Taking out Castro?

Steve Clemons, who writes The Washington Note blog, was on a flight from Europe recently when he talked to a soldier from the 82nd Airborne. He had some strong opinions about what the current sentiment among fellow soldiers -- 75%, he said, want Bush defeated -- but another interesting tidbit of that conversation related to Cuba:

He also shared an interesting anecdote that about a year ago, certain commanders in the 82nd Airborne had been told to prepare for a quick incursion into Cuba. I was stunned.

He said, "Yep, we couldn't believe that on top of everything else, Bush thought he could go take out Castro." The Navy Seals were going to go in and do the dirty work, he said, and the "82nd was going to go in for clean-up." He said that he never heard more about it but that the orders clearly didn't go forward -- but they were prepared for that possibility and told that "Bush just wanted to take out Castro."

Is this believable? Clemons says he'll do a follow-up after digging around a bit. Stay tuned.

My electoral predictions

The above is my worst-case scenario. Kerry loses Florida, New Mexico and Iowa, but keeps Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Michigan and Minnesota--and still wins, 272-266.

Or, if you listen to Tucker Carlson (and John Schmitt), and you think that Kerry is going to take Florida, but possibly not Ohio, you can still envisage a Kerry victory. Carlson sees it at 277-260 for Kerry, which probably assumes that Kerry wins Iowa, but loses Hawaii and New Mexico.

Below is my best-case scenario, and certainly within the realm of possibility: Kerry doesn't lose Florida, New Mexico and Iowa--in which case he wins, 311-227.



If you're still not convinced, go over to Matt Bergman's analysis at Daily Kos. He argues for the best-case scenario, actually. Ruy Texeira over at Donkey Rising had nice things to say about Matt's analysis.

(Make your own maps, or calculate the electoral college vote, at http://uselectionatlas.org/.)

Iraq and the numbers game

I've been waiting for someone else to figure out what they think about the new study, published the other day in The Lancet, which "conservatively" estimates that 100,000 civilians have been killed since the U.S. toppled Saddam.

Via Marc Cooper's post yesterday, I see that Fred Kaplan in Slate has, in fact, pretty much demolished the methodology used by the team of public health researchers who rushed to get this article to press before the U.S. elections. Juan Cole is somewhat more benevolent. I also see where the Washington Post story cites a critical comment from Human Rights Watch:

"The methods that they used are certainly prone to inflation due to overcounting," said Marc E. Garlasco, senior military analyst for Human Rights Watch, which investigated the number of civilian deaths that occurred during the invasion. "These numbers seem to be inflated."

Importantly, Cooper writes about a couple of similar episodes of body counting from Latin America:

Horror is horror. No need to exaggerate. I thoroughly reported the 1989 invasion of Panama and know to a moral certainty that a total of about 500 people died in that pointless “war.” And yet, thanks to a lot of endlessly recycled hyperbole the completely unsubstantiated figure of 4,000 has become accepted “fact” by many critics of the war.

Likewise, those of us who resisted and opposed the Pinochet regime in Chile absolutely swore for an entire decade that he had killed upward of 25,000 people. More careful accounting in the mid-80’s determined the real figure was about 3200 – macabre enough in a nation of 11 million people.

No one has yet to come out and publicly revisit the 70,000 figure for El Salvador, but I know that at one point, Doug Farah (UPI/Washington Post) told me that reporters in the late 1980s simply added 5000 a year to previous totals -- which, in the late 1980s, was a very high estimate of annual civilian casualties. And then there's the issue of whether that number includes all civilian casualties, or total war dead, including combatants from both sides.

UPDATE: Significant further discussion taking place over at a second Marc Cooper posting.

Collateral damage

A new book is coming out in November -- Democracy and Drugs in Latin America: The Impact of U.S. Policy -- that's touted as the first systematic, region-wide documentation and analysis of the collateral damage caused by the U.S. war on drugs. It's edited by my old friends Coletta Youngers and Eileen Rosin, who codirected the Drugs, Democracy, and Human Rights (DDHR) project at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).

Here's a look inside:

* The U.S. "War on Drugs": Its Impact on Latin America and the Caribbean—the Editors.
* The U.S. Military in the War on Drugs—A. Isacson.
* U.S. Police Assistance and Drug Control Policies—R. Neild.
* Colombia: A Vicious Circle of Drugs and War—M.C. Ramírez, K. Stanton, and J. Walsh.
* Bolivia: Clear Consequences—K. Ledebur.
* Peru: Drug Control Policy, Human Rights, and Democracy—I. Rojas.
* Ecuador: Untangling the Drug War—F. Rivera Vélez.
* Mexico: The Militarization Trap—L. Freeman and J. L. Sierra.
* The Caribbean: The "Third Border" and the War on Drugs—J. Rodríguez Beruff and G. Cordero.
* The Collateral Damage of the U.S. War on Drugs: Conclusions and Recommendations—Coletta A. Youngers.
* Appendix 1: An Overview of U.S. Laws and Agencies Related to International Drug Control Efforts.
* Appendix 2: Funding and Staffing for DEA Programs in Latin America 1998-2004.
* Appendix 3: List of Abbreviations and Acronyms.

If the topic interests you, be sure to order now at your favorite bookstore!

Outsourcing Diplomacy

El Salvador makes the front page of the Los Angeles Times today, but that's a dubious distinction in this case. In an article about foreign countries paying lobbyists to push their agendas in Washington, El Salvador gets the lede:

When the government of El Salvador wanted help extending immigration benefits to its citizens in the U.S., it turned to a new lobbying shop set up by Miami lawyer Alberto Cardenas Jr., a star of the Republican fundraising machine.

The lobbyists were confident that "a round of consultations and meetings" with Bush administration officials would get El Salvador what it wanted: an additional 18 months of protection and work permits for Salvadorans living in the U.S.

In less than two weeks, El Salvador got just that.

So now, in addition to the exorbitant power of money in U.S. domestic politics, we have foreign countries stepping up to the plate:

Influence magazine, a trade publication for lobbyists, recently reported that lobbying on behalf of foreign governments in Washington was at an all-time high. The magazine cited trade opportunities and Bush's creation of the Millennium Challenge Account in 2002, which gives aid as an incentive for countries to meet certain human rights and economic policy criteria.

The basic problem here:

The trend of foreign countries relying on lobbyists who also serve as political fundraisers troubles government watchdog groups. Issues such as trade and immigration drive U.S. foreign policy, they say, and should not be influenced by those with fundraising links to decision makers.

Can we really expect Democrats to do any differently, should Kerry win?

Very odd double-standards

President Bush said Tuesday that he would be "disappointed" if free and fair elections in Iraq led to the seating of an Islamic government, but that the United States would accept the results. "Democracy is democracy," he said. "If that's what people choose, that's what the people choose."

-- from today's Washington Post

So, the Bush administration doesn't mind if Iran -- a member of the so-called Axis of Evil -- increases its influence in Iraq through flawed elections.

After all,"democracy is democracy"--except in tiny El Salvador, where, in a much less flawed electoral process (procedurally, at least) , the U.S. was publicly worried about a potential a victory by the FMLN in presidential elections earlier this year.

UPDATE, Oct. 25: I guess they don't really have double standards after all. Today's Los Angeles Times reports:

While publicly stressing the need for Iraqis to control their own destiny, the Bush administration is working behind the scenes to coax its closest Iraqi allies into a coalition that could dominate elections scheduled for January.

U.S. authorities in Washington and Iraqi politicians confirmed that top White House officials have told leaders of the six major parties that were on the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council that it would be in the groups' common interest to present a unified electoral slate....

One U.S. official in Washington said the administration now believes Iraq needs a "negotiated resolution … a scaled-back democratic process.

"Between the two conflicting key goals, "I see the arguments for stability now outweighing the calls for democracy," said the official, who declined to be identified. The formation of a unified slate would further entrench the U.S.-allied parties, which are mostly led by longtime exiles with dubious popular support and are still viewed with suspicion by many Iraqi citizens.

Now that does sound quite a bit more like El Salvador -- circa 1982-84 -- or Nicaragua circa 1990.

The Boston-Guatemala nexus

"Mark it down. Oct. 20. It will always be the day that Sox citizens were liberated from 8 decades of torment and torture at the hands of the New York Yankees and their fans. Boston Baseball's Bastille Day."
-- from today's Boston Globe

and sixty years earlier...

