Promoting debate about Latin America and the Caribbean
View Article  Including the affected state: Peru's earthquake response and the cluster approach

With a 7.9 score on the Richter scale, the earthquake which struck Peru on the 15th August 2007 shook up the country’s entire natural disaster response system. The magnitude of the event revealed the institutional and logistical limitations of Peru’s crisis response system particularly at the regional level.

The international community has been seeking to improve the capacity, predictability and accountability of humanitarian response processes through the implementation of the cluster approach. Approved by the IASC in 2005, it seeks to concentrate expertise, coordinate action and foster partnerships by grouping humanitarian organisations of the same field under the leadership of ...   more »

View Article  El desafío de ser un país normal

 Por Antonio Cicioni, director del Programa de Instituciones Políticas de CIPPEC (Centro de Implementación de Políticas Públicas para la Equidad y el Crecimiento)

 

Las elecciones presidenciales argentinas del 28 de octubre son, antes que nada, un motivo para celebrar. Se trata de la sexta elección consecutiva desde la restauración de la democracia en 1983, algo que no deja de ser auspicioso si se tiene en cuenta las décadas de violencia y gobiernos dictatoriales que caracterizaron a la Argentina del siglo XX. La democracia logró incluso sobrevivir a la trágica crisis de 2001, que sumió en la pobreza ...   more »

View Article  New Latin American trade and poverty programme launches today

Comercio y Pobreza en Latinoamérica (COPLA) aims to use research based evidence to strengthen and promote an improved dialogue between policymakers, researchers and those institutions that represent the poor to incorporate new issues into the policy debate.

 

 A couple of years ago, when the Free Trade Agreement between the US and Peru was still being negotiated, a friend who had worked in the Peruvian Ministry of Trade and had been involved in the negotiations told me that studies about the effects of the agreement on poverty had been commissioned but not been made public. Why? Because they ...   more »

View Article  Chavez Inc Expands to London
Amid announcements that Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is seeking indefinite terms for the presidency and thereby further undermining what remains of Venezuelan democracy, comes more moves to shore up support from leftist / anti-American leaders the world over… this time, very close to home, in London.   more »
View Article  Tough Times Ahead for Argentina’s Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner

Tough Times Ahead for Argentina’s Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner

Aaron Goldfarb 8 August 2007

After presiding over an impressive fifth year of economic expansion in Argentina, President Nestor Kirchner could have easily won a second term in the upcoming October elections. Instead, Kirchner is stepping aside to let his wife, Cristina Fernandez, seek the presidency. Cristina, who has often been compared to Hilary Clinton, has been a leading figure in the Senate for the past four years. Though her approval rating is not as high as her husband’s, Cristina (as she likes to be known) is still heavily favoured ...   more »

View Article  China’s Growing Presence in Latin America

Costa Rica switched diplomatic relations from Taiwan to Mainland China earlier this month, citing economic reasons as the deciding factor. Costa Rica’s realignment is a small example of how Chinese "checkbook diplomacy" is reshaping Latin American politics. By financing multi-billion dollar infrastructure and public works projects in Latin America, China is receiving contracts for raw materials and foodstuffs that will feed the appetite of its ever expanding economy. On his 2005 tour, President Hu Jintao spoke of a US$100 billion investment in South American infrastructure over the next ten years. Clearly, China is laying the path for a long-lasting presence ...   more »

View Article  They weren’t shouting 'GOOOOOOOOL' …
The stadium shook as the passionate crowd seemed to unite in one resounding voice at the US-Argentina Copa America soccer match in Maracaibo on June 28. A chant was taking hold, and it grew louder and louder as people joined in, clapping and stomping their feet at the same time.   more »
View Article  What Kirchner and Clinton have in common
Argentine president Nestor Kirchner announced this month that he would not run for re-election in order to put forward his wife, Senator Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, as a presidential candidate. Unlike the wives of Juan Peron, Kirchner is an accomplished politician who has served both in the lower house of Congress and now the Senate. Many are comparing her to Hillary Clinton – both are lawyers, both were involved in policy making during their husbands presidency and both are notable politicians in their own right.   more »
View Article  World Bank releases governance indicators for Latin America and other regions

The World Bank released its annual “governance indicators” yesterday – a set of six variables which is designed to measure governance globally.  The project has many critics, broadly falling into two camps – those that oppose the idea on principle and argue that the World Bank should not be in the business of rating countries on governance or any other metric, and those that find fault with the indicators methodology, which could accurately be described as a “kitchen sink” approach to measuring corruption, political stability and other categories of governance with surveys and other imprecise metrics....   more »

