years, augmenting my food journal, working at hotels and theaters and restaurants from San Francisco to St. Louis to Cleveland to L.A. to D.C. and beyond, and I think that certainly played a part in it.

TS: What about the food challenges?

Richman: I honestly didn't know how well I'd do. I still don't. One thing I always want to impress upon everybody who watches the challenges on the show -- the competitive eating -- at no point do I or the network advocate over-eating or reckless gluttony. It's about the occasional indulgence, the once in a blue moon indulgence. In this economy, travel is in and of itself an indulgence. I'm not going to the Riviera or Monte Carlo. I'm going to Pittsburgh. And families of four can go to Pittsburgh and have a great experience and be seriously proud of the food our nation has produced. This is about these great treats that are out there, great local finds, that's the main thing. It's a completely fun exploration of local destinations, one bite at a time.

TS: A love of American places and people?

Richman: Places that have a distinct voice. A distinct link to the environment in which they are. That's the great part. We go to places to eat in Little Rock, Arkansas and see what they represented to both a former president, and farmers who still go to the Mercantile to buy wingnuts for their lawnmowers. It's not just a souvenir. It's something you can ingest, something you can taste. What is Arkansas? What do they grow there? Who owns the shops? Tangible edible proof of the place, and the life.

Read more: Hawaii, San Francisco, Food, Alaska, Travel, United States, Cuba, Chile, Ice Cream, Restaurants, Burgers, Locavores, Entertainment News

Chile Land Dispute Escalates As Mapuche Leaders Threatened

2009-08-18T09:37:11Z
SANTIAGO -- A Ku Klux Klan-like group believed to be made up of large landowners in southern Chile is vowing to kill as many indigenous Mapuche as it can in retaliation for land occupations by the Mapuche.
Read more: Chile, Hernan Trizano Commando, Chile Mapuche, Threats to Mapuche, Chile Land Ownership, Chile Hernan Trizano Commando, Mapuche Leaders, Chile Land Dispute, Mapuche, World News

Nelson P. Valdes: Honduras: Term Limits When Governments Benefit People

2009-07-29T16:30:14Z
"Why haven't there been attempted coups in Washington DC? Because there's no
US Embassy there." -- Joke told by Chilean journalist to President Obama during President
Michelle Bachelet's White House visit.

In 1954, conservative Dwight Eisenhower authorized the CIA to overthrow Guatemala's government, modeled on a 1953 "regime change" in Iran. In 1964-65, liberal Lyndon Johnson authorized coup d'etats in Brazil and the Dominican Republic. Dominicans resisted; Johnson sent in troops.

In September 1970, conservative National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon disapproved of the government Chileans had elected. They decided to alter Chilean destiny by replacing Dr. Salvador Allende's democratic government with 17 years of military fascism, 1973-90.

In the post-Cold War world, such flummery became laughable. Washington thus faced an apparent dilemma: direct policy toward law and human rights or continue collaborating with military thugs. National security officials tried to finesse this impasse with a new blueprint, a façade that would perpetuate Latin American oligarchs and satisfy US corporations and banks linked to local elites.

In 2002, the first test came when US-backed military officers kidnapped Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. But unforeseen opposition arose inside the Venezuelan military; masses of Venezuelans took to the streets. The coup failed.

Washington continued ranting against the "undemocratic" Chavez without mentioning his five successive victories -- since 1998 -- in internationally supervised elections. Chavez' government won because it directed its energy toward meeting basic needs, despite middle and upper class opposition.

In 2004, in test two, the State Department "to protect" Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide, helped his kidnappers. Following the Venezuela model, the Haitian plotters fabricated a "resignation letter." It worked.

In June, the third coup test began. Military thugs kidnapped Honduran President Manuel Zelaya. Civilian plotters faked his letter of resignation. The Honduran Supreme Court provided legal cover by ordering Zelaya's arrest -- not kidnapping and deportation -- for violating the Constitution. A 2009 State Department Human Rights Report had characterized that Court as issuing "politicized rulings" and contributing "to corruption in public and private institutions."

All three 21st Century coups followed traditional US policy in Latin America. Oppose change that helps the poor. Presidential re-election becomes "constitutional" when aspiring Latin American candidates serve local ruling class and Washington interests as in Colombia and Costa Rica. Otherwise, they remain sacred, no matter what they actually say about democracy.

Mind-numbing discussions of "legally authorized behavior" have omitted reference to conditions in Honduras. A 2003 report showed the richest 10 percent still netted 50 times more than the poorest 10th. 86.3% of the Honduran rural population lived in poverty; 71.3% of urban dwellers qualified as poverty-stricken.