"The government tried to shut down the press and arrest opposition leaders. But the protests could not be stopped. Finally, on October 20, 1944, discontented military leaders joined armed workers and students to topple the government. Guatemala's 'ten years of spring' had begun."
--from Paul Kobrak's study on university students organizing and repression in Guatemala

Cocaine Republics

I've no time to comment, but it's worth checking out today's piece on NPR by John Burnett on the transformation of Central America's erstwhile "banana republics" into "cocaine republics." It's the first in a three-day series. One thing that bothered me as I listened to the 8-minute story was one of the last quotes from a U.S. military official in Guatemala, about how the region is being destabilized again, that it's come full circle from the wars of the 1980s. Huh?

To get a deeper grasp on that, you might check out the new report by WOLA, LAWG and CIP -- entitled Blurring the Lines -- on how the "war on terror" guides the U.S. military's mission in Latin America these days.

And if the Guatemala/drug angle piques your interest, try taking a look at this set of articles on Guatemala and drugs from Frank Smyth, who's been writing about this issue for years.

Growing the economy?

The Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) has released a report, according to today's La Prensa Gráfica, on the development of a land canal that might stretch between La Unión in the far eastern part of the country north to Puerto Cortés in Honduras. Another 100 kilometers of highway needs to be built on the Honduran side to complete the 371 km stretch between the two ports. Construction on the Cutuco port is set to begin next year, and end by 2007. Unlike the Acajutla port (closer to the Guatemalan border), there are plans for large-scale development projects (including tourism) around this port, which would also be able to receive luxury liners. There's also talk of rail lines along this route, as well as elsewhere within Central America.

The JICA report estimates that, in the next fifteen years, the commerce generated by this port and the land canal could double El Salvador's GDP.

This news, along with the weekend news that travelers between Guatemala and El Salvador will no longer have to stop at immigration when crossing the border as of Nov. 15, is heartening for regional trade and development. It remains to be seen how all of this will really play out, however -- i.e., whether there will be sufficient investment capital to make this work. For example, over the past four years, none of the competitive bidding processes for a new ferry between La Unión and Nicaragua have received any takers whatsoever.

PBS Frontline/World

FRONTLINE/WORLD -- Election 2004 from PBS has quite a good general overview story on El Salvador by Joe Rubin. Under the general rubric of "payback," he explores issues of remittances, U.S. policy, and human rights. Written in an engaging first-person voice, it's a good introduction to some of the salient issues.

George Bush, the Worst Mexican President Ever

Tom Englehardt has overseen the publishing in English of the work of Mexican political cartoonist "El Fisgón" (aka, Rafael Barajas). Now he's invited him to write about our president, and concludes that "all evidence suggests that George Bush has stolen his ruling style from old-fashioned Mexican politicians:"

Mexican political culture has very defined features and the President of the United States has absorbed them all: The classical Mexican political boss usually inherits his power from his father. The typical Mexican cacique has a love for guns as well as an inclination toward violence and cruelty; he despises legality and intellectual activity, has a personal history of alcoholism and dissipation, lies systematically, and declares himself a faithful servant of God. (Did we miss anything?)

According to Mexican tradition, politicians always reach their positions thanks to a fraudulent electoral process and then surround themselves with a clique which uses its power to conduct "business" on a staggering scale while in office. The Florida electoral thievery and Halliburton's Iraq contract are classic examples of Mexican corruption.

And if you read the New York Times Magazine story today by Ron Suskind, the following comment by El Fisgón will also ring all too true:

In the Mexican court, dialogues like the following were not uncommon and completely irresistible:

The President asks: "What time is it?"

His minister replies: "Whatever time you say, Mister President."

Our presidents were almighty creatures, the voices of God on Earth. Not to be with them was to be against them. After them came the final flood or the atomic apocalypse.

Yes, compare the above to the following excerpt from Suskind's piece from a meeting at the White House:

[Congressman] Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall.

"I don't know why you're talking about Sweden," Bush said. "They're the neutral one. They don't have an army."

Lantos paused, a little shocked, and offered a gentlemanly reply: "Mr. President, you may have thought that I said Switzerland. They're the ones that are historically neutral, without an army." Then Lantos mentioned, in a gracious aside, that the Swiss do have a tough national guard to protect the country in the event of invasion.

Bush held to his view. "No, no, it's Sweden that has no army."

The room went silent, until someone changed the subject.

Exports to the rescue

I have mixed feelings about trade and capitalist values, but it's somewhat easier to feel okay about USAID helping small businesses in El Salvador. The Post has a story about a trade show in DC this week:

...[there was a] a contingent of 15 Salvadoran companies sponsored by Expro, a $6 million project by the U.S. Agency for International Development that is teaching small-business owners in El Salvador to export their products. The small-business owners said the United States is an attractive market for two reasons: The Salvadoran community in the United States is about 1.5 million strong and growing; also growing is the market for organic and natural foods.

Expro, which started in July 2003, has already helped about 55 Salvadoran businesses export $4.8 million worth of products to the United States, Japan, Germany and other countries. That's a tiny sliver of El Salvador's total exports of $3.2 billion last year, but the program has helped small businesses reach markets overseas. A few USAID trade specialists live in El Salvador and help guide small-business owners through the maze of regulations so they can begin exporting.

"The companies come to [trade shows] to get to know a new market, to see what the trends are and to see who the competition is," said Lisa K. Alley, an Expro trade specialist.

The "terrorist" label

If the Salvadoran conflict were still ongoing, yet about to be resolved today, would the State Department permit assistance to help demobilize the FMLN rebels? Probably not, given that the FMLN would likely have been labeled (and rightly so, I might add, from my reading of how the label is defined) as a "foreign terrorist organization" by the State Department.

So Marcela Sanchez raises a very good point today when she questions the difficulties in using U.S. funds to help demobilize rightwing paramilitaries in Colombia. Human rights groups rightly worry about the lack of prosecution of these guys for past crimes, but I don't recall anyone making such concerns a fundamental reason for questioning the validity of U.S. assistance to demobilize leftist guerrillas or the military (which also committed terrorist acts, but which of course the State Department would never have included in the FTO category) in the Salvadoran context, not to mention rightwing contras in the Nicaraguan case.

Jockeying for the OAS

UPDATE: Salvadoran President Tony Saca said today that he would respect the decision of Venezuela to say whatever they want about any candidate for the top job at the OAS, but at the same time finds the FMLN's objection to a Paco Flores candidacy as downright "petty" (mezquino):

...lo que sí yo no puedo entender es la mezquindad que pueda tener un partido político local en contra de un salvadoreño que pueda tener aspiraciones de llegar a la OEA. Yo como salvadoreño me sentiría orgullosísimo de que un salvadoreño fuera el secretario general de la OEA. Me parece absolutamente mezquino de parte del FMLN.

I'm surprised he just didn't come right out and say it was treasonous!



Andres Oppenheimer reviews his favorites to be the OAS chief. Among Central Americans, he only mentions Paco Flores, but also gives him the least chance to get it (50%). He fails to mention that both Honduras and Venezuela are against a Flores candidacy. Flores is criticized at home for his submissiveness to the U.S. (e.g., Iraq), his failure to adhere to regional human rights decisions, and his generally dismissive attitude toward dialogue with the opposition and talking with the press. Flores also has a "cleaner" reputation than most former Central American presidents, but.... ARENA has been in power 15 years straight, meaning that there has been no opposition party to take power who can dig up dirt on the previous administration; and the Salvadoran print media is probably the most consistently and uniformly pro-government in the region, so most corruption scandals rarely if ever surface without the government's blessing.

Oppenheimer favors former Brazilian president Cardoso (if he wants it) or one of several good Chilean candidates. The Central Americans meet today here in San Salvador to come up with a consensus candidate (or at least agree that their should be a consensus), which Mexico -- and probably Colombia and the U.S. -- has agreed to support.

Talking Trash

If you follow El Salvador closely, you'll remember that the mayoral re-election (and later presidential candidacy) of Hector Silva was plagued by daily attacks from El Diario de Hoy, principally around the issue of trash collection in greater San Salvador. There were millions missing, they had ties to a Canadian mafia, etc.

Now, we have Hugo Barrera, the new minister of the environment (and one of ARENA's founders), saying that the trash dump and processing plant in Nejapa that services 10 or so municipalities in this area is great. In fact, Barrera told La Prensa Gráfica, "if there were 12 others like it in the country, there would be no trash problem."

