ISIS in Latin America

Reading Admiral Kurt Tidd’s 2017 Posture Statement for U.S. Southern Command, two things jump out at me. First, there are repeated mentions of budget constraints. Second, there are repeated mentions of Middle Eastern terrorists, including ISIS. In short, at least from the outside this sounds like a way to get Donald Trump’s (or at least Jared Kushner’s) attention at a time when he is talking about increasing military budgets and ISIS.

Right off the bat:

Threat networks engage in a range of destabilizing illicit activities that further dangerous ideologies or generate profit. Violent extremist organizations like ISIS seek to radicalize and recruit vulnerable populations in the Caribbean and parts of Central and South America. Hezbollah members, facilitators, and supporters engage in licit and illicit activities in support of the organization, moving weapons, cash, and other contraband to raise funds and build Hezbollah’s infrastructure in the region.

That’s some serious red meat right there. When John Kelly (who of course is now Secretary of Homeland Security) did his last posturestatement, he definitely discussed Middle Eastern terrorism but couched it with phrases like “we have not yet seen evidence of this occurring.” But if you need money and money might be available, you do away with the nuance.

So we have a gradual expansion of SouthCom talking about such terrorists as more of an imminent threat in Latin America, which gets both the right and the alt-right excited. Go ahead and work with allies; go ahead and disrupt the financial networks. Just don't make this an excuse for ill-conceived intervention.

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Venezuelans Like Their Legislature

The Latin American Public Opinion Project at Vanderbilt has some brand new (October 2016-January 2017) survey data from Venezuela. Mariana Rodríguez and Liz Zechmeister just published a new AmericasBarometer Insights paper (it's been a while since one was published, so this was welcome). They show Venezuelans strongly disapprove of closing the legislature (a question they actually use in their normal battery, so obviously it's good to have in there).

As a matter of fact, over the past few years Venezuelans have increased their trust in the legislature:

We can reasonably argue that the executive branch attacks on the legislature have made it more popular. The authors further conclude that the recent attack will likely make Nicolás Maduro less popular. Since only 17% of Venezuelans think he is doing a "good" or "very good" job, he can't go a heck of a lot further down.

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Nica Act

The U.S. Congress has revived the Nica Act from last year, while making it more stringent. The idea is that the United States should block international loans if Daniel Ortega doesn't follow some required conditions. An initial version passed the House in late 2016 but didn't get further than that. The new version has more conditions. From Ileana Ros-Lehtinen's own description, arguing that it's the same for other countries:

The act placed numerous conditions on aid for Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador including certification that the governments were taking effective steps to address 16 conditions, including combating corruption, protecting human rights, combat human smuggling and trafficking, and improving border security.

Nicaragua is a poor country and I don't tend to see depriving the poor as a great way of fostering democratization. It also has more than a whiff of forcing drug tests on welfare recipients. Plus, unless I am missing something, Ros-Lehtinen is talking about aid, whereas the bill is about loans. It's worth noting that some in the Nicaraguan opposition thinks it matters, though.

I am liable to listen to Luis Almagro, clearly no shrinking violet on such matters, who does not support it.

The OAS General Secretariat considers that the bill, in the context of the present legislature, is not a productive contribution to the tasks that the Government of Nicaragua and the this General Secretariat are carrying out in terms of cooperation for democratic, electoral and institutional strengthening in the country, that have as a direct reference the principles and values of the Inter-American Democratic Charter.

Meanwhile, the Nicaraguan government issued a flowery and lengthy denunciation.

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Crazy Wall Ideas

The bids for Donald Trump's wall are now in, and some of the companies have released descriptions of their proposals. The upshot is that they're insane.

Imagine making the wall a tourist attraction. Perhaps sip a cold beer (maybe even a Mexican beer) at the top of the wall while you stare off into the desert.

Imagine storing nuclear waste inside it. Kinda like a moat, maybe?