A 2006 United Nations Development Program described Honduras as "suffering from
profound social inequalities, with very high levels of poverty, and with an insufficient economic growth where the population had a relative dissatisfaction with the results of democracy." 15% of rural Hondurans have a 40 years or less life expectancy; 20.4% of the adults remain illiterate. The UNDP concluded that "the time for change is now."

Until Zelaya tried to incorporate democracy into the governing equation, Honduras' elite with US banking and corporate backing, exercised a seemingly perfect recipe: people vote but don't change anything. Congress and Courts belong to the rich and powerful who also control the military in cooperation with the Pentagon. Washington provided aid. The School of the Americas trained Honduran officers.

For Zelaya, the UNDP Report coincided with a brutal fact. Switzerland and Honduras each have 7 million people. Swiss yearly average income is $53 thousand; Hondurans $2K. When Zelaya began to act on his "obligation" to meet peoples' needs the rich in Tegucigalpa and some of the powerful of Washington reacted: a coup. This déjà vu experience to millions of Latin Americans changed, however, when the OAS voted to reject the "de facto" government. One hundred and ninety two countries also refused to recognize the "putschists."

Coup defenders like the Honduran Catholic and Protestant hierarchy and right wing anti-Castroites of Miami applauded the "rescue of Honduras from the claws of Chavism."

The polarized drama descended toward farce, however, when Costa Rican President Oscar Arias did not arrest the kidnappers, impound their military plane and demand the surrender of the illegitimate gang in Tegucigalpa. Instead, he allowed them to return. No high official or mainstream reporter has yet suggested Arias aided and abetted a kidnapping and coup even when Collaborator Arias became Mediator Arias.

Twenty years ago, Arias refused to allow US bases in Costa Rica for its illicit war against
Nicaragua. His one act of "disobedience" won him a Nobel Prize. Since then, he has shown loyalty to Washington's and Wall Street policies.

Arias followed US dictates by not befriending Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro or any serious "change" talker. Zelaya disobeyed. Washington, faced with a unanimous OAS, formally disapproved of the coup. But Secretary Clinton wouldn't call it a coup and proposed that Zelaya return with "reduced powers." She wanted a coalition government to further weaken him and no punishment for the coup-maker. This plan would also cost Zelaya control of the Honduran military.

Clinton's formula calls for early elections, a phenomenon US Presidents hail -- when they benefit US interests. Elected governments helping the poor and reducing US corporate interests beget US-backed coups. Washington insists they obey term limits and abide by their Constitution which State Department officials have apparently not read.

Sources:

U.S. Department of State, 2008 Human Rights Report: Honduras. February 25, 2009.

J. MacDonald, Expresión de la pobreza en la ciudad, Reunión Grupo de Expertos sobre Pobreza Urbana en America Latina y el Caribe, 27-28 de Enero 2003, p 4-5.

Read more: Dominican Republic, Chile, Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, Henry Kissinger, Latin America, Latin America Policy, Manuel Zelaya, Jean Bertrand Aristide, Military Fascism, Us-Policy-in-Latin-America, Manuel Zelaya Honduras, Post-Cold-War, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Chavism, Coup D'etat, Secretary Clinton, Anti-Castroites Miami, United Nations Development Programme, Cia, Oscar Arias, Richard Nixon, US Embassy, State-Department-Human-Rights-Report, Guatemala, Lyndon Johnson, Salvador-Allende, Undp, World News

Tiny Drizzle Wreaks Havoc In Desert City

2009-07-21T12:57:02Z
SANTIAGO, Chile — In one of the driest regions on earth, even a drizzle can cause an emergency.

Less than 100th of an inch (about 0.2 millimeters) of rain fell on the Chilean port city of Iquique Monday afternoon, accompanied by moderate winds of about 10 mph (17 kph), according to the country's weather service. That was enough to knock out power to several neighborhoods and to damage the roofs of 4,000 precarious dwellings, Gov. Miguel Silva said Tuesday.
Read more: Chile, Desert, Iquique Chile, Desert City Rain, Wtf, Extreme Weather, Green News

Jason Saltoun-Ebin: Qadhafi: Once A Clown, Always A Clown?

2009-07-21T10:27:36Z
After President Obama shook hands with Libyan leader Qadhafi earlier this month at the G8 summit, I tried to imagine what President Reagan would have done had he been in Obama's shoes. My initial reaction was probably the same as most -- there is no way Reagan would have shook hands with the guy responsible for scores of acts of international violence, a guy he famously called the "mad clown of Tripoli"-- the same guy that Reagan probably hoped would have been killed when he ordered air strikes against Libyan military targets in 1986.