As for any legal problems with the trash enterprise (known as MIDES), the new adminstrator, former vice-minister of Defense Orlando Zepeda (one of the depurados back in 1992) says everything's hunky-dory. More on this in El Faro this week.

CAFTA prospects

Bob Davis surveys the political landscape on trade in the Wall Street Journal, and says the next occupant of the White House will necessarily spend more time on Latin America. Davis is fairly blunt about who Bush has to rely upon to get CAFTA passed, while pessimistic about Kerry's prospects for a revised agreement:

If the president wins re-election, he will rely on the lobbying power of U.S. retailers and importers to push the deal [CAFTA] through Congress. He also may promise to crack down on Chinese clothing imports as a way to ease textile-industry opposition.

If Sen. Kerry wins, the equation changes. He says he would renegotiate the pact to improve labor and environmental standards in Central America. That is a reprise of former President Bill Clinton's position on the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was negotiated by the first President Bush. In 1993, Mr. Clinton negotiated Nafta labor and environmental side deals and won passage. But Democratic Party support for free trade is much weaker now than it was during Mr. Clinton's first term, so Mr. Kerry may be unable to win enough Democratic lawmakers to compensate for Republican votes he would lose.

What does seem implausible is an assertion in this same article that "a defeat in Congress for the Central American deal and continued stalemate on a hemispheric trade package would sour relations and give a boost to populist forces in the region who already are dubious about the value of free trade." If CAFTA goes through, it would take years for the benefits to trickle down to the poor. With or without CAFTA, there will be fertile terrain for "populists" for many years to come.

Looking to El Salvador

The Associated Press does a story on the lure of Salvadorans to Iraq security details, and the Miami Herald goes with it:

Many of Iraq's recent victims have been private contractors from poor nations, lured by high wages. But as violence increases in Iraq and nations like Bulgaria and the Philippines urge their citizens to avoid working there, private contractors are looking toward some Latin American countries, where kidnappings are common and war is nothing new....

''No one lives forever,'' said Saturnino Hernandez Castilian, 40, the father of four children. "God says how far I am going to get. We may die here, or we may die there. If we survive, we are going to benefit. If we die, our family will be OK.''

Wanted: A new OAS S-G

Just back from a couple of days in Guatemala. Seems like every Central American country wants to lay claim to the now-vacant Secretary General spot at the OAS. Guatemala has a good candidate, Eduardo Stein, but he already has a job--as VP in the Guatemalan government. Nicaragua wants to put up a foreign minister, and finally Saca's hoping to put Paco Flores into the seat.

But first all of the foreign ministers of Central America have to meet on Thursday and see if they can come up with a single candidate. Of course, Costa Rica leads every country in Central America in all of the corruption surveys (that is, as the least corrupt), so will the rest of the hemisphere take another chance on a Central American candidate from a country somewhat less distinguished?

Note to Amy Sullivan

Dear Amy,

Have you ever watched Sunday morning preachers, say maybe some Baptists from Texas? Try taking a look tomorrow. Does their style remind you of anyone? (Hint: He was seen on all television networks last night.)

You got it--George W. Bush. And you wonder what George W. does on Sunday mornings!

Yours truly,
D.H.
(lapsed Southern Baptist from Fort Worth)

Outsourced to Iraq: Prescient Cynicism?

Back in April, shortly after starting this blog, I wrote about the Salvadoran troops in Iraq, noting

"who's to say that these guys can't join the outsourced forces of Blackwater and company after their stint in Iraq."

Well, what seemed logically possible back then has now become reality. For the last several days, El Diario de Hoy has run several stories each day about how hundreds for ex-military and elite cops are being recruited for security duty in Iraq, at a salary of $2500 to $4000 a month. In other words, these guys (and women!) can make more in a month than what it would normally take them a year to bring home.

I'm on the cusp of a few days offline, so I won't go into much detail now, but journalists would do well to take a look at these stories, which are full of details and human interest angles. I could only be amused by President Saca's warning to these potential recruits that things are really, really dangerous over there, and if they choose to go, they're on their own. Dicho de otra forma, if Salvadoran security guards start getting killed, it's not on him!

Click here to read Wednesday, Thursday and Friday's stories, but also take a look around the site for these days because other stories might not be linked directly.

A couple of other relevant blog entries on this subject are here and here.

Can Paco make a comeback?

Can Miguel Angel Rodríguez, the new Costa Rican head of the OAS, really hang to his post while everyone in Costa Rica has lined up against him on charges of corruption, including Costa Rica's president (from the same political party as Rodríguez)? Marcela Sánchez writes about this today, saying "the repudiation of Rodriguez has been nearly unanimous in Costa Rica. Pacheco has had a hard time getting the legislature to agree with him on anything, but in this case they are united."

UPDATE: The answer to the first question is no. Rodríguez resigned today (Friday), although as of 6 pm Eastern Standard Time neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post thought it was important enough an event to grace their websites with the story.

Oct. 9th UPDATE: The Washington Post does run a story today, but the New York Times doesn't, just an outdated story from earlier in the week on their Americas page.

Meanwhile, Arturo Cruz speculated the other day that should Rodríguez resign, former Salvadoran President Paco Flores -- who earlier seemed to covet the OAS post, but whose candidacy was outflanked by the Costa Rican -- would be well-placed to sign up for the job, if he wanted to. As soon as news of the corruption scandal surfaced, the cartoonist for La Prensa Gráfica came up with the above.

Rubbing it in

I think vice-presidential lies (from the man who thinks he's president already) merit a departure from my recently instituted self-censorhip of things not related to El Salvador (although everything's game given that stellar sales pitch for hunky-dory El Salvador by Cheney last night).

Cheney said last night that "Now, in my capacity as vice president, I am the president of Senate, the presiding officer. I'm up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they're in session."

Well, Dave the pro at Daily Kos bothered to look up who presided over the Senate since 2001, and guess what? Cheney presided over a grand total of two sessions in the past four years.

Oh, and John Edwards also presided over two sessions.

Brad Delong thinks this little fib is going to top the Bentsen-Quayle "you're no Jack Kennedy" line in the annals of vice-presidential debates.

Cheney's Brooksian moment

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, here you have it. Wasn't good enough for the presidential debate, but -- by golly -- someone's gotta spread the electoral gospel of "the savior" (El Salvador). From the Washington Post transcript:

CHENEY: ...There will be democracy in Afghanistan, make no doubt about it. Freedom is the best antidote to terror....

Twenty years ago we had a similar situation in El Salvador. We had -- guerrilla insurgency controlled roughly a third of the country, 75,000 people dead, and we held free elections. I was there as an observer on behalf of the Congress.

The human drive for freedom, the determination of these people to vote, was unbelievable. And the terrorists would come in and shoot up polling places; as soon as they left, the voters would come back and get in line and would not be denied the right to vote.

And today El Salvador is a whale of a lot better because we held free elections.

The power of that concept is enormous. And it will apply in Afghanistan, and it will apply as well in Iraq.

No reason to rehash these arguments. But I have to say that it was news to me that 75,000 people were dead by the time of the 1982 elections. (Also, at the time, did the Administration ever admit that a third of the country was under rebel control?) But maybe facts simply aren't the VP's strong suit.

Like when he said he'd never met Edwards before tonight:

Hat tip to Daily Kos

UPDATE: Factcheck.org (not factcheck.com, as Cheney said, which actually links to the site of George Soros--try it!) has this and more to say about previous Cheney/Edwards encounters:

Cheney claimed Edwards has such a poor attendance record in the Senate that he was just meeting Edwards for the first time during the debate, even though Cheney visits the Senate every Tuesday. But the Kerry-Edwards campaign quickly documented at least two instances in which Cheney had met Edwards previously. Edwards escorted Elizabeth Dole when she was sworn in as North Carolina's other senator on January 8, 2003, according to Gannet News Service. Cheney administered the oath.

Cheney also was present with Edwards at a National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 1, 2001, when a transcript shows Cheney acknowledged Edwards among those at the gathering:

Cheney: (Feb. 1, 2001): Thank you. Thank you very much. Congressman Watts, Senator Edwards, friends from across America and distinguished visitors to our country from all over the world, Lynne and I are honored to be with you all this morning.

Neglecting Latin America

The Miami Herald sponsored its Americas Conference last week, and there are several articles on the event that are worth checking out.