Imagine it containing artifacts. I'm not sure how that works, maybe it's embedded. Even worse, the artifacts might be Mexican.

Imagine making it really slippery, with some sort of constantly flowing slime.

Or, conversely, imagine no wall at all but a bunch of libraries and cultural centers. That too is a proposal, and probably one of the more sane ones.

This is what we're currently doing in the United States of America.

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Crying Fraud in Ecuador's Election

The Wall Street Journal has a piece on Guillermo Lasso's accusation of fraud in Sunday's presidential election in Ecuador. Especially coming from a conservative media outlet, the article does not reflect too well on Lasso's case.

Most problematic:

On Sunday, one of Mr. Lasso’s allies in his CREO coalition cited two other exit polls giving him the lead. However, one of the polls cited—by well-respected Informe Confidencial—was never conducted, said Santiago Nieto, the director of that polling firm. 

A private poll conducted by Informe Confidencial on Saturday showed Mr. Moreno leading with a 4.8% advantage over his opponent, said Mr. Nieto, adding that Mr. Lasso celebrated too early based on exit polls, which are often inaccurate. 

“I don’t think it’s correct to put the figures from a poll ahead of the official data,” he said in a telephone interview. Exit polls “are not trustworthy.”

Ouch! We already know that exit pools are hotly contested and should be used with extreme caution. If you want an example, just look at the controversy about the Latino vote in the 2016 presidential election. But we should also know that you should not base an argument on an exit poll that never actually occurred.

Also working against Lasso is that international observers did not detect fraud. The OAS, which is no mouthpiece of the left, has confirmed Lenín Moreno's victory. Further, the conservative governments of Argentina and Peru have already congratulated Moreno.

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Elliott Abrams and Human Rights in Latin America

Mike Allison writes about how Elliott Abrams is mad that The New York Times is claiming Ronald Reagan (and by extension him) was indifferent to human rights in El Salvador in its obituary of Ambassador Deane Hinton. As Abrams writes:

And Ronald Reagan was a great president under whom there were remarkable advances for human rights in Latin American and around the world. Let’s leave it at that.

Mike puts that in the context of Efraín Ríos Montt, who Reagan believed was a committed democrat, going on trial for genocide in Guatemala.

Let's just get something out of the way. The notion that there were any advances, much less remarkable ones, for human rights in Latin America--or anywhere, really--under Reagan requires ignoring Mt. Everest-sized mountains of contrary evidence. And it should be noted that Abrams himself served in the State Department under Reagan in a human rights capacity, and his idea of promoting human rights was to attack human rights organizations. Those groups, meanwhile, could only respond that Abrams was so vicious that sometimes his attacks helped their cause. More recently, he was a vocal supporter of the coup in Honduras.

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Podcast Episode 30: The Venezuelan Crisis

In Episode 30 of Understanding Latin American Politics: The Podcast, I talk with Iñaki Sagarzazu, who is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Texas Tech University. He studies political communication, voting, and Venezuelan politics. The topic is Venezuela. Among other things, we talk about whether this was an autogolpe, the nature of divisions in the government, the international response, and we end on a depressing note about the military, agreeing it was fitting to end on a depressing note.

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Initial Thoughts on Ecuador's Election

Here are the current totals from Ecuador's Centro Nacional de Eleccciones:

The right is saying it will contest the results, so nothing is set yet. When the dust settles, more likely than not any given story will be framed in left/right terms. Assuming Moreno's victory holds, I think "a much needed victory for the Latin American left" will be by far the most common (TeleSur is hopping onto that bandwagon already).

I'll come back to the point I made in an op-ed in February, which is that the left/right thing isn't necessarily a helpful way to understand what's going on. Fundamentally, this is mostly about the Ecuadorian right's inability to craft an effective message after years of demonizing Rafael Correa. Voters look to who is going to solve their problems. If we want to see this in left/right terms, the best way is to consider it an utter failure of the right. As in the United States, too much of the Latin American right is so immersed in its dislike for the incumbent that it spends no time actually developing policy alternatives.