But the question of what Reagan would have done stuck with me, so I scoured my collection of recently declassified documents on Libya from the Reagan Library and ended up posting a few online at www.thereaganfiles.com. The documents show the evolution of the Reagan policies starting with a February 1982 NSC paper titled, "Next Steps on Libya," to two 1986 papers detailing Qadhafi's use of international violence to consolidate power, to the efficacy of economic sanctions President Reagan ordered in 1987.

Combined with my research on Reagan's NSC meetings, after thinking about it for a week I'm now not so sure Reagan wouldn't have looked Qadhafi square in the eye and said, "Welcome back to the civilized world, it's about time."

Reagan, after all, was big on overlooking people's transgressions if they could help the Reagan agenda, which in his time meant fighting communism. One example stuck in my mind is how Reagan, in a Nov. 18, 1986 NSC meeting on Chile, advocated overlooking the horrible human rights record of General Pinochet of Chile because he feared that if Pinochet fell from power the communists would take over Chile. The full meeting minutes from the Nov. 18, 1986 meeting on Chile can be read by clicking here, but the pertinent part reads:

Pres. Reagan: Well, I guess there would be some screaming and hollering from the Congress but maybe we should think about a state visit.

Secretary Shultz: No way. This man has blood all over his hands. He has done monstrous things.

Pres. Reagan: But haven't there been some signs of progress? Letting some exiles back and cleaning up the national police?

Secretary Shultz: The police are in an uncomfortable position. They get comprised by the orders from the top. And it results in their being more and more hated.... Pinochet is formidable. I've met him, but it's been some time. He is a chess player. He's like a chess player that acts like a tiger. He sees the board and makes his moves and wacks at them.

Pres. Reagan: But they have a legitimate communist problem. Allende was removed because of the citizens. It was the march of the wives and so forth that brought him down.
There was no state visit to Chile but Reagan's fear of communism clearly put him in the camp of a man with "blood all over his hands."

Today, communism is no longer the problem of the day, which begs the question, how would shaking hands with Qadhafi have promoted the Reagan agenda, which would have been today's agenda, namely fighting terrorism and finishing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm not sure Reagan would have seen shaking hands with Qadhafi as a step towards any of these goals but Reagan, like Obama, might have been thinking that the United States could always use another friend, and that's a tough argument to refute, even if that friend happens to be a clown.

Read more: Chile, Qadaffi and Terrorism, Ronald Reagan, Augusto Pinochet, Muammar El-Qaddafi, World News

Cynthia Boaz: The Iranian Crackdown: Who's Really Afraid of Whom?

2009-06-24T12:50:02Z
Now that the Iranian regime has predictably cracked down, there is a growing misconception that the resistance has failed and "stability" (i.e. status quo) is on its way to being restored. However, the conventional wisdom that repression "works" is in need of some correction, especially when it comes to the ongoing events in Iran.

First of all, it is critical that spectators of the Iranian uprising understand that violent repression on the part of the regime is not evidence of the regime's strength, but rather of its weakness. And that when a regime finds itself resorting to draconian measures to suppress the voice of its own people -- even as an international audience watches in horror -- it is a sign that the regime has calculated that they are facing an opponent of potentially enormous power. Violence is a last resort, even for a repressive regime, because the cost of using it can be devastating to a government's legitimacy. Hannah Arendt wrote that "In a head-on clash between violence (a state-sponsored military) and power (mass civil resistance), the outcome is hardly in doubt." But, she continues, while violence can temporarily disable the momentum of power, "it is utterly incapable of creating it." Since violence is purely a destructive force while mass civil resistance has the potential to be a creative force, each use of violence by the Iranian government against nonviolent protesters chips away at the political authority of the regime, and makes the case for an alternative source of power that much stronger. When used against a nonviolent movement, instead of being a sign of strength, extreme brutality often results in what Gene Sharp has called "political jiu-jitsu." This is where the regime's violence ends up working against them instead. When martyrs are created (e.g. "Neda"), internal or external parties who were previously on the sidelines are often galvanized to support the movement. So every time the regime represses, it further undermines its own power while simultaneously helping to recruit new members to the resistance.

A second thing that global observers should understand is that just because we can't see the movement, we should not assume that they have been successfully crushed. To the contrary, a strategic movement understands that mass protests and rallies are only one -- usually the most visible -- tactic amongst a menu of options available to a nonviolent civil resistance campaign. Successful movements are able to anticipate and prepare for the inevitable brutality of a regime like the one currently being undermined in Iran. They adapt lower-risk actions that take individuals out of the cross hairs, but allow the movement to sustain both their morale and momentum. Over recent days, we've heard about numerous campaigns that fall into this category (for example, Mousavi himself has allegedly organized a mass campaign to nonviolently shut down bazaars across the country), which, when combined with the ongoing activity in the digital media, are clear signs that the movement has not gone away. Ordinary people have withdrawn their consent for the government and are willing to take action, especially if creative, low risk options are presented to them. They are following in the footsteps of courageous nonviolent resisters who battled against Pinochet's junta in Chile, the apartheid regime in South Africa, and the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. All of those movements faced severe repression yet devised nonviolent actions to disrupt their oppressive systems and mobilize people. So while the Iranian government would like us to believe that they are "restoring normalcy," the reality is just the opposite. Is it possible that people's desire to be free from corruption and oppression now outweighs their fear of being repressed? Ironically, once that threshold has been crossed, each act of regime repression causes the resistance to go up, which subsequently lowers the level of fear amongst the population. Violence itself becomes a victim of the rule of diminishing marginal returns.