Included on its website are excerpts from speeches by Madaleine Albright (who plays up Clinton's policies on Latin America) and Roger Noriega (who defends the Administration's policies); the ever astute former Salvadoran President Paco Flores is mentioned in one article as saying that "democracy is at risk" (no thanks to you, bubba); and former US envoy to El Salvador Pete Romero is cited in another article as saying that Latin America is disillusioned with free trade:

Free trade was oversold to Latin Americans as the solution to poverty, unemployment and inequality, said Romero, chief executive of consultancy Experior Advisory.

They think "we have lost touch with the issues that are the most urgent for Latin America," he said. "That is the reason why the century of the Americas that was promised by [President] Bush . . . has fallen off the map."

Marta Lagos, the head of the polling firm Latinobarómetro, has much to say as well about the decline of Latin opinion of the U.S. in the Bush years:

Two conflicting arguments are part of the common knowledge about the image of the United States in Latin America. Latin America is signaled as being the U.S.A.'s "back yard" and also as the "best friend"....

The impact of 9/11 and the Iraq War is striking. In Mexico, Bolivia, Argentina and Nicaragua, the U.S.A. loses more than 20 percentage points in positive opinion. While in Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile and Venezuela, it loses between 10 and 20 percentage points. Only in Salvador, Colombia and Panama does it increase between 2 and 7 percentage points. In Ecuador and Peru, it remains the same. Even in Central America it drops from 82 percent in 2000 to 78 percent in 2004. The net result is devastating for the image of the U.S.A. in Latin America. It has lost face in all but five countries since 9/11.

Our numbers continue to give evidence of a back yard much more than a best friend.

Should Christopher Marquis really need to write a whole column wondering why in the first presidential debate -- held in that most Latin American of cities, Miami -- our Southern neighbors merited not even a blip in the discussion of foreign policy?

Uncle Sam's favorite nephew

Why is El Salvador in Iraq? Catherine Elton finally gets a story into a major U.S. media outlet, the Miami Herald, covering this angle. For readers of this blog, it will be nothing new:

''El Salvador suffered a prolonged internal conflict, and thanks to the support of the international community, it achieved a lasting peace,'' President Tony Saca told the United Nations recently as he explained the rationale for the presence of El Salvador's Cuscatlan Batallion in Iraq.

''We believe it is time for us to put our experience to the service of other peoples,'' he added.

But many here say the government's decision to stay in Iraq is really about the ruling party's long-standing, almost obsessive quest to be Uncle Sam's favorite nephew.

''Staying on created a contrast with those who left, giving El Salvador the opportunity to prove itself even more faithful to the United States, to be the one country that wouldn't betray it,'' said Luis González, who edits the political journal Proceso.

But as El Faro (an excellent online newsweekly) noted this past week, I suppose it depends on who you're talking to. They report that, in a September 7th interview for a local paper (i.e., one that was for local consumption), Saca was a bit more direct about why Salvador has troops in Iraq:

"It is an opportunity to identify ourselves with the friend and ally that has asked us for this identification."

The Dalai Lama in El Salvador

The Dalai Lama was in El Salvador this week, and Wednesday I joined 2,000 others in hearing him at the Hotel Radisson. Without pretending to report on everything that he said, I have here a simple reflection or two on the simple truths he shared. To many, his words may have seemed all too simple; to me, they seemed all too true.

Toward the end of his two-hour appearance, and in response to a question from the audience, he said to remember that "change is gradual." This doesn't seem so profound out of context, but after listening to him discussing how real change begins from within, I made an important connection.

Many of us who have been around revolutionary movements in Central America have long since abandoned any real belief in radical, immediate change; politically speaking, we have come to a greater appreciation of the fact that all political change is gradual. If we cannot expect change to happen from one day to the next, then certainly "change" that flows from the barrel of a gun is illusory and impermanent.

Of course, the Dalai Lama was not referring to political change, or was he? In fact, this belief is the reason that in resisting the Chinese occupation of Tibet, he refuses to advocate violence. Hugh Byrne, who spent twelve years of his life in the solidarity movement (with the last four as national political director of CISPES, which is to say, in solidarity with the FMLN rebels), went through his own personal transformation after seeing the ravages of war. He became a Buddhist, and began to link the personal to the political in his view of change. In the preface his doctoral dissertation-turned-book, El Salvador's Civil War: A Study of Revolution, he has these reflections to offer:

In the years since the war ended, reflecting on its enormous human costs and those of other conflicts, I have come to believe that all war is a war against ourselves; it is an illusion that we are separate from each other. While affirming the justice of the grievances that led to the war, the depth of the oppression, and the courage and sacrifice of so many participants, I have come to see strategies of violence as leading to strategies of counterviolence, which escalate in a spiral of polarization and conflict from which escape becomes ever more difficult. That the weight of moral responsibility is not equally shared does not alter this dynamic.

While many of us now feel this way, I think we still have a long way to go yet towards rethinking history --our own, as well as that of the people of Central America whose suffering we claimed to share-- in light of this profound truth.

Not about the debate

I've been trying to find a Salvador angle on the presidential debates last night, but so far have been unable to come up with one. I guess the Salvadoran success story simply didn't pass debate muster, as Bush's advisers realized that such a reference wouldn't get their man many points.

As an aside, however, I would note that former Sen. Mark Hatfield (R-OR), who played such a very positive oversight role during the conflict in El Salvador, and who was the only senator to oppose both the Republican and Democratic resolutions authorizing the use of force in the first Gulf war, and who -- in 30 years in the Senate -- never voted for a single military appropriations, now says he supports President Bush's foray into Iraq, and will now "proudly" cast his vote for him. Why? Because the world changed on Sept. 11, 2001.

Indeed, it did.

Will there be accountability for the disappeared?

It's looking like the Inter-American Court of Human Rights is going to issue a first-ever ruling on on the issue of the forced disappearance of children during the civil war in El Salvador. Despite the Salvadoran government's best and costly efforts, it doesn't look good for their side.

Maggi (a.k.a. Margaret) Popkin, now director of the Due Process of Law Foundation in Washington, DC, and who wrote the bible on justice reform in El Salvador, filed an amicus curiae brief before the Court, and has also written a short piece on the case before the court. Here are a few excerpts, but read the whole thing (which is only four pages):

An unprecedented hearing took place in San José, Costa Rica, on September 7 and 8, 2004, as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights heard its first case ever brought against El Salvador. The case involves the disappearance of Ernestina and Erlinda Serrano, who were just seven and three years old when last seen by their family. The two girls were found and taken away by soldiers on June 2, 1982, during a major military operation in the department of Chalatenango, which had forced the civilian population to leave their homes and flee to escape capture or death at the hands of advancing troops. Dozens of children were picked up by soldiers in the course of this same military operation….

Over the past ten years, Salvadoran authorities have shown no willingness to move forward with investigations in the cases of missing children. The legislature has not acted on Pro Busqueda´s proposal to form a national search commission. Although Pro Busqueda´s success in locating other children has shown the likelihood that missing children will be found alive, the Salvadoran government argues that the state has no responsibility in these cases. The government's representative at the Inter-American Court repeated what Salvadoran officials have long proclaimed: the importance of not reopening the wounds of the past. The reality, of course, is that for families of disappeared children, these wounds remain open, as the children's fate remains unknown. A political "reconciliation" between the parties to the conflict cannot be a substitute for the rights of victims and their relatives to truth and justice. Engaging seriously in the effort to find these young people would constitute an affirmative step towards reconciliation and healing the wounds left over from the war. Given the experience of Pro-Busqueda, there is a real likelihood of a happy outcome - finding the young women alive.

Instead the Salvadoran government used its resources to discredit the victims, suggesting that the sisters never existed and that their mother might have had a pecuniary motivation -- and using a combination of intimidation and promises to persuade a distant relative to testify to that effect….

Whatever the Court's decision turns out to be, the Salvadoran government should use this experience as an opportunity for learning, both about the role and functioning of the Inter-American system and about how it might contribute to healing and reconciliation by working with survivors and their representatives to discover the truth by determining the fate and whereabouts of the missing children and acknowledging State responsibility. El Salvador committed substantial financial and human resources to defending itself in this case. In the future, its resources could be far more usefully applied to working in conjunction with groups such as Pro Busqueda, so that the survivors of human rights violations could finally discover the truth, seek justice, and obtain reparations, having their rights recognized and upheld in El Salvador.

More debate on the Iraq/El Salvador parallels

Longtime Salvador watcher, lawyer and political scientist Bill Barnes has this to add to the debate spawned by David Brooks' NYTimes op-ed two days ago.

It makes no sense to try to talk about the intersection of elections and insurgency in the abstract or across widely disparate cases.

