I guess it's election season.
On Sunday, Guatemalans chose Álvaro Colom — a "gawky policy wonk and businessman who made fighting poverty his campaign’s centerpiece," describes the NYT — as their new president. Colom beat out Otto Pérez Molina, a former army general who has been accused of overseeing massacres during the country's 36-year civil war, which ended in 1996 (AP). More than 200,000 people died or disappeared during those years.
Colon won with about 53 percent of the vote. He has quite the job ahead of him. Guatemala has one of the highest murder rates in Latin America, with some 5,000 and counting this year. This trend of violence can be seen throughout Central America, largely due to drug trafficking and transnational gangs. Governments have unsuccessfully tried "Mano Dura" or "Hard Hand" campaigns to target the violence. But instead of solving anything the policy of locking up minor delinquents or kids with tattoos has turned prisons into training cells and command operation centers.
It had been a bloody few months leading to the election, with dozens of political candidates, activists and their families murdered or disappeared since last September, according to a recent BBC News Americas report. Before Sunday's elections, James Painter wrote that although Guatemalans would be electing their sixth consecutive civilian president since the military withdrew from formal power in 1986, it isn't quite something to cheer about:
The country's timid steps towards democratic rule mask a series of deep-seated problems.
Top of the list are organised crime, grim levels of public insecurity and deeply entrenched social divisions.
"'Guatemala is the saddest country in Latin America," writes a long-time observer of the region, Michael Reid, in his new book, Forgotten Continent.
He points to the "dark shadow" cast by Latin America's most brutal civil war in recent times, which left 200,000 people dead, most of them Mayan Indians.
The real power in the country, Mr Reid writes, consists in many ways of "shadowy networks linking corrupt former army officers and organised criminal gangs of drugs traffickers and money launderers".
If you'd like to read more about what kind of shape Guatemala is in, go here (Unicef), here (Human Rights Watch) or here (CIA Factbook). Or to learn more about the so-called "transnational gang problem" — which largely resulted after Salvadorans who were fleeing their own country's civil war in the 1980s clashed with Mexican gangs in Los Angeles — check out some reports by the Washington Office on Latin America.
Now, I'm not sure how I missed this yesterday, but there was a fantastic nine-page article in The New York Times Sunday Magazine that smoothly goes through Venezuela's petroleum strategy. The Perils of Petrocracy, by Tina Rosenburg, compares the benefits/drawbacks of private vs. state companies, analyzes whether Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's "Zero Misery" programs improve standards of living and suggests more transparency in government.
As a slogan, “Negotiate a Better Royalty Rate!” doesn’t have the ring of “The Oil Is Ours!”; nationalization of natural resources can bolster a country’s psyche even if the management of those resources is a failure. The urge to nationalize is, at its core, a political one. Chávez seized Pdvsa not so it would produce more but so he could directly control the money. When governments give into this urge, they tend to be susceptible to the temptations of using oil for short-term gain.
But not always. Nationalized oil production doesn’t necessarily lead to political corruption or shortsightedness. If the old Pdvsa were operating in today’s booming oil market, there might be plenty of money for investment in oil and social programs. But it would be the government’s job to watch the company closely to make sure the state got its fair share — in other words, to ensure oil does what it should do: produce maximum sustainable money for the state. It’s also the government’s job to use the money wisely. That is a more important and difficult problem than the dilemma of whether to nationalize, and the solution does not depend on whether production is nationalized or privatized. It is not even an oil problem at all.
Now I'm off to read the dailies here. I'm planning a trip to León and/or Chinandega — yep, same place where the leptospiroris has reached epidemic heights — later this week. Perhaps another motorcycle rental is in order. And depending on whether I can find a companion, I might venture up to El Salvador or Guatemala since I have family in both countries (thank you, Mom).