Thirdly, there is very real evidence that many members of the government's security forces have begun to step over to the side of the people. For days now, the rumor has been that it is only the Basij who are still willing to ruthlessly carry out the regime's orders against the protesters. The potential significance of this can't be overstated. An oppressor's security forces are usually the most girded of the pillars of support, which are the institutions or groups who help the oppressor maintain the system of injustice. It is not Ahmadinejad or the clerics themselves who are shooting at the protesters, it is the security forces -- army, police, and paramilitary -- that are doing the regime's dirty work. However, the neutralization of the opponent's security forces is very possible, has been done successfully in the past (a few notable examples include South Africa, Chile, Serbia, Ukraine, and the Philippines), and almost always signals the turning point in the struggle. Sometimes security forces change sides because they've been persuaded by the message of the people's movement. Sometimes they change sides because they believe the regime whose orders they are enforcing is about to fail, and they don't want to go down as losers alongside the government. And sometimes they change sides because they find it more and more difficult to use violence against their own brothers and sisters. Perhaps in Iran they've been moved by the extraordinary courage of the individuals or discovered that they have more in common with the people than the regime. But for whatever reason, members of the security forces are being transformed by a successful outreach campaign on the part of the movement. And once those holding the guns see the people on the other end of the scope as colleagues, neighbors, family, or just human beings, it becomes much more difficult for them to carry out their orders.

It is still too early to draw a conclusion about the medium or long term success of the resistance in Iran, but one thing is certain: every time a government official or cleric openly threatens more repression against the mass nonviolent resistance that still persists, he betrays which party in this dynamic is truly motivated by fear.

Read more: Chile, Mir Hossein Mousavi, South Africa, Nonviolence, World, Repression, Middle East, Violence, Serbia, Nonviolent Action, People-Power, Iran, Hannah Arendt, Philippines, Iranian Election, World News, World News

Chile's Military Expansion Tips Regional Scale

2009-06-18T12:10:57Z
Chile's government recently announced the purchase of 18 F-16 combat planes from Holland, continuing a decade-long weapons spending spree that some say is destabilizing South America's military balance.
Read more: Chilean Military, Chile, South America, Peru, Latin America, Colombia, Brazil, Foreign Affairs, Chile Military, Advocacy, World News

Federer 1 Win From Tying Sampras' Grand Slam Mark

2009-06-05T20:00:43Z
PARIS — Fresh off a ragged, rugged, five-set French Open semifinal victory Friday, Roger Federer was leaving for the night when a dozen or so fans drew his attention.

They wanted photos and autographs, and Federer obliged, signing hats, a poster, even one guy's white polo shirt. As Federer ambled off, a man shouted: "Win on Sunday! Please!"
Read more: Sports, French Open Finals, French Open, Roger Federer, Roger Federer French Open, Pete Sampras, Argentina, Sweden, Chile, Home News

Chile: Remnants Of Dictatorship Get New Life

2009-04-27T09:10:20Z
SANTIAGO, Chile -- During Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship, political prisoners were held in navy ships and stadiums, in office buildings and police stations. Military bases, expropriated houses and resorts: all served as detention and torture centers.
Read more: Globalpost, Chile, South America, Latin America, Chile Dictatorship, Santiago Chile, Chile Pinochet, Dictatorship, Pinochet, Augusto Pinochet, World News

Susan Benesch: The Danger of Caution

2009-04-23T23:02:43Z
If President Obama agrees to investigate or prosecute U.S. officials for torture, he will take a place in line behind newly-elected leaders of Chile, Argentina, South Africa and many other countries who have had to reckon with the crimes of regimes they had just replaced.

Each country has worked out a different formula during the quarter-century in which "transitional justice" has gone from neologism to buzzword, so they now provide the newcomer with a palette of options including truth commissions, trials, hybrid bodies intended to dispense both truth and justice - or none of the above, lest a fragile new government lose its hold on power.