As to the 1982 election specifically: here are two relevant footnotes from an article of mine published in Spanish in El Salvador (shorter version published as "Incomplete Democracy in Central America: Polarization and Voter Turnout in Nicaragua and El Salvador," Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, V. 40, #3 (Fall 1998) Prior to 1988, voting was technically mandatory in El Salvador, and registration somewhat less complicated. At least (or particularly) with regard to the 1982 constituent assembly election, it was considered to be dangerous to fail to vote. There was no registration. Soldiers and police would frequently ask to see the identity documents on which certification of having voted was to be stamped, in a context in which the FDR- FMLN had called for a boycott of the election, and death squads linked to the army and the police were killing on the order of 800 people every month for suspected links to the FDR-FMLN. Defense Minister Garcia advised the public that failure to vote would constitute treason, while electoral authorities advised that abstention equaled "support for subversion." Tommie Sue Montgomery, Revolution in El Salvador, 2nd ed. (Boulder: Westview, 1995), pp. 156, 159. James Dunkerley, Power in the Isthmus (London: Verso, 1988), p. 405; Gary Bland, "Assessing the Transition to Democracy," in Joseph Tulchin, ed., Is There a Transition to Democracy in El Salvador? (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1992), p. 197.

I discount the 1982 constitutional convention elections (officially claimed turnout of 1.55 million) because many believe the results to have been fraudulently inflated, and because of the extreme level of fear and duress during this period, likely to have led to coerced voting. See note 25 above. On fraudulent inflation see "Las elecciones de 1982. Realidades detras de las apariencias," Estudios Centroamericanos (May-June 1982), pp. 403-04. Tommie Sue Montgomery reports that U.S. Ambassador Dean Hinton eventually acknowledged the merit of this analysis. Op cit., p. 160. In October 1983 interviews, high-ranking members of both the PDC and ARENA admitted to North American scholar Terry Karl that they had submitted fraudulently inflated figures of voter turnout in the 1982 election. "Imposing Consent? Electoralism vs. Democratization in El Salvador," in Paul Drake and Eduardo Silva, eds., Elections and Democratization in Latin America, 1980-85 (San Diego: University of California Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies, 1986), p. 19, note 16.

More generally, the 1982 election was not part of anything positive, rather it as part of the 1974-83 retreat from meaningful elections in the major urban areas (and continuing disallowance of meaningful competitive political activity in the countryside) and part of the Right's finishing off the driving out of open politics of the real champions of electoral democracy, the center-left, whose last gasp was the short-lived 1979 Junta. An electoral regime became meaningful and began to play a positive role ("sucking the oxygen out of insurgency") only very gradually and against the grain of the policies of the first Reagan administration. Such evolved out of the combination of (1) the work of elements of the Church, and in particular UCA's Social Projection, Martin-Baro's development of IUDOP, his and Ellacuria's appearances on Canal 12, their insistence that their could be no military victory for either side; (2) the impact on U.S. policy of the partnership between Congressional Democrats and the anti-intervention movement in the U.S. and the leverage that gave to the moderate professionals in the State Dept and AID against the eaganauts (the hardcore Reaganauts had always been more interested in Nicaragua than El Salvador and beginning in 1984 they took Nicaragua policy entirely for themselves while leaving Salvador largely to the moderates at State); (3) the Reagan administration's need to compete with and try to outshine the 1984 Nicaraguan election; (4) the unraveling of Iran-Contra, leading to some defanging of the Reagan Doctrine (the Reagan Doctrine, parallel to current Bush/neocons, stood for the pipedream that military defeat of Third World "Communists" would lead automatically to the emergence and success of "democracy"); (5) Oscar Arias' work; (6) the profound delegitimation of the Salvadoran military by its 1989 murder of the UCA's Jesuit leadership, and the Bush administration's bowing to that delegitimation; (7) the shocking of the right by the strength of the FMLN's 1989 offensive; (8) the gradual revival of the center-left in Salvador at the end of the 80s and the gradual recognition by both ARENA and the FMLN that they should accept a growing role for such, the latter made possible (for both ARENA and the FMLN) by the fall of the Soviet bloc (9) the UN's massive and sustained presence and commitment to peace negotiations and processes, and the courageous service of prominent people in various truth and reconciliation commissions, and the Bush administration's willingness to countenance all that and lend some support, including to the purging and reduction of the Salvadoran military and security apparatus. It is impossible to imagine either the first Reagan administration or the similarly deluded current Bush administration behaving in a parallel manner.

There are no functional equivalents to most of these things at the present moment re Iraq. And of course it took a full ten years (1984 to 1994) in Salvador to get to elections that were beginning to be what passes for free and honest, and elections continued to have low participation for another 10 years. Something that is parallel between the two cases is that in both El Salvador and Iraq, a highly centralized and militarized government had profoundly suppressed civil society, except for religious leaders and groups, who were killed if they became too political, but otherwise allowed to survive and maintain their institutions. But in Salvador the Church/the religious were split only along left/center/right lines, and the most powerful and resourceful institutional presences, UCA and the Archbishop were super-humanly committed to what amounted to center-left, pro-democracy, anti-militaristic positions. In Iraq, religious leaders and groups are much more highly fragmented in much more sectarian ways; neither they nor their cadre having experience with elections or democracy; many are pro-insurgency; and many are only conditionally anti-insurgency (in Salvador the cadre and leaders of Christian Democracy and Liberation Theology had a good deal of experience with elections from the 1960s and 70s). Is there any potential for Sistani to play a role parallel to Ellacuria and Martin-Baro in Salvador?

Al Qaeda and the gang(s)

Not my favorite news source, but it's worth mentioning that the Washington Times has a story today about Al Qaeda making contact with Central American gangs, specifically the Mara Salvatrucha. The idea here is that Al Qaeda might use the sophisticated (?) human smuggling operations of Central American gangs to get people into the U.S.

This single Washington Times author demonstrated access to a remarkable amount of detail from official sources. A couple of weeks ago, the Los Angeles Times had five reporters do a similar yet longer story, but failed to even mention the gang angle, focusing more on the porousness of Mexican borders. The LA Times also gave less credence to information about a suspected Al Qaeda operative sited in Honduras in July, the same guy who was portrayed today as a "key al Qaeda cell leader for whom the U.S. government has offered a $5 million reward."

Salvadoran Defense Minister: Things are getting better in Iraq?

When Juan Cole wondered how long the Salvadorans would last in Iraq, I had to pipe up and say they'd leave when the U.S. leaves, or when their presence is no longer requested.

So I'm surprised to see the Minister of Defense in today's La Prensa Gráfica hinting that, because things are getting better every day in Iraq, the third contingent might not even finish out their tour of duty, and we'll just have to wait and see whether a fourth contingent will be necessary. After all, they're having elections there in January, so everything's going to be fine, right?

Or perhaps he's counting on a November win by Kerry, under whose administration the political capital to be gained by sticking it out will be minimal. (This is doubtful.) Or perhaps he's reading the latest UCA poll, which says that the decision to send troops to Iraq is the single most unpopular move by the new Saca administration (and since elections are around the corner, in 2006, perhaps ARENA's started to figure they should do something.) Or perhaps Saca's defense of Salvadoran troop presence in Iraq before the General Assembly last week was a total flop.

Your guess is as good as mine.

The lessons of El Salvador

It hasn't been 12 hours yet since I first laid eyes on David Brooks' New York Times piece, and I'm already tired of thinking about it. When someone finally decides to write about El Salvador on the op-ed pages of the New York Times (when was the last time that happened, anyway?), we're sure to see old (and new) Salvador hands crawl out of the woodwork to nitpick it to death, and I've had more than a few email exchanges on the subject.

A couple of noteworthy blogging entries are one by Marc Cooper that just posted, and another by David Adesnik (of Oxblog), posted in the wee hours of the morning. Marc, of course, covered El Salvador from time to time during the war, and was here during the 1982 elections. David was probably about 4 years old at the time of the '82 elections, but his knowledge is nothing to sneer at, since he's working on a Ph.D. dissertation for Oxford on Carter/Reagan-era policies toward El Salvador and Nicaragua. (So when he says that Democrats argued this or that, you can rest assured that he probably just read it yesterday.)

In addition to recounting his own harrowing experiences, Marc makes the argument that Iraq isn't El Salvador:

The real lesson of Salvador, of course, is quite the opposite of Brook’s thesis. What Salvador teaches us that belligerent U.S. unilateralism failed miserably in trying to stabilize that tiny and suffering nation. In the end, it was a UN-negotiated multi-lateral solution that secured the peace and stopped the bloodshed.