View Article  US Medical Ship Tries to Mend Broken Relations with Latin America
After US President George W. Bush’s long trip to Latin America this spring, the US has announced a number of very small humanitarian and aid initiatives for the region which appear like buy-offs to the uninitiated. Dedicating just $20 million (the cost of a single day of the continuing Iraqi war), the US has put a large hospital ship off the coast of several Central American cities in an effort to buy popularity. One can’t help but notice how much this mini-mission has in common with the itinerant Cuban doctors working in Venezuela.    more »
View Article  The de-politicisation of humanitarianism in Colombia is essential in order to avoid further tragedies like the one witnessed last week

In December 2005, Switzerland, France and Spain put forth a proposal to negotiate a humanitarian exchange between hostages kidnapped by the guerrilla group FARC-EP and members of the group being held in prisons by the Colombian government. The proposal sets out a period of 45 days for discussions to be held and the exchange carried out, during which security guarantees would be provided through the ICRC and the UN. But since the proposal was made, neither party have been able to come to an agreement. This has been due to the FARC’s insistence on the demilitarisation of two municipalities ...   more »

View Article  Mexico and Central America Angered by the Defeat of US Immigration Bill

     The bill that proposed a pathway to citizenship for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States now lays dead on the Senate floor, where it will likely stay until after the 2008 presidential election.  Latin American leaders expressed their disappointment, with Mexican President Felipe Calderon calling the Senate’s defeat of the bill, “a grave error” and Salvadorian President Elias Antonio Saca labelling the bill’s demise, “a pity”.  Yet a much more incensed tone arose from the Latin American press.  An op-ed in the Mexican newspaper La Jornada placed responsibility on the shoulders of President Bush, ...   more »

View Article  Watch video of student protesters in Venezuelan National Assembly

Last week, after 11-days of street protests, Venezuelan students opposing Chavez’ decision not to renew the license of the private television channel RCTV were allowed to speak in the National Assembly, an unprecedented event that was also broadcast on Venezuelan television. This video posted on Youtube shows student leader Douglas Barrios giving an impassioned speech in defence of democratic rights, as well as at one point stripping off his red T-shirt. Even if you don’t speak Spanish, it’s worth watching for the expressions of members of Congress and the pro-Chavez students, who far outnumber the protesters.

 

Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hw91wKfN2g

View Article  Venezuela – Off the Rails or an Innovative Financier?

Chavez is getting ever bolder.  As he consolidates all instruments of state power into his hands, undermining Venezuelan democracy in the process (as commented on previous posts on this blog), he has also struck out in a new direction in the international realm: independence from the international financial system. 

Chavez’s government announced during the first week of May that it planned to withdraw its membership from the International Monetary Fund, a first for a major emerging market country.  The announcement created a momentary panic amongst financial analysts because many of Venezuela’s sovereign bonds contain clauses which stipulate ...   more »

View Article  It is not money or experts what Latin America needs: think partners

When DFID withdrew their bilateral programmes in Honduras, Peru and Bolivia, civil society was fast to point out that, among other things, there were many poor Latin Americans who needed urgent assistance. DFID should have stayed to look after them. There are other reasons too for supporting DFID’s direct involvement in Latin American countries. DFID left a space in policy debate that was not filled by other donors (or by the government) and many of the progressive ideas it had supported have suffered to remain in the policy and research agendas.

 

ODI’s mid-term evaluation of DFID’s RAP...   more »

View Article  Postcard from another Mexico: a glimpse into the Zapatistas’ alternative world of politics and development (by Sandip Hazareesingh)

On Sunday 1 April 2007, the Zapatistas launched the second phase of the movement known as La Otra Campana (The Other Campaign).

 

La Otra was originally initiated in January 2006 in the wake of the Zapatista National Liberation Army’s (EZLN) new strategy spelt out in a document famously known as La Sexta (Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle). This proclaimed the need to open a space for the millions of ‘otros y otras’, i.e. the most marginalised sections of the Mexican population – indigenous Indians, maquiladora (sweatshop) workers, the low-paid, women workers in both the country and the ...   more »

View Article  Engaging regionally: Five questions for donors

Working at the regional level poses a series of challenges for donors. DFID’s Regional Assistance Plan (RAP) in Latin America aims to influence regional policy by working with the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, two of the main IFI’s in the region. Without a bilateral programme (except in Nicaragua) DFID faces organisational and contextual challenges which pose a series of fundamental questions -addressed in an ODI evaluation of the RAP. Their answers could potentially inform a process of regional strategy design; but also of global thinking about donors as part of a network of partners and ...   more »

