This Week in the Americas

Dirty Democracy Sullies Mexican Presidential Campaigns
By Laura Carlsen

Mexicans have fought long and hard to bring democracy to their country. That’s why the spectacle of the current presidential elections is particularly lamentable. The presidential debate on April 25 did little to tone down the insults or encourage more constructive discussion. Lopez Obrador refused to participate and the other candidates spent much time attacking each other and little on concrete policy proposals.

As the July 2 vote nears, the level of campaigning has descended. The PAN´s latest campaign states darkly that Lopez Obrador is “a danger to Mexico.” In a political context where the memory of the assassination of the 1994 presidential candidate remains fresh, this message has been viewed as going beyond the accepted practice of attacking an opponent’s political platform and contributing to a climate of potential violence. In response, Lopez Obrador has called for a truce on public denouncements of opponents, but not before calling the president a “chachalaca,” or noisy bird. The third major candidate, Roberto Madrazo of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), has also been called to the carpet for name-calling.

Laura Carlsen directs the Americas Program of the International Relations Center, online at www.irc-online.org.

Made in Argentina: Slave Conditions for Bolivian Workers
By Marie Trigona

Bolivian workers in Argentina are pressing the government to take action against slave-like conditions inside clandestine textile shops after a fire in a factory killed six people in Buenos Aires on March 30th. The government has initiated inspections of seamstress shops employing Bolivians and Paraguayans. Inspectors shut down at least 100 of these plants.

Representatives from the Union of Seamstress Workers, an assembly of undocumented textile workers reported at least 8,000 cases of labor abuses inside the city's nearly 400 clandestine seamstress shops in the past months. Around 100,000 undocumented immigrants work in these unsafe plants with an average wage of $100 per month, if they are paid at all.

Marie Trigona forms part of Grupo Alavío and writes regularly for the IRC Americas Program (online at americas.irc-online.org). She can be reached at mtrigona@msn.com.

Whose Democracy is the United States Promoting in Nicaragua?
By Brynne Keith-Jennings

The U.S. government has been flexing its muscles in Nicaragua to defeat Daniel Ortega, candidate of the National Sandinista Liberation Front (FSLN), in that country’s November presidential elections. Ortega, president during the Sandinista revolution in the 1980s, is running for president for the fourth time since his first defeat in 1990.

As in other parts of the world, the United States is touting its support of democracy as the justification for intervening in the internal affairs of a sovereign state. Recent actions show that for the U.S. State Department, democracy is a relative concept that need apply only when convenient.

Brynne Keith-Jennings, at Nicaragua@witnessforpeace.org, works with Witness for Peace in Nicaragua.

Porto Murtinho: Sparkplug Ignites Cross Border Activism
By Bill Hinchberger

To the uninitiated, Porto Murtinho may seem like the middle of nowhere—or simply the end of the road. A well-paved Brazilian interstate ends here. No bridge connects it across the river to Paraguay. Beyond the reservation lies the vast expanse of the Gran Chaco, a bioregion as remarkable for its diversity as for its hostility to humans. Covering much of Paraguay, parts of Argentina and Bolivia, as well as this sliver of Brazil, the Chaco’s arid plains are as sparsely populated as polar regions, deserts, and tropical rainforests. Yet many consider this paradise—or at least the gateway to it.

But the newfound blend of social and environmental agendas in this border zone determined the course of Vida Pantaneira (Pantanal Life), the name adopted by the local activists for their organization. Vida Pantaneira has organized seminars and events, helped scavengers of fishing bait improve their professional standing, organized groups of volunteers to plant seedlings along deforested stream banks, and helped ensure access to Brazilian public health services for the neighboring Paraguayan Indians who have no other nearby alternatives.

A former correspondent in Brazil for The Financial Times and Business Week, Bill Hinchberger is the founder and editor of BrazilMax: www.BrazilMax.com and contributor to the IRC Americas Program: www.americaspolicy.org . The Center for Social and Environmental Support (CASA) and the Greengrants Alliance of Funds (GAF) ( www.greengrants.org ) provided support for this article.

Uprising Against the Inevitable
By Laura Carlsen

The Zapatista Army of National Liberation has had a tremendous impact on Mexican, Latin American and global politics. Today it faces new challenges on all three levels.

In June of 2005 the EZLN came out with the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle. The Sixth Declaration sets out a bold set of political definitions: it declares the movement anti-capitalist (in those terms) and describes neoliberal globalization as a global war of conquest. It posits that “a new step forward in the indigenous struggle is only possible if indigenous people join with workers, peasants, students, teachers, employees… that is, all the workers of the city and countryside.” It reclaims the label of “left” saying “we believe that it is on the political left where you find the idea of resisting neoliberal globalization and building a country where there will be justice, democracy, and freedom for everyone.”

It also announces the beginning of the Other Campaign. With presidential campaigns in full tilt, Subcomandante Marcos left Chiapas in January of 2006 to tour the country and meet with groups that had signed on to the Declaration. In scores of meetings throughout the country, he has registered their demands and activities: battles against environmental destruction, for workers’ rights, against the ostracism and oppression of sex workers, for indigenous civil and territorial rights. Organized groups of youth, punks, leftists, alternative media, small farmers, homosexuals, workers, women, and “others” have organized to receive the EZLN representative.

Accustomed to swimming against the current, the Zapatistas chose to denounce party politics just when a significant part of the left saw in center-left presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador a ray of hope for prying open the neoliberal stranglehold on the nation.

Laura Carlsen directs the Americas Program of the International Relations Center, online at www.irc-online.org. This essay appears in the May issue of the British political philosophy and culture magazine "Naked Punch."

The U.S. Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control Evicts Cuban Diplomats from Sheraton Hotel in Mexico City
Bad Neighbor Policy

The U.S. Treasury Department ordered the Sheraton Hotel chain to expel 16 Cuban nationals staying at the Sheraton María Isabel in Mexico City on February 4th. The Cubans were participating in the U.S.-Cuba Energy Summit, a conference organized by the U.S.-Cuba Trade Association.

The Global Good Neighbor Ethic of International Relations includes among its guiding principles for foreign policy “mutual respect,” support for sustainable development through equitable trade policy, “cooperation rather than confrontation,” and good governance, including respect for international law. The vindictive trade embargo against Cuba and the selectively enforced Helms-Burton act violate all these basic principles of the Global Good Neighbor Ethic. The Mexican experience reveals that the Helms-Burton law is impossible to enforce in a non-discriminatory manner due to its attempted overreach and the disruption it would cause in normal trade and diplomatic relations.

If you would like to reproduce our articles for free, please cite the source, and let us know at americas@ciponline.org. We also welcome comments about our materials.

If you would like to unsubscribe, click on the link below that says "Update Profile/Unsubscribe". If you would like to subscribe for the first time to our multitude of topical lists, please go to http://app.streamsend.com/public/iKs8/Mr1/subscribe.

The Americas Policy Program is a fiscally sponsored program of the
Center for International Policy
http://www.ciponline.org/
Email: americas@ciponline.org
Tel. in Mexico: (52 55) 5324-1201, U.S. phone: (202) 536-2649

Donations can be mailed to: (please specify Americas Program)

Center for International Policy
1717 Massachussets NW, Suite 801
Washington, DC 20036

Or by visiting the site: https://app.etapestry.com/hosted/CenterforInternationalPolic/OnlineGiving.html