If there is a lesson here, it's for the right in Bolivia and Venezuela. If you want to win (and in Venezuela this is predicated on actually having elections, I know, but it was a problem even when elections were held) then find ways to appeal to people. And even if you do win, you have to govern.

There will be other stories too, such as the 6% who voted null, and of course the right's dispute of the results. Unfortunately, though, I expect the "big win for the Latin American left" to dominate and people will cling to the "pink tide" imagery.

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Christopher Hitchens' Mortality

You immediately notice how short Christopher Hitchens' Mortality (2012) is, and soon learn he had a much larger vision in his head. He was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in June 2010 and died 18 months later. 

It is his effort to show what it means to be, as he puts it, "living dyingly." It's about suffering, straightforward and without wallowing, without religion (of course, for the famous atheist) and with apparently no regrets, and with no small amount of hope. He keeps coming back to the saying "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger," which after his diagnosis he began to see as illusion. Some outcomes were just plainly not leaving you stronger, even if they put off death for a while.

Almost fittingly, the prose is as tight as ever until the final chapter, which is just jottings he was writing in hospitals and never able to make whole. 

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A Weird Autogolpe in Venezuela

Some hours after the declaration by the Venezuelan Supreme Court, prosecutor (and Nicolás Maduro ally) Luisa Ortega said that the Supreme Court's action violated the constitution. This prompted a meeting of the Consejo de la Defensa de la Nación. That body issued a declaration read by Vice President Tarek El Aissami, framing the whole thing as a dispute between the legislative and judicial branches which, technically, it is, sort of, and for the court to review its own ruling to make sure "institutional stability" (which can be defined in any way you find convenient) was preserved.

Then it got weirder.

The core of the declaration is to call for dialogue. Who exactly will be engaging in dialogue is uncertain, given that all the government needs to do is rescind an illegal measure and actually allow the legislature to...legislate. And of course for a recall election to go forward as the constitution provides.

Then it called for dialogue for the broader crisis, not acknowledging that the only reason there's a crisis is because the government is taking illegal measures and uses dialogue as a way to endlessly delay action.

Finally, it took a gratuitous swipe at the OAS because they all hate Luis Almagro. Not really any other reason for that to be in there.

Several possibilities come to mind. They are not mutually exclusive.

1. The Venezuelan government is preparing to back off the Supreme Court decision, and will claim that doing so was a major concession, then require concession from the opposition, thus leaving things the same while pretending to move forward. This is more of the "master plan" sort of explanation and assumes a lot of guile for Maduro.

2. There are real fissures already within the government, and Maduro et al are getting nervous about how long unity will last under duress so are already cracking.

3. Maduro is not certain what the Supreme Court is doing and there is too much chaos (or distrust?) for coordination. That would make this autogolpe even weirder.

Developing...

Update: LITERALLY one minute after I hit "publish" I saw this breaking story on the Supreme Court reversing its decision. Weird indeed.

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Autogolpe in Venezuela

There has been an autogolpe, or self-coup, in Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled that it would govern in the place of the National Assembly, and would feel free to prosecute members of the legislature. Horizontal accountability, already barely there, is now gone entirely. Unlike Peru in 1992 and Guatemala in 1993, the judicial system was part of it, not a target. But the basic idea is the same. In the language of all dictatorships, the government argues that democracy must be attacked in order to be preserved.

I had a lengthy Twitter discussion with Quico Toro yesterday, as he (like others) called on the military to do something. He argued that all other avenues had been exhausted. I argued that hope lay in pushing the splits between hardliners and softliners. Henry Ramos Allsup has said he thinks there plenty of people in the military and in the government who believe this is undemocratic and want elections.

