Posted on 02/18/2003 2:31:28 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Edited on 07/12/2004 4:00:58 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Country by country, Latin America is boiling over. From the fatal police-military clash last week in Bolivia, to the ongoing social upheaval in Venezuela and economic calamity in Argentina, the region is showing signs of distress. Paraguay, Ecuador and Uruguay are tottering financially.
(Excerpt) Read more at washtimes.com ...
It's not a lack of funds, said Mrs. Manganelli, the foundation's spokeswoman. It's a lack of U.S. dollars.
President Hugo Chavez suspended dollar sales Jan. 22 to stop a drastic devaluation of the Venezuelan bolivar. Dollar sales will resume in March, once a fixed-rate exchange scheme is hammered out, Mr. Chavez said.
That's of little comfort to Mrs. Manganelli, who says the foundation has a one-month supply of imported medicine left.
"We have to buy [medicine] with dollars, and we're having serious problems with imports because of the new policy. The situation is critical," she said.
Thousands of businesses and thousands more citizens are struggling in this import-dependent nation, which just emerged from a two-month strike against Mr. Chavez that devastated the economy.
Venezuela imports 60 percent of its food, most medicines, essential manufacturing elements and almost all finished goods. Dollars must pay for those imports.
Mr. Chavez imposed the temporary ban to foil what he called an "economic coup," including capital flight and panic dollar buying, precipitated by the strike, which effectively ended in non-oil sectors early this month.
"Not one more dollar for coup plotters," he has said repeatedly, vowing to use his control over money to bankrupt his political enemies, including many in the private sector.
"We have defeated the conspirators, terrorists and coup plotters, but we must remain alert," Mr. Chavez asserted during a speech to hundreds of soldiers and supporters last week.
Foes of his government accuse the president of using the policy to help establish a Cuban-style dictatorship. A government committee appointed by Mr. Chavez will determine who gets dollars and who doesn't.
All dollar-seekers, individuals and businesses alike, must register with the government. Mr. Chavez says priority will be given to those importing food and medicine.
It could take several weeks for the committee to get to work. After that, dollar requests can take up to 45 days to process.
"It's totally strangling the economy," said Jose Pineda, chief economist for the Venezuelan American Chamber of Commerce and Industry, which represents over 1,000 businesses.
"Most businesses have an average of 30 percent of normal inventories and these are falling every day because of the slowdown caused by the import problem," said Mr. Pineda.
Banks are denying access to transfers from abroad until the government issues its regulations. As a result, many businesses that depend on those transfers are laying off workers despite a government ban on firings designed to keep unemployment down.
Venezuela's Labor Ministry has received more than 30,000 complaints from workers laid off since December. Analysts expect the jobless rate to swell enormously from its official quote of 17 percent.
According to the Fedeindustria business chamber, strike fallout and continuing recession will cost 200,000 jobs and close more than 20,000 small- and medium-size businesses by August.
More than half of Venezuelans work in the so-called "informal sector," hawking wares on sidewalks, shining shoes or baking homemade cakes sold to motorists in traffic jams.
At the nonprofit cancer center, Mrs. Manganelli said that patients who miss one month of treatment lose benefits gained over two years. "They start from zero," she said.
All sorts of imported drugs are increasingly scarce, said Douglas Natera, president of the Venezuelan Medical Federation, which represents public-hospital employees.
"There's medicine to last two weeks. If that's used and more supplies don't arrive, hospitals will have to be closed," Mr. Natera said.
Even business travelers will have new rules to live by that will restrict business trips abroad and set limits on how many dollars travelers can take abroad.
"There are no longer any dollars for the happy travelers," Mr. Chavez said. He announced on Feb. 6 that each dollar will cost 1,598 bolivars. That's a break for Venezuelans, as black-market trading puts the dollar as high as 2,500 bolivars.
Inflation is rising because Venezuelans are paying more to buy dollars. Shopkeepers, in turn, charge more for their products.
To brake rising prices, the government slapped price controls on more than 220 basic goods ranging from powdered milk to beef and rice. But Venezuela's consumer protection agency is understaffed and incapable of enforcing the controls. [End]
______________________________________________________________________________________
Thousands of businesses and thousands more citizens are struggling in this import-dependent nation, which just emerged from a two-month strike against Mr. Chavez that devastated the economy.
Let's put the onus where it belongs - Hugo Chavez has been stripping Venezuela of democratic controls. Now he is taking over the business sector.
The explosion was heard miles away at the farms where villagers had taken shelter to get away from the huge bomb left by guerrillas. They knew La Union was no more.
No one was hurt, but the destruction of an entire village marked a new level of violence in Colombia's nearly 40 years of civil war. And it underlined the challenges facing President Alvaro Uribe.
For more than a month, the people of La Union had lived in terror of the half-ton bomb in their village at the intersection of two dirt roads through rolling pasture lands.
Guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, had hauled in the bomb in December, leaving it inside the nicest house. The rebels planned to detonate the bomb by remote control whenever an army patrol passed through.
The guerrillas told the 17 families in the hamlet of rough wooden shacks and concrete-block houses that the bomb couldn't go off by accident, but said they should run at the first sight of soldiers.