This isn't a typical transitional justice scenario, of course: the United States is not a fledgling democracy. Also, the other countries' former regimes mainly tortured and killed their own citizens, whereas we targeted foreigners. Neither of these is a reason for Obama to sit it out. The United States should be able to uphold the rule of law at least as capably as countries that are just learning, or re-learning, to live by it. And the nationality of torture victims shouldn't have any bearing on the national response to it. First, torture is equally illegal, no matter who suffers it. Second, it causes injury not only to the victims but also to the law, the institutions that carry out torture, the society that sustains them, and to the torturers. The United States must recognize and repair that damage, as soon as possible.

Like his predecessors in other countries, Obama is weighing the risks of reckoning with the past against its benefits. But recent experience from abroad shows that reckoning can only be postponed, not prevented - and if postponed, it festers.

"This is a time for reflection, not retribution," Obama said on Thursday, defending his decision to release four more Bush Administration 'torture memos' while declining to prosecute those who committed torture. "Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past." With these cautious words, Obama inadvertently echoed what Chilean President Patricio Aylwin said on March 4, 1991, upon releasing the report of Chile's National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation. The report described how 2,279 people were killed for political reasons by the 1973-1990 military regime of General Augusto Pinochet. "We should not waste all our efforts digging into wounds that are irreparable," Aylwin said. "We cannot progress by digging deeper into divisions. It is time for pardon and reconciliation."

At the time Aylwin didn't have much choice but to pardon, as his Chilean audience knew. General Pinochet had grudgingly permitted the elections that Aylwin won to succeed him as president in 1990, but Pinochet retained control of the armed forces and the Senate, and had seen to the passage of an amnesty law that covered official acts during his regime.

Aylwin was also well aware of the experience of Argentine President Raul Alfonsin, who took office in 1983 after a seven-year military dictatorship had waged a "Dirty War" against suspected dissidents, killing at least 13,000 of them. Alfonsin created a truth commission and then ordered nine former junta leaders prosecuted, which led to military uprisings that nearly overthrew him. He felt forced to ask Congress to pass laws ending the trials and promising impunity to other officers. In 1990, Alfonsin's successor Carlos Menem pardoned the junta leaders, in the name of national reconciliation. "The past has nothing more to teach us. We must look ahead, with our eyes fixed on the future," Menem said. Alfonsin called it the "saddest day in Argentine history."

There is a saying in Argentina: the past is a predator. Its grip on the present is not easy to loosen. To this day, Chile and Argentina are still reckoning with the state crimes of the 1970s and 1980s. Pinochet was arrested in London in October 1998, based on a human rights case against him in Spain, and eventually returned to Chile, where hundreds of charges for torture and killings were filed against him. He died in 2006 without being convicted. Still, hundreds of other former Chilean military officers have been accused and many convicted, even though more than 30 years have passed since most of the crimes occurred. The same is true for Argentina, where laws against prosecutions for Dirty War crimes have been overturned, and more than 400 people now face charges.

In both countries, the prosecutions have had many curative effects. They made it clear that torture is a crime, strengthened the Chilean and Argentine judiciaries, and elicited truth that the commissions were unable to gather. Once prosecutors scrutinized Pinochet, for example, they charged him for corruption as well as human rights violations, cracking the façade of honesty that he had maintained among some Chileans. The cases against Pinochet led to charges against lower-ranking officials, and opened a new public discussion about the past, joined sometimes by torturers themselves, who have come forward to make startling, detailed confessions. In Argentina, for example, a former naval officer confessed to his role in throwing live prisoners into the ocean during "Death Flights," which sparked a round of confessions from other officers.

Accountability can also be internationally contagious. Just two weeks ago, the Peruvian Supreme Court convicted former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori for torture, disappearances and massacres, and sentenced him to 25 years.

Courts are likely to spend decades deciding U.S. torture cases, too, if Obama declines to consider them promptly. The matter will make its way into courtrooms in other ways. Torture charges against U.S. officials have already been filed in Spain, and civil lawsuits are likely to come from the private bar in the United States.

In January, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) indignantly rejected a truth commission for Bush-era torture and other crimes and said, "This is not Latin America". Sen. Specter was right in an unintended sense. Obama is not navigating a risky transition from military to civilian rule in 1983 or 1991. Surely the United States can do at least as well as Chile or Argentina, in allowing state crimes of the past to be exposed to the rule of law. For Obama the greatest danger may come, in fact, from caution.

Read more: Chile, Argentina, CIA Torture, Human Rights, Latin America, Alberto Fujimori, Torture, World News

Abraham Lowenthal: President Obama and the Summit of the Americas

2009-04-15T19:24:00Z
President Barack Obama will travel to Mexico and then to the 5th Summit of the Americas in Port of Spain, Trinidad, beginning on April 16th. He would do well to remember Ronald Reagan's seemingly obvious but fundamentally important comment on returning from his first trip to South America as President: "These Latin American countries are all very different from each other."