Adesnik's take is similar to that of Brooks, and says that El Salvador is a useful analogy for Iraq:

The lesson of El Salvador is that the central government's best strategy for winning the allegiance of "lost" provinces is to demonstrate its commitment to democratic norms in the terrority that it does control.

To some extent, I'm cherry picking here from their positions (and you should read both lengthy posts in their entirety, if you're interested), but these are pretty much they way they summarize their own arguments.

A third comment comes from Sam Rosenfeld who says, in an entry for Tapped (the blog for the American Prospect), that Brooks is trying to cleverly reframe the issue:

Brooks seems to think that the problematical nature of elections in destabilized states is some new, preposterous idea cooked up by those down-on-democracy, Kerry-realist types.... Democracy’s not just a light switch you can flip on when you finally get around to seeing its benefits. And democracy-building isn’t primarily about having the right attitude.

My own position? I agree with Adesnik "that the democratization of El Salvador facilitated the end of its horrific civil war," but wind up siding with Marc with respect to the lessons for Iraq. The absence of the kind of structural factors in Iraq that so greatly facilitated the end of the war in El Salvador (see my earlier entry) are sufficient cause for skepticism.

Brooks' facile arguments on El Salvador

David Brooks of the New York Times picks up on General Abizaid's argument (without any attribution), and says today in reference to the 1982 elections: "As we saw in El Salvador and as Iraqi insurgents understand, elections suck the oxygen from a rebel army."

It's hard to argue with the latter (at least in theory), but the former is not so self-evident. In El Salvador, the civil war endured another 10 years following those elections, and then only after the U.S.-backed military blundered by killing a bunch of Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter in response to a large-scale offensive by the rebels that brought fighting to the nation's capital.

The negotiated end to the civil war also came to an end only after the end of the Cold War, only after the defeat of the Sandinistas in neighboring Nicaragua, only after the rise of a more pragmatic Bush (I) administration that pushed for negotations, only after the U.S. Congress leveraged its substantial aid package, and only after the United Nations got involved (and this, only before the UN resources became overstretched elsewhere.)

So, pray tell, what exactly is it about these circumstances that the Iraqi insurgents supposedly "understand"?

El Salvador in the U.S. military imagination (updated)

Did anyone else catch that reference to El Salvador yesterday by Gen. Abizaid, Commander of the U.S. Central Command, who was interviewed about Iraq on Meet the Press yesterday?

MR. RUSSERT: Do you believe there's a possibility, though, that the elections may occur in just parts of the country and not all of it?

GEN. ABIZAID: My belief is that elections will occur in the vast majority of the country. I can't predict 100 percent that all areas will be available for complete, free, fair and peaceful elections. I assume that there will be certain areas of the country that will have to be fought over in order to have the elections take place.

That having been said, if we look at our previous experiences in El Salvador, we know that people who want to vote will vote. We look to our own example that we see taking place right now in Afghanistan. We know that there are certain provinces along the Pakistan-Afghani border that are going to be very, very difficult. We also see that al-Qaeda and Taliban troops and activities are starting to increase in those areas, but we believe that we can deal with those challenges. We believe that we'll set the conditions for successful elections, although they won't be perfect conditions.

First of all, it's notable that the U.S. military -- like the State Department and the United Nations -- continues to allude to the Salvadoran conflict as one of its great success stories. Of course, the allusion to El Salvador in this case is strange. Presumably he's referring to elections in 1982 and 1984, which were the only ones the FMLN rebels tried to disrupt in any significant way, but even then only in a few places. Of course, the U.S. military was not occupying El Salvador at the time either, as they are in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So neither in terms of potential disruption (and, hence, the potential for electoral turnout) or security protection, El Salvador simply doesn't compare to the current situation in Iraq and Afghanistan. So why mention El Salvador at all, if the case doesn't really compare? Perhaps it's because there aren't other "successful" cases that the U.S. military can point to in recent years. It says alot when El Salvador is the best you can come up with.

UPDATE: To see just what election day was like (and I realize we're not there yet in Iraq, but that's what Abizaid alluded to) in El Salvador in 1982, I turned to Raymond Bonner's Weakness and Deceit: U.S. Policy and El Salvador, p. 299:

There were indeed guerrilla attacks on election day--in Apopa, San Antonio Abad, Zacatecoluca, Usulután. But in total there was one major battle and fewer than a dozen fire fights. "Despite the 'ballots over bullets' news frame, over 85 percent of the 260-300 (reports vary) polling places were opened and peaceful, and two to three percent experienced fighting," wrote a professor [sic] of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, Jack Spence, who analyzed all the election coverage in the major newspapers, in the magazines and on the networks.

In the end, a more memorable parallel between Iraq and El Salvador may turn out to be the covert support for particular candidates. This was less the case in 1982 than in 1984, when the CIA funnelled some $2 million to Duarte -- who won the presidency -- against the candidacy of ARENA's Roberto D'Aubuisson. This week's issue of Time magazine reports that about a secret "finding" issued several months that would have helped specific candidates in the upcoming Iraq elections. Apparently, these plans were "scaled back" after pressure from Congress.

The logical corollary: The U.S. intervenes not just on behalf of pro-American candidates in foreign elections, it actively intervenes against groups that are antithetical to U.S. interests. In Iraq, the U.S. feels compelled to level the playing field because some parties are clearly getting financial support from Iran. In El Salvador 20 years ago, the U.S. government felt a similar need to level the playing field: they were worried that D'Aubuisson might actually win against Duarte, given the millions that the country's wealthy elite poured into the 1984 presidential elections.

Hmm. As we know from recent history, yesterday's enemies can easily become today's bedfellows, and vice-versa.

Worshipping Che

"Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become …"

Che Guevara may be the most popular icon ever to come out of Latin America, yet these words -- cited by Paul Berman in a review in Slate -- are nowhere to be found in the new movie, "The Motorcycle Diaries," about Che's vagabond adventures through Latin American in 1951-52. Berman also has this to say about the movie's romanticized depiction of Che:

Yet the entire movie, in its concept and tone, exudes a Christological cult of martyrdom, a cult of adoration for the spiritually superior person who is veering toward death—precisely the kind of adoration that Latin America's Catholic Church promoted for several centuries, with miserable consequences. The rebellion against reactionary Catholicism in this movie is itself an expression of reactionary Catholicism. The traditional churches of Latin America are full of statues of gruesome bleeding saints. And the masochistic allure of those statues is precisely what you see in the movie's many depictions of young Che coughing out his lungs from asthma and testing himself by swimming in cold water—all of which is rendered beautiful and alluring by a sensual backdrop of grays and browns and greens, and the lovely gaunt cheeks of one actor after another, and the violent Andean landscapes.

A friend who spent some time in Chile a couple of years ago reported seeing t-shirts with an image of Che on one side, Osama Bin Laden on the other. I didn't see that here in El Salvador, but similar attitudes prevailed among hotheaded university students who celebrated the destruction of 9/11.

As long it continues to follow the tired old cliché -- "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" -- why should anyone be hopeful about that (dominant) strain of the Latin American left?

Dissecting the gang issue in Central America

The New York Times' Ginger Thompson -- with reporting from Dan Alder (with whom I shared office space in the early 1990s, when he was with UPI and I with Americas Watch) -- has a 4600-word piece today on gangs in Central America .

It's one of the best and most thorough pieces I've seen on the transnational phenomenon of gangs. Although it focuses largely on Honduras, it describes the issue in a comprehensive and engaging way. These few grafs serve as a primer on the subject:

They are gang members, known here as "maras," after a species of swarming ants. Indeed, over the last decade gangs have spread like a scourge across Central America, Mexico and the United States, setting off a catastrophic crime wave that has turned dirt-poor neighborhoods into combat zones and an equally virulent crackdown that has left thousands of gang members dead, in hiding, in jail or heading to the United States.

The authorities estimate there are 70,000 to 100,000 gang members across Central America and Mexico. In the last decade, gangs have killed thousands of people, sowing new fear in a region still struggling to overcome civil wars that ended just a decade ago. Gangs have replaced guerrillas as public enemy No. 1.

The presidents of Honduras and El Salvador have called the gangs as big a threat to national security as terrorism is to the United States. They have revived old counterinsurgency strategies and adopted zero-tolerance laws known as Mano Dura, which loosely translates as "firm hand," that bypass basic rules of due process and allow them to send young men to prison for nothing more than a gang tattoo.