The terrified villagers sent their children and the old people to nearby farms. The others continued to do their daily work, but at night La Union became a ghost town -- all were too scared to fall asleep at home.
Finally, the pressure became unbearable. On Jan. 19, someone tipped off the army. Soldiers stormed in, but they couldn't deactivate the bomb and had to detonate it after clearing the area.
The southern city of Neiva wasn't so lucky Friday. Seventeen people were killed when a bomb left by FARC rebels exploded as police searched a house. A week before that, a bomb killed 35 people in the capital, Bogota.
Some of La Union's residents returned recently to see what they could salvage.
Eriberto Zapata spent 10 years building his lavender-painted house. Now the concrete blocks are crumbled, and the roof is caved in. Only the broad porch still stands.
"It's too much. It's too much to rebuild," Zapata said, his eyes welling with tears.
At the shattered remains of a small store, the owner pulled a piece of the roof off a refrigerator and discovered the bottles of water and beer inside had survived the explosion.
A group of women stood in the wrecked shop and wondered about the future.
"It would be nice if the police came here, if the soldiers patrolled the town," one woman said softly, declining to give her name.
That seems unlikely soon. Government forces abandoned this impoverished area to the rebels 20 years ago. The people of La Union, 185 miles south of Bogota, grew accustomed to the guerrillas, serving them in their cantinas and selling them supplies.
Since taking office Aug. 7, Uribe has been urging people to report rebel activities, and someone in La Union did just that -- the villagers won't say who for fear of reprisal. But the government is not in a position to reciprocate with protection.
Uribe is beefing up the army with U.S. help, and the military is slowly regaining control of roads that have become some of the most dangerous in the world. But in a nation bigger than Texas and California combined, whose major cities are connected only by pitted two-lane roads that snake through towering mountains and bisect jungles, there are not enough soldiers and policemen to protect everything.
On the highway that runs from Bogota toward La Union, troops guard bridges and patrol remote stretches. Banners hanging over the road urge Colombians to report suspicious activity to the army. One banner, near a military roadblock, says: "We are at war, and we are winning."
But long before La Union, the highway deteriorates into rough gravel, then into a dirt track. The presence of security forces fades. Government troops enter La Union only occasionally. There are no police stationed nearby.
For now, the villagers must get along as best they can, hoping the government will at least provide promised help for rebuilding.
They plan to put back up their homes and businesses because they have nowhere else to go.
A man who identified himself only as Jose pulled a table leg from the rubble of what used to be his barbecue restaurant.
"We'll work, as we have always worked," he said. [End]
All those Greengos...stealing our women and eating our cheese!
As all of our attention seems to be focused on the looney bins in the ME and North Korea, I don't know how to account for our nations ability to deal with what is occuring in our own back yard in Latin America.
The new "Red Axis" of the South is gaining momentum and our apparent inability to deal with it at the moment is going to cost us dearly in the future.
I haven't heard so much about Lula just yet, but then again Chavez was in place for quite a while before he revealed his cards. One can only hope that the administration is watching S.A. carefully and is working on how to deal with the situation shortly.
A long term occupation in Iraq and nation-building there isn't going to help our position any. Perhaps this is why GW IS SEEKING some sort of UN approval. If there is any means to draw on their resources in the process we might better focus on the home front. Just speculation.
Still, Venezuela is our chief source of foreign oil. I don't see how we can just stand by idoly while another "Castro" consolidates his power in the South. Once Lula does become active it could become a real nightmare.
They account for 8% of our oil. Another 38% we supply ourselves and the rest comes from various OPEC and nonOPEC countries. About 10% we get from the Sauds.
If our sources in Saudia Arabia, Iraq and Venezuela dried up, we'd lose 27% of our supply.
I don't think that's the problem, but there is a structural flaw. Mary Anastasia O'Grady, the WSJ LatAm writer, pointed out that most Latin American constitutions are based on 19th century European liberal models that gave power and rights not to the individual, but to the state. Thus, the deck is already stacked against freedom in Latin America.
In most cases, this constitutional bias in favor of the state simply results in bureaucracy and inertia, particularly economic inertia, but it also provides dictators with the platform they need. Once someone gets in charge who wants to exploit this flaw - and the Marxists are producing them in droves - it is very easy for them to use the imbalance to their advantage, and also to begin to regard themeselve and the state as synonomous.
Pinochet basically regarded himself as doing a job and cleaning up his country, and was not after personal enthronement. But that's pretty unusual.
Horrors, Comrade! An evil capitalist Wall Street Banker, you say? Alors!
We know what evil lurks behind the scare quotes of 'compassionate conservative.' (Spell check is our friend!)
i commend your denunciation of capitalization too. every letter is as equal as every other, and so none should be given greater height. it is heightist. punctuation can also be randomly inserted so as not to offend the intellectually challenged please keep me and the secretariat, apprised of your work - here today we are ever so interested; in your great works for the proletariat solidarity!
I throw my vote away on Nader. which should make FR happy, according to the logic that I would vote for gore, which I can guarantee you I would never do."
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.