Empowering chavista democrats is the challenge. My own opinion--for now, at least!--is that the best way to do this is for Latin America to close ranks. As I've made clear, I don't think Latin American unity is on the horizon. Maybe the autogolpe changes that. Maybe someone like Rafael Correa, who accepts elections and term limits, says something privately. Something along those lines could give life to the softliners. Peru recalled its ambassador but for now the response is not too strong.

If Latin America abdicates its responsibility, then the situation is more dire. At some point there will be large protests, and those protests will be repressed. Perhaps, as in 1989, a chunk of the military will resent being forced to do the repressing, and push back. Or perhaps a lot of people die and not much changes.

I suppose it's also possible that nothing happens, and everyone waits to see whether a presidential election is held in 2018. Meanwhile, Venezuela becomes more and more like Zimbabwe.

As they say, it's developing.

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Postmortem on Venezuela and the OAS

I recommend Geoff Ramsey's post at WOLA's Venezuela blog about five key takeaways from the OAS session. Actually, I find the entire episode almost more interesting for what it says about broader issues than about Venezuela per se.

So, for example, the Trump administration is doing exactly what I would want a U.S. government to do, which is play an active role but one that is quiet and collaborative. As President Obama said several years ago with regard to foreign policy, "Don't do stupid shit." Marco Rubio is falling into that trap, but thus far Trump isn't in the Venezuelan case*. And that's amazing, really.

Next, Mexico playing a lead is quite a development. Remember when Brazil was the presumed hemispheric diplomatic player? Lula cherished that (as did many past Brazilian presidents), Dilma did so less, and now it's entirely dormant. Given its size, its threat from the Trump administration, but also ironically its close connections to the Trump administration, Mexico could be a hemispheric leader.

*Just one 3:00 a.m. tweet could destroy this, but so far, so good.

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Conservative Take on Cuba

Rep. James Comer, a conservative Republican from Kentucky, just returned from Cuba, where he joined four other members of Congress on a trade mission. He then published an op-ed calling for the end of the embargo. He makes a good case, with essentially the same arguments I (and many others) have been making for years.

The foreign policy position of every American President from Eisenhower to Obama has essentially been to shut off Cuba’s economy through an embargo, thereby starving its people and hoping the people would rise up and overthrow the Castro Regime.  However, what would transpire over the years with the embargo is that the Castro Regime blamed the blunders of the Cuban economy on the American embargo. Thus, the regime remained in power despite horrible economic conditions and standards of living for Cuban citizens.  In other words, U.S. policy toward Cuba actually helped Castro remain in power and keep Cuba a socialist state.
 Lifting the US embargo against Cuba is an overall win-win.  It is a win for foreign policy because countries that the US trades with are countries with which we have good relations. Similarly, countries we ban trade with are the ones where conflict often arises.  Noting Cuba’s proximity to the US, the last thing we need is for China or Russia to establish its own Guantanamo Bay Military Base pointed right at us.  It is also a win for trade, especially agricultural trade.

I'm not concerned about China or Russia establishing a base, which won't happen, but overall I agree.

The big question of course is whether Donald Trump sees Cuba in economic terms or in Cold War terms for his Florida constituency. Comer tries to play to his "make a better deal for Americans" schtick. Bit by bit, Republicans over the years have moved away from support for the embargo, so are ready to accept liberalization.

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Marco Rubio's "Bully" Pulpit

One way not to get what you want is to bully other countries publicly.

Sen. Marco Rubio sent a strong warning to the Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Haiti on Monday, saying that it would be difficult to protect them from possible cuts in U.S. aid if they fail to defend democracy when the Venezuelan government comes up for a possible sanctions vote at the Organization of American States (OAS). 

The Florida Republican, one of the harshest critics of the Venezuelan government in Washington, told El Nuevo Herald that the OAS vote set for Tuesday is exceptionally important for the future of democracy in the region, and of the hemispheric organization itself. 