Instead of offering reassurance, official campaigns inflame public fear. And in the last year, human rights investigators have begun to report alarming increases in the numbers of young men killed by the police and vigilantes.

Winning in Iraq, "even if it looks like losing"

Michael Hirsh is a senior editor at Newsweek, and has a sober piece in the Outlook section of the Washington Post. These are just a few lines of the last few grafs, which gives you the general idea:

But no matter who wins the U.S. elections in November, there is no foreseeable endgame in Iraq that does not include many more American casualties over the next several years....

In the interim, a U.S. withdrawal would almost certainly lead to civil war, turning Iraq into a failed state and a haven for Islamic jihadists....

What does "winning" mean in Iraq? For U.S. troops, it means just surviving....

Confronting reality in Iraq, and reducing expectations, also means backing whatever sources of stability we can find, even if they are anti-American.... Washington must swallow the likelihood that Iraq will enter some drawn-out Islamic phase before it ever turns into a secular democratic model.

For the Americans who went to war in Iraq hoping for historic change, those options are pretty much all that's left on the table. That is what "winning" in Iraq will look like for years to come. It's the best we can do right now, even if it looks like losing.

Blogging for dollars

Matthew Klam writes about the blogosphere in the New York Times Magazine today, noting how this electoral cycle has essentially given blogs a new role. He profiles top bloggers Josh Marshall, Ann-Marie Cox (Wonkette), and Markos Moulitsas (Daily Kos)--all of whom now make a living off of blogging, and whose blogs get hundreds of thousands of hits a day.

As I noted months ago, Markos is half-Salvadoran (on his mother's side), and he spent ages 3-9 in El Salvador. This story notes that he left the country in the 1980s after "rebel soldiers" circulated a photo of him and his brother, apparently a signal to his parents to leave unless they wanted something to happen to their children.

There's also a clue here as to why I'm not so successful as a blogger, why I fall into the category of "hardly read," among the estimated 2 million blogs currently in existence:

Left-wing politics are thriving on blogs the way Rush Limbaugh has dominated talk radio, and in the last six months, the angrier, nastier partisan blogs have been growing the fastest.

That may be true, but I'm not sure that's the best way to understand the success of someone like Josh Marshall. How about: articulate, historically informed, focused, and open to critical debate (i.e., willing to admit human errors).

After writing this, I saw a reference by Kos to a blog entry by Elizabeth Edwards (wife of John) on the official Kerry-Edwards blog, who in turn references another blogger about blogging:

The blogs sound like the people I choose as friends: smart, informed, funny, curious, and imperfect.

Dictators and disasters

Democracies are less likely to go to war with each other (conventional political theory these days informs us), but what we're missing is a theory about how dictatorships are better able to cope with natural disasters.

That seems to be the case with Cuba. This Los Angeles Times editorial (Michael Kinsley?) says Cuba has an "impressive" record on disaster prevention, and that perhaps other Caribbean countries can learn some lessons from its experience.

It's hard to figure out just how other countries might emulate the social controls of Cuba, however, unless they're proposing a John Ashcroft-type authoritarian figure be put in charge of emergencies.

Venezuela update

The anti-Chavez opposition (to be described in that way, since they define themselves negatively, not in terms of what they stand for) began to fall apart this week, as this report in the BBC indicates.

Meanwhile, the Center for Economic and Policy Research does what they do well (which is to say that I rarely see eye to eye with Mark Weisbrodt in his political commentary on Venezuela) and rips apart Hausmann and Rigobon's Analysis of Venezuela's Referendum Vote.

U.S. vs. Iraqi insurgents on civilian casualties

"Operations by U.S. and multinational forces and Iraqi police are killing twice as many Iraqis — most of them civilians — as attacks by insurgents, according to statistics compiled by the Iraqi Health Ministry and obtained exclusively by Knight Ridder...

Iraqi officials said the statistics proved that U.S. airstrikes intended for insurgents also were killing large numbers of innocent civilians. Some say these casualties are undermining popular acceptance of the American-backed interim government.

That suggests that more aggressive U.S. military operations, which the Bush administration has said are being planned to clear the way for nationwide elections scheduled for January, could backfire and strengthen the insurgency."

Read more of this Knight-Ridder piece by Nancy Youssef.

Farenheit 9/11 survives censors in El Salvador

This afternoon, La Prensa Gráfica posted a note at 3:30 pm on its website, announcing that "Farenheit 9/11" would, in fact, be permitted to be shown here in El Salvador.

The paper notes that one Carlos Urrutia, of the Dirección de Espectáculos Públicos, Radio y Televisión, was called into to review the film and make sure it was palatable for Salvadoran eyes. LPG said that, according to various people they consulted, this kind of review is very "exceptional" and, according to the law, is designed to protect the mental health of Salvadorans.

Elmer Menjívar, a film critic for LPG said that "in recent years, obvious censorship has been for sexual or religious issues"--never for political ones.

Why you should read Kevin Drum

Drum, along with Josh Marshall, is one of the best reads on the web. He writes the blog for the Washington Monthly. Here's some great lines from earlier today, where he worries that Bush living in fantasyland, while increasingly running out of options:

And Thursday's press conference was just scary. It's no longer clear if George Bush is merely a cynical, calculating politician — which would be bad enough — or if he actually believes all the happy talk about Iraq that his speechwriters produce for him. Increasingly, though, it seems like the latter: he genuinely doesn't have a clue about what's going on. What's more, his staff is keeping him in a sort of Nixonian bubble, afraid to tell him the truth and afraid to take any positive action for fear that it might affect the election.

So things will just get worse, since no one is willing to admit the truth and no one is willing to propose serious action to keep things from deteriorating further — at least not until after November 2nd. But by then it will be too late. And when the Iraqi elections fail, what happens then?

What's Plan E?

Getting real on Iraq

The Washington Post editorial page has little to say today about Iraq, but the Times comes in with an editorial and three op-eds, by Bob Herbert, Noah Feldman (on why elections should be postponed, which both Bush and Allawi don't want to admit) and, of course, the always-must-read Paul Krugman.

But don't forget to check out that other paper -- the Los Angeles Times -- where Juan Cole asks "What would the United States look like if it were in Iraq's current situation?" and then proceeds to spin out that hypothetical scenario.

And Hadi Semati, a professor of political science at Tehran University who is currently a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, has this ominous opening paragraph in his op-ed on how Bush's Iraqi adventure has backfired:

The Bush administration hoped that regime change in Iraq would stimulate democratic change throughout the Middle East but, in fact, the opposite is taking place.

Progressives on Iraq

Frank Smyth, who has “embedded” with leftist guerrillas in El Salvador, Iraq, and Rwanda--yet is nobody's fool, has written a piece of Foreign Policy in Focus entitled, Who Are the Progressives in Iraq? The Left, the Right, and the Islamists. Frank covered the 1991 uprisings against Saddam Hussein’s regime, and was later captured and held for two weeks inside Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. This is a good short piece that serves as a rejoinder to the likes of Naomi Klein, who recently argued for a rather benevolent view of Muqtada al-Sadr in The Nation. Doug Ireland also likes this piece. Frank's reporting can be found at www.franksmyth.com

Here are some key grafs:

...all of the organized groups among the Iraqi resistance are reactionary forces of one kind or another. The resistance around and between the cities of Falluja, Tikrit, and Baghdad in the so-called “Sunni triangle” is led by ex-Ba’athists who aspire to return the old minority-based dictatorship to power. As Juan Cole points out, Nasir A`if al-Ani, the Sunni delegate to the Iraqi National Council from the Iraqi Islamic Party, does not even recognize the Shi’a people as a majority in Iraq. (Not even the most recalcitrant Afrikaners in apartheid South Africa pretended that blacks were a minority.)

Others like The Nation’s Naomi Klein, meanwhile, seem to have naively fallen for the al-Mahdi militia that recently fought U.S. Marines in Najaf. The al-Mahdi militia is a loosely organized Shiite opposition group led by Muqtada al-Sadr. He is a young man who inherited his role after his father and two brothers were murdered by Saddam. Lacking either the maturity or training of a senior cleric, al-Sadr has tried to lure supporters from more-respected Shiite clerics by promoting militant enforcement of the most fundamental tenets of Shiite Islam, including the explicit repression of gays and women.