It's crucially important for the new U.S. government at its senior levels to take seriously the oft-repeated advice of regional experts to disaggregate "Latin America" -- to understand its complex diversity. Emphasizing this is now more important than ever.

During the past 20 years, under administrations of both parties, Washington has tended to underline the supposed convergence within the region: toward democratic governance, market-oriented economies, regional economic integration and policies of macroeconomic and fiscal balance. These convergent trends were real, though never universal, and they have been significant, though never as fully consolidated as Washington liked to claim.

Key differences persist among the many countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. Some of the differences are growing, not shrinking. And U.S. policy should focus on how different countries of the Americas cluster along five separate dimensions.

The first is the degree of demographic and economic interdependence with the United States: highest and still growing in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean: lowest and likely to remain low in South America, and especially in the Southern Cone. Countries such as Mexico, El Salvador, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic and others, which have significant fractions of their population living and working in the United States, pose "intermestic" issues -- combining international and domestic facets -- from immigration to medical insurance, pensions to drivers licenses, remittances to youth gangs.

A second dimension is the extent to which the countries have opened their economies to international competition: by far most fully in Chile; a great deal in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Panama and some Central American nations; and less so in other countries. A key challenge in the current world economic crisis will be to shore up the trend toward open economies by resisting domestic pressure for protectionism in our own case.

A third distinguishing dimension is the relative advance of democratic governance (checks and balances, accountability, and the rule of law): historically strong in Chile, Uruguay, and Costa Rica; increasingly, if quite unevenly, robust in Brazil; gaining ground in Mexico over the past twenty years but with ups and downs, hard struggle and major recent setbacks; arguably declining, or at least at risk, in Argentina; under great strain in Venezuela, most of the Andean nations, much of Central America and Paraguay; and exceptionally weak in Haiti. The Obama administration can make an important positive difference on these issues by respecting the rule of law at home and internationally, and by nurturing democratic governance abroad with patience, restraint and skill, mainly through nongovernmental organizations.

A fourth dimension is the relative effectiveness of civic and political institutions beyond the state (the press, trade unions, religious organizations, and nongovernmental entities): strongest in Chile, Uruguay, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic and perhaps Argentina; growing but still severely challenged in Brazil and Mexico; slowly regaining stature but still quite problematic in Colombia; weak in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Venezuela, most of Central America and Haiti. Washington can help strengthen nongovernmental institutions, but it should do so as much as possible through multilateral organizations, and in strict accordance with each country's laws.

Finally, countries differ regarding the extent to which traditionally excluded populations are incorporated: this includes more than 30 million marginalized, disadvantaged, and increasingly politically mobilized indigenous people -- especially in Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, the Peruvian highlands, and southern Mexico -- and Afro-Latin Americans in countries where they are still the object of racial discrimination. The very fact of President Obama's rise to the presidency has probably done more to affect this issue than years of more direct policies, but enhanced U.S. support for poverty alleviation targeted at excluded populations would also be helpful.

Hemisphere-wide summit conferences like the meeting in Trinidad have their place as a way of building communication and rapport, and they offer mutually convenient photo opportunities. But major progress on substantive issues can only be achieved with clusters of countries with comparable or complementary issues and concerns. Recognizing this reality should be the starting point for reframing U.S. policies in the Americas.

Abraham F. Lowenthal, professor of international relations at the University of Southern California, is co-editor of The Obama Administration and the Americas: Agenda for Change, just published by the Brookings Institution.
Read more: Americas Summit, Mexico, Latin America, Latin America Policy, Obama Foreign Policy, 5th Summit of the Americas, Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Peru, Brazil, Venezuela, World News

Women Make Up Majority Of Chile's Community Leaders

2009-04-10T12:18:01Z

SANTIAGO, Apr 10 (IPS) - Over 70 percent of community leaders in Chilean shanty towns are women. Their average age is 42, and most of them do not identify with any political party. Forty-five percent believe that the prevailing economic system makes the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

"Our life is extremely lonely. We have to struggle against the whole world to achieve our goals, we have a community that depends on us and we are massively disinformed" about the options that are open to the poor, Cecilia Castro, president of the "We Are Chileans Too" National Association of Campamento (as slums are known in Chile) Leaders, told IPS.

"We did not know that there were funds that could be applied for, or that there were subsidies available. That is why we decided to create the Association in 2006 and go out and look for information," said the 41-year-old slum-dweller.

Castro took part this week in the presentation of the results of the first National Survey of Campamento Leaders, carried out by the Social Research Centre (CIS) attached to the Fundación Un Techo para Chile (A Roof for Chile Foundation), a not-for-profit organisation funded by donations and operated by volunteer workers that was created in 1997 by Jesuit priest Felipe Berríos.