The vote would even affect the assistance that Washington provides to El Salvador, the Dominican Republic and Haiti, he added.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/article141080013.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/article141080013.html#storylink=cpy

This made me think immediately of George W. Bush pressuring Chile and Mexico (among others) in 2003 to get their UN votes for the invasion of Iraq. It did not go over well, and poisoned the U.S.-Mexico relationship for a long time.

Even worse in this case is the obvious fact that punishing El Salvador and Haiti will only make migration and other issues worse, which then creates more problems for the U.S. As with so many aspects of U.S. policy, unintended (but foreseeable) consequences hover around. Though I suppose we've been learning that blustering and then not getting what you want is a hallmark of the current administration.

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Podcast Episode 29: Venezuela and the OAS

In Episode 29 of Understanding Latin American Politics: The Podcast, I consider the obstacles to the OAS taking some sort of action with regard to Venezuela. My basic argument is that prescriptive analyses aren't terribly useful unless we think about what challenges must first be overcome.

The upshot is that it will take a Herculean effort for anything substantive to happen.

I want to give a shout out to Xanda Lemos, a doctoral student in History at Emory University, alumnus of UNC Charlotte, and musician, for providing the musical clip at the beginning, which was something I had been lacking.

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Problems With Implementing Colombia's Peace Agreement

I recommend listening to Adam Isacson's podcast, where in his first episode he discusses challenges to implementing Colombia's peace agreement, especially with regard to measures being delayed. The list of potential reasons is alarmingly long. He also notes that there are precisely 571 "observable, measurable actions" that all the parties to the accords have to complete. Trying to do that much in such a complex environment is daunting.

One point he makes that I found interesting was that one (of the many) potential problems is that the Colombian military might be the state institution with the best logistical capabilities, yet for obvious reasons it cannot be used to help the FARC demobilize. So the logistics suffer badly.

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Trump and Soft Power in Latin America

Andrés Oppenheimer brings up a useful point about the Trump administration and Latin America. When floods hit Peru, countries from around Latin America (including Venezuela, which can ill afford it) responded.

The presidents of Spain, Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Nicaragua, Honduras and Panama, among others, had either called Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski or announced humanitarian aid to Peru, the report said. But there was no mention of the United States. 

When I called a senior aide to Kuczynski to ask him whether the United States had been accidentally left out of the news report, he said there was still no official statement from Washington, nor an announcement of U.S. aid.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/andres-oppenheimer/article140381658.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/andres-oppenheimer/article140381658.html#storylink=cpy

This is all about soft power. In the article I recently published on the Obama Doctrine and Cuba, soft power was an important component. When you ditch soft power, you lose leverage. If you slice up the State Department and other government agencies, it's harder to respond effectively to crises. Trump is moving in a direction of almost exclusive use of hard power, with threats and bluster leading the way. That will not achieve U.S. policy goals in Latin America, though I suppose we don't have a firm grip of what the administration's policy goals in the region actually are.

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Podcast Episode 28: Human Rights in Chile

In Episode 28 of Understanding Latin American Politics: The Podcast, I talk with my friend and co-author Silvia Borzutzky, Teaching Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Carnegie Mellon University. She has written extensively on social security and health policies in Chile, as well as Chilean politics. She has a forthcoming book with Palgrave entitled Human Rights Policies in Chile: The Unfinished Struggle for Truth and Justice: 1990-2014, that will be coming out this year. That’s our topic, especially the distinction between truth and justice.

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Trump, the IACHR, and Venezuela

The Trump administration refused to attend a meeting of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which is looking into the effects of the immigration Executive Orders.

My immediate reaction was that this was great for the Venezuelan government. Hugo Chávez hated the IACHR and even pulled out of it in 2012. It has been, in fact, persistent in highlighting human rights abuses in Venezuela. If there was going to be any sort of hemispheric response to the Venezuelan crisis, the IACHR would have been part of it in some manner. As I've argued, there won't be a unified response, and this is really just another example.

Now Trump has signaled that it does not value the IACHR, which puts him squarely in the same camp as Nicolás Maduro. Every day they seem to have more in common.

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