View Article  Biofuels, corn prices and food security in Mexico (by Sitna Quiroz)
Recent announcements from President Bush on prioritising the biofuels agenda have fuelled the debate on the possible implications for developing countries and one of the main concerns is the impact it will have on food security. This issue is of special concern for Mexico, which experienced its first shock in the rise of food prices in January, when the price of tortillas more than doubled. Facing popular discontent, the government’s immediate solution was to authorize the import of 650,000 tons of corn free of tariffs from the US and intervene in the regulation of prices until May, when the new harvests in the North of Mexico are    more »
View Article  Migrant money outstrips aid and investment

The volume of remittances hit the headlines last week on the BBC and One World websites.  The BBC reported that remittances to Latin America are now $62bn, more than aid and foreign direct investment combined. 

This figure has attracted the interest of development policymakers. How, they ask, can remittances be harnessed as an effective development tool? The answer is as yet unknown. What we do know is that the majority of migrants send home small amounts, around $100 to $150 a month.  Charges are incurred per transaction meaning remittances are big business.  One current line of inquiry is what governments ...   more »

View Article  The Juntos programme in Peru: an innovative approach to tackling childhood poverty and vulnerability?
To date, the Juntos programme has been the most ambitious and innovative government attempt at tackling childhood poverty in Peru, a country where two out of three children live below the poverty line and many lack access to basic services. Strange then, that the programme has received so little attention; in fact, debates on child protection in Peru have been more preoccupied with how to punish child molesters and kidnappers and fathers who evade child support than with the state’s responsibility for child well-being. However, according to a recent report to which ODI researchers contributed, Juntos has made ...   more »
View Article  Inviting Posts from Guest Bloggers...

The Overseas Development Institute invites you to contribute to our Latin America and Caribbean Blog!  This blog is written by ODI researchers and provides a forum for discussion and debate on politics and development in Latin America and the Caribbean from contributors all over the world. We also provide information about events, publications or web resources on Latin America. We are particularly keen to encourage the participation of those of you in the region, and welcome your comments, which can be in English or Spanish, as well as your posts. So if you have a specific issue or news story you’d like ...   more »

View Article  The boom in counter-hegemonic news channels - the case of Telesur in Venezuela (ISA, 4th March)

To those who, like myself, had assumed that Telesur was merely an outlet for pro-Chavez propaganda, this talk by James Painter of the BBC World Service revealed some surprising and some not-so-surprising facts about this Caracas-based pan-Latin American TV network. In fact, Telesur is not owned exclusively by Venezuela, but a joint project in which a number of Latin American governments are stakeholders - although it is all paid for by Venezuela’s oil wealth. Claiming to provide an alternative to CNN and other Western media, it follows the example of other ‘counter-hegemonic’ news channels like Al-Jazeera, which ...   more »

View Article  The Politics of Economic Integration: Where does Peru stand in the global context? (LSE, February 26th 2007)

In this conference organised by LSE’s Peruvian Society, speakers reflected on how the new political map of Latin America is influencing Peru’s integration into transnational markets and what this tells us about the opportunities and challenges facing developing countries when interacting in the global economy. Speakers were Dr. Ricardo Luna (Peruvian Ambassador in the UK), Dr. John Crabtree (Centre for Latin American Studies, Oxford University) and Mr. Richard Ralph  (former British Ambassador in Peru (2003-2006) and current chairman of a UK mining company working in Peru). The conference was chaired by LSE’s Dr Evan Killick....   more »

View Article  What impact will China's growth have on Latin American countries?
There has been a surge of recent interest in China’s impact on developing countries, but far more of this discussion has focused on Africa than on Latin America. This is partly because the consequences of China's growth for Latin America are likely to be both more complex and less direct. Unlike Africa, the Latin American resource sector is dominated by large state-owned companies and how these will interact with new Chinese investment is hard to predict. A more developed infrastructure also means China will have less of a competitive advantage in the race to exploit Latin America’s natural resources. In Latin America, there are likely to be both winners and losers, as a recent report by the    more »
View Article  Will he or won’t he? Correa’s game of chicken with Ecuadorian default

Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s new president, has been playing a game of chicken with the international capital markets.  Earlier this week the government announced that it would utilise a 30 day grace period to repay interest on its bonds – in effect, defaulting.  Yesterday, however, the government surprised the markets by making the payment on time. Predictably, the response in the bond markets has been volatility: first a massive selling off of Ecuadorian debt, then a rally.  All of this follows on a campaign promise by Correa to restructure the country’s debt.