According to official figures, the poverty rate in this South American country of 16 million people declined from 38 percent in 1990 to 13 percent in 2006. But a survey by Un Techo para Chile in 2007 found there were still 533 shanty towns home to 29,000 families nationwide.

The Foundation launched a campaign to eradicate slums by 2010, the 200th anniversary of Chile's independent existence as a republic.

In order to find out more about the characteristics, concerns and hopes of the leaders of the shanty towns, which often lack basic services, the CIS interviewed 289 community leaders around the country in May and June 2007.

The results indicate that 76 percent of the leaders are women, the average age is 42, 55 percent are married, and 50 percent give their main occupation as head of household.

Approximately 90 percent of the respondents said they were religious believers, mainly Roman Catholics (60 percent), followed by Protestant denominations (34 percent).

Some 25 percent of the community leaders had finished primary school, nearly 16 percent had completed their secondary education and nearly five percent had completed studies at university or technical institutes.

Asked what had motivated them to become leaders, 64 percent replied that they "wanted change," whereas 42 percent said they "needed to express themselves."

When it came to politics, 79 percent said they were registered voters, but 62 percent did not identify with any political party - a higher proportion than the national average found by other polls.

Among those leaders who did identify with political parties, 67 percent supported the centre-left Coalition of Parties for Democracy that has governed the country since 1990.

The rightwing opposition Alliance for Chile came second, mentioned by 22 percent of those expressing a party preference, followed by Juntos Podemos Más, a coalition of the Communist Party and other small leftwing parties without parliamentary representation, with 11 percent.

Within the governing coalition, on an individual party basis, the Christian Democracy Party was the most popular, with 32 percent support, followed by the Socialist Party.

The authority who most listens to their opinions, the leaders said, is President Michelle Bachelet. Senators were regarded as those who listen least.

Asked about the factors that exclude or limit participation by poor people in national decision-making, nearly 22 percent of the respondents blamed discrimination by the institutions, more than 13 percent mentioned lack of resources and 13 percent said the fault lay in their own lack of education.

To the question "What does democracy mean, in your opinion?" 26 percent replied "the right to speak up and to vote," nearly 17 percent said "the right to have my views heard," and 13 percent said "equality."

Asked why poverty persists, 45 percent said "the economic system makes the rich get richer and the poor get poorer," 17 percent said "there is no real political will to overcome it (poverty)," and 16 percent said "people's capabilities differ widely."

Furthermore, 52 percent of the interviewees expressed the view that the best way to overcome poverty is to have "better jobs with fairer wages," 30 percent said education and training are needed, and nearly seven percent said "a change in the structures of society" is required.

Ninety-two percent of the community leaders believed that wealth distribution in Chile is unjust. They said the main problems in society today are drug consumption (41 percent), unemployment (15 percent), education (10 percent), and lastly, housing (seven percent).

The social exclusion suffered by families living in the slums is also reflected in their lack of access to technology and cultural recreation, the study says.

For example, 26 percent of the shanty town leaders have never been to a movie theatre, 49 percent have never seen a play, 80 percent have never used e-mail and 74 percent have never surfed the Internet.

Thorny issues in Chilean society were also addressed. Over 55 percent of those surveyed said that "women have no right to an abortion under any circumstances," and 53 percent said "the death penalty is applicable in certain circumstances."

"The expectations these leaders have about social mobility is one of the main conclusions of the study. Taking on leadership roles shows that they are seeking a change, trying to do something about their circumstances, and not just for themselves and their families, but also for their communities," Javiera Pizarro, the head of the CIS, told IPS.

"It has made them look at themselves and think that in five years' time they will be better off than they are now, that they will get decent houses and there will also be more social justice in Chile," the sociologist said.

The demands of shanty town community leaders are not limited to decent housing, Pizarro added, but include improvements in the quality of healthcare and education for their children, and getting wider access to cultural and technological services.

The conclusions of the study should help to include community leaders in the process of formulating public policies, she said.

Government officials should realise that "leaders do not only arise from the traditional circles of power, but also from the grassroots level, and the voices of community leaders should be heard because they speak of their own needs," Pizarro said.

"We are organising regional councils to develop concrete proposals in this election year. We want to tell the presidential candidates, 'Look, these are the proposals of the most vulnerable people in the country, what do you say to them?' We don't want them to offer us the same plans they have been offering for 20 years," Castro stated.

"This year we are going to be much more proactive, we are going to make many more demands. But we're not going to stand on street corners, shouting complaints against the Ministry of National Assets, unless we have a definite proposal to make," the leader concluded.

Read more from Inter Press Service

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Read more: Chile, Chilean Community Leaders, Foreign Affairs, Chilean Women, Chilean Women Community Leaders, Chilean Shantytowns, Santiago, Advocacy, Inter Press Service, World News

G-20 Summit: Gordon Brown Optimistic

2009-03-27T13:41:49Z
Mr Brown says he is optimistic about the summit after Foreign Office minister Lord Malloch Brown said it had to produce more than "empty promises".
Read more: Chile, Gordon Brown, Gordon Brown G-20, England, Group of 20, Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Europe, G-20, G20 Summit, G-20 Summit, g20, World News

Biden Pens Op-Ed To Latin America

2009-03-27T10:47:12Z
Vice President Biden is currently in Chile for the Progressive Governance Summit, where he will meet with Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Spanish President Zapatero, Brazilian President da Silva and Argentine President Fernandez. As part of his diplomatic effort, the vice president penned an op-ed, titled "A New Day for Partnership in the America", that appeared in 11 newspapers and three languages throughout Latin America. Here is the press release with the English version:

March 27, 2009

A New Day for Partnership in the Americas

By Vice President Joe Biden

Next month, President Obama will travel to Trinidad and Tobago to meet his colleagues from across the Western Hemisphere at the Summit of the Americas. In advance of that historic meeting, I am traveling to Central and South America to consult with Latin American leaders gathered in Chile and Costa Rica about the Summit and the challenges faced by the people of the Americas.

These meetings are an important first step toward a new day in relations and building partnerships with and among the countries and people of the Hemisphere.

The President and I understand that only by working together can our countries overcome the challenges we face. Today, we are more than just independent nations who happen to be on the same side of the globe. In today's interconnected world, we are all neighbors who face many common concerns.

The current global economic crisis has touched virtually all of us--every country, every community, every family. Citizens everywhere are searching for answers, looking for hope--and turning to their leaders to provide them. It is our duty as global partners to heed their calls, to together forge a shared solution to a common problem.

Our Administration is taking several steps to make this happen. Our Congress has approved the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which is designed to promote job creation and to set a course for growth for the next generation. The President has proposed a budget designed to set a foundation for the economy of the future, with important investments in health care, education, and energy. And we are working with our partners in the G-20, who meet next week in London, on a coordinated plan to ensure recovery and restart growth, and to reform the international regulatory and supervisory system to ensure that no such crisis occurs again.

Rekindling the U.S. economy and ensuring that international financial institutions serve the interests of the people are particularly important for the Americas. Our economic interconnection means that a robust U.S. economy is good for the hemisphere and can become an engine for bottom up economic growth and equality throughout the region.

The economy isn't the only challenge requiring our cooperation. We also face dual challenges of security - both for our countries and for the individuals who inhabit them. Our countries are plagued by gang violence and the illegal trafficking of weapons and narcotics.

In the United States, we need to do more to reduce demand for illicit drugs and stem the flow of weapons and bulk cash south across our borders. We applaud Mexico's courageous stand against violent drug cartels, as well as Colombia's anti-drug efforts, but we know that they will have the side effect of pushing traffickers into Central America. We will build on the Meridá Initiative - started last year under President Bush - to assist Mexico and the Central American nations in a joint effort to confront that threat head-on. The drug trade is a problem we all share and one whose ultimate solution we must devise together.

Consistent with the Inter-American Democratic Charter, we must also focus on building and encouraging strong democracies, where basic fairness, social equality, and a deep respect for human rights and the rule of law are the guiding principles of everything we do. Democracy is about more than elections; it's about strong, transparent governance and a thriving civil society. It is also about addressing as effectively as possible the challenges of poverty, inequality and social exclusion

We recognize that the United States is still striving to meet its constitutional goal of forming a "more perfect union" and that we have, in the past, fallen short of our own ideals. But we pledge every day to honor the values that animate our democracy, and to lead by example. This is why, on his third day in office, the President ordered the closure of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay.

Finally, we all face the threat to our planet posed by the changing climate, and, so, we share the need to develop clean energy sources to combat--and reverse--this critical threat. The President and I are deeply committed to leading in the development of an urgent and coordinated response to climate change. Working as partners, we must harness the potential of green energy in a way that protects our planet for future generations, while also catalyzing economic growth for the generations of today.

As we face these threats and as we confront the most serious economic crisis in generations, the countries of the Hemisphere must look forward. And we must work together, as partners, to give our citizens hope that brighter days lie ahead.

Read more: Chile, Joe Biden Vp, Latin America, United Kingdom, Brazil, Biden Op-Ed, Foreign Affairs, Argentina, Michelle Bachelet, Cristina Fernandez De Kirchner, Spain, Joe Biden, Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva, Gordon Brown, Biden, Advocacy, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, World News