 

There are ...   more »

View Article  Surprise! Pemex and PDVSA are the third and fourth largest companies in the world

Attending a conference last week at Chatham House on political risk, I was faced with the most surprising statistic: Pemex and PDVSA are the third and fourth largest companies in the world, respectively.  The presenter, Dr. Harm Bandholz of UniCredit Markets and Investment Banking, informed us that the Mexican and Venezuelan state oil companies were recently ranked by the Financial Times as third and fourth largest companies in the world on the basis of total assets when both state owned and public companies were compared.  This makes both larger than General Electric, and lagging behind only ...   more »

View Article  Rafael Correa: Chavista or ‘Christian on the left’?

 The Western media depict him as a Chavista and the latest South American leader to join the ‘Bolivarian revolution’, yet he describes himself as a ‘Catholic humanist’. He has been criticized both for populism and for using the overly complex language of an academic. So, who is Rafael Correa and what does he really stand for?

 Representing his newly-formed Alianza PAIS, Correa won the November run-off elections in Ecuador with a surprise landslide victory, gaining 58% of the vote. His campaign promises included a new more democratic constitution (to be written by a Constituent Assembly), cutting ties with the IMF and World Bank, ...   more »

View Article  The Ecuadorian presidential elections of 2006 (1st Feb, ISA)
In this talk, hosted by the Institute for the Study of the Americas (ISA), independent consultant and journalist Colin Harding offered an insightful analysis of the 2006 presidential elections in Ecuador, in which Rafael Correa was elected as president. Harding described Correa as a good speaker who had appeared as a new face representing the promise of change. In the first part of his campaign, he said, Correa focused on denouncing the inequalities of the system and arguing the need for a new constitution.  His campaign gained such momentum that he was expected to win outright; the ...   more »
View Article  Notes from Exile: Salinas at LBS
Former Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994) was in London this week giving a talk on NAFTA at the London Business School. The argument of his presentation was that NAFTA was intended to be an instrument to making the Mexican economy more competitive and robust, not an end in and of itself. He presented a number of statistics which demonstrated that Mexico had lost competitiveness in the decade since NAFTA on a number of metrics, and was highly critical of the lack of progress in reforming the Mexican economy further during the Zedillo and Fox administrations...   more »
View Article  Latin America's trade patchwork just got more complex...
The Latin American trading arrangements just got more complex as Colombia and the US moved one step closer to signing a free trade agreement (FTA), despite the US Congress’ increasingly anti-free trade stance. The agreement follows on a raft of recent Latin American free trade agreements including the US – Peru FTA, the US - Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), which later incorporated the Dominican Republic as a member, and the Chilean – US agreement signed in 2002. The US was also negotiating a free trade agreement with Ecuador until 2006...   more »
View Article  The differences between Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez in a new ODI Opinion

After a year of record gas revenues in 2006, Bolivia has achieved a fiscal surplus for the first time in three decades. In a period in which high oil prices have given Chavez more room to manoeuvre to shift its policy towards nationalisation and authoritarianism (see recent LACG Blog), there is the suspicion that windfall revenues may allow the Morales administration to take the same turn in Bolivia.

 

A new ODI Opinion argues that this is unlikely to be the case and that Evo Morales is actually departing from Chavez-type policy-making, acting more pragmatically and to some ...   more »

View Article  After the demise of Doha and the FTAA, what is the future for free trade in Latin America? (continued from last week)
In last week’s blog, I discussed the collapse the Doha round of trade talks and Brazil’s leading role in these negotiations. This week's blog looks at progress on other free trade agreements in Latin America and asks, who really stands to benefit from trade liberalization? FTAA, bilateral FTAs and regional integration Doha is not the only recent example of trade talks collapsing after failed negotiations. In 2005, the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) floundered over similar issues to Doha: the US was seeking to expand trade in services and increase intellectual property rights, while Latin American countries pushed for an end to agricultural subsidies and freer trade in agricultural goods. Again, Brazil’s role in negotiations was crucial and it’s opposition at the Mar de Plata Summit in January 2005 played a large part in blocking a deal. There is some speculation that reaching a last-minute agreement over the Doha round could pave the way for a revival of the FTAA, but the terms of any negotiations would most likely be very different...   more »
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