The third sizable element of resistance inside Iraq is composed of foreign Islamist members of al-Qaida, who, like both the Saudi royal family and Osama bin Laden, practice an even more extreme version of Islam, Wahaabism. This group’s recent victims may include two kidnapped Italian women who work for the Italian group A Bridge to Baghdad, which, like U.S. anti-war groups working in Iraq, is explicitly opposed to the U.S. occupation. The American anti-war group, Iraq Occupation Watch, seems to believe that members of the Iraqi resistance may be holding them, pointing out on its website that the abductors should recognize that the Italian women are anti-war activists. On the other hand, Democracy Now's Jeremy Scahill and The Nation's Naomi Klein have written in The Guardian that a Western intelligence-backed group may be behind the abductions, suggesting that the CIA or others seized the two women to try to discredit the Iraqi opposition.

The Iraqis favored by the Bush administration may be secular, but they are hardly more admirable people. Prime Minister Iyad Allawi is an ex-Ba’athist who left the Ba’ath Party in the mid-1970s. Paul McGeough of the Sydney Morning Herald, reported that Allawi personally executed (with a handgun) six Iraqis in a Baghdad police station right before he became prime minister, though no proof of this crime has yet been forthcoming. Prime Minister Allawi’s democracy credentials are also not impressive. He has already banned the Qatar-based satellite TV network, al-Jazeera, and has imposed certain forms of martial law.

Neither the resistance groups cheered on by many on the American left nor the governing parties championed by the American right seem to reflect the views and aspirations of most Iraqi people, who seem to be hoping for the rise of groups independent of both Saddam’s reign and the increasingly dictatorial Allawi government. Possibilities include moderate Shiite groups and secular leftist ones, through whose leadership most Iraqis hope to find a way to empower themselves for the first time in their history.

Unfortunately, mainstream Iraqis seem to have been all but forgotten by both the American left and right. Iraqis must be valued for who they are, not as pawns in some partisan political agenda. Such chauvinism might be expected of “America-first” right-wingers, but such a position is hardly defensible for any conscientious progressive. It’s no wonder instead of seeing Iraq’s highly complex and, indeed, contradictory political reality, so many American leftists have chosen instead to cling to the comfort that comes from simple sloganeering.

More on "Innocent Voices"

A review has now come out on the new feature-length film on El Salvador, "Innocent Voices," and it is very encouraging. The review is from Reuters/Hollywood Reporter, but I'm not sure how long it will be online, so I'll print most of it here.

By Kirk Honeycutt
TORONTO (Hollywood Reporter) - Luis Mandoki returns to his native Spanish and Latin American themes for the first time since his debut Mexican feature in 1987 with "Innocent Voices," a poignant yet harrowing account of children, and in particular one rambunctious boy, during the Salvadoran civil war.

You immediately sense Mandoki's profound affinity for this subject and its characters, a passion not always evident in his routine Hollywood movies.

"Innocent Voices" is a riveting tale of survival and how even war cannot diminish a child's indomitable spirit. The film should find highly appreciative audiences in specialty venues in North America and Europe as well as in cinemas throughout Latin America.

First-time screenwriter Oscar Torres has drawn on his own incredible experiences as a child trying to grow up in El Salvador during the civil war of the '80s. A father abandons his poor family at the outbreak of war to go to the U.S., leaving Chava (Carlos Padilla) as the "man of the house." A naturally happy kid, Chava lives in a rude shack with his sister, younger brother and hard-working mom (fast-rising Chilean actress Leonor Varela). The army is already "recruiting" 12-year-old boys, pulling them at gunpoint from classrooms at the local school. Chava is 11, meaning he has one year left.

Their village lies between the capital and the guerrilla forces, making it a constant battleground. Many nights, the frightened family hits the floor or ducks behind upturned mattresses to escape bullets that pound through the cardboard walls. During daytime, Chava stake his claim to normalcy by attending class, falling in love with a pretty classmate, playing games with his pals along with the village idiot (Gustavo Munoz) and getting a job on a bus to help out with expenses.

His uncle (Jose Maria Yazpik), who fights for the guerillas, has given him a transistor radio so he can listen to the forbidden guerrilla broadcasts and especially its banned musical anthem. He witnesses the soldiers' harassment of the local priest (Daniel Gimenez Cacho) and their abduction of young girls to satisfy their lust.

The war finally forces the family to move in with their grandmother (Ofelia Medina), but even here they are not safe. Soldiers raid the village to kidnap more children to become soldiers. The boys learn to hide on the corrugated tin roofs of the houses.

Pedilla, who has acted in telenovelas, has an expressive face and superb acting ability that allows him to carry the film. (He is in virtually every scene.) His spirit makes this an uplifting film rather than a huge downer.

His Chava is a resilient child, clearly unafraid of death yet deadly afraid of being recruited to kill. Varela's mother is resilient too only as an adult, fear rules her life as her family is exposed to constant danger.

Mandoki and his accomplished cinematographer, Juan Ruiz Anchia, resist the temptation to make a gritty film about warfare; instead they shoot the lush jungle, town and the villages in delicate, pleasing colors, creating a dramatic contrast between the carnage taking place and the land's great beauty.

"Innocent Voices" accomplishes this: It shows warfare from a child's perspective as well as from an omniscient observer's point of view as the camera sweeps up above villages and into trees to show us rain pelting the shantytown and soldiers industriously going about their murderous business. It is at once intimate and epic.

The film was shot in Mexico with a top-notch crew, which along with Andre Abujamra's Latin-flavored musical score gives "Innocent Voices" a persuasive sense of the hell that was rural El Salvador of 20 years ago.

Post misses the story on gangs

I guess I should pay more attention when the Washington Post comes to town. Last week, Mary Jordan wrote about gang violence in El Salvador, in the aftermath of a bloody prison riot in August.

To me, it's pretty much the same-old-same story, and adds nothing new. However, the Post should have been better in one respect. About the anti-gang laws, she wrote this:

Governments across the region have adopted popular get-tough measures against gangs, including laws that make it easy for police to detain people with telltale tattoos. Critics said such methods, some of which have been ruled unconstitutional, had not stopped the gangs, but rather forced them to disperse to rural areas and to other countries.

The problem is --and I can't believe that even the government minister she interviewed failed to mention this, or perhaps they did-- that Jordan fails to note the first and most important accomplishment of the Saca administration, namely, the consensual process in which a new anti-gang law was developed in June and July, with the participation of all political parties and key civil society groups. This is something not to be frowned upon -- or ignored -- and sets a tone for a different way of governing. No one is currently criticizing the law, for that reason. FESPAD's criticisms are quite outdated. It wouldn't have required much effort to figure this out.

UPDATE: After talking to someone, a couple of additional notes. First, the process by which a new law was written in July apparently wasn't exactly done by "consensus," since votes were taken. It probably couldn't have been done otherwise. Second, I understand a new "mesa" that was set up to discuss the penitenciary system--in light of the recent uprising and other problems-- is not really a roundtable discussion, but rather a series of bilateral meetings with different sectors. The possible conclusion to be drawn from the implementation of this new mechanism is that the government may have felt that they didn't get everything they wanted in the previous process, and that a new system -- one in which they could exercise greater control -- should be tried.

Nevertheless, all agree that the process instituted by Saca was a qualitative step forward from the previous governing posture of President Flores.

That's right, E.J.

"...there is only one reason the story about Bush's choices during the Vietnam years persists. It's because the president won't give detailed answers to the direct questions posed by the Times story and other responsible media organizations, including the Boston Globe. Their questions never depended on the discredited CBS documents.

Bush could end this story now so we could get to the real issues of 2004. It would require only that the president take an hour or so with reporters to make clear what he did and did not do in the Guard. He may have had good reasons for ducking that physical exam. Surely he can explain the gaps in his service and tell us honestly whether any pull was used to get him into the Guard....

I'm as weary as you are that our politics veer away from what matters -- Iraq, terrorism, health care, jobs -- and get sidetracked into personal issues manufactured by political consultants and ideological zealots. But the Bush campaign has made clear it wants this election to focus on character and leadership. If character is the issue, the president's life, past and present, matters just as much as John Kerry's.

Dan Rather has answered his critics. Now it is Bush's turn."

--E.J. Dionne, in his Washington Post column today

Democratic authoritarianism (?) in Venezuela

Andres Oppenheimer of the Miami Herald admittedly has it in for Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Nevertheless, many of his criticisms are undeniably on the mark.

In his latest column, he warns about the dangers of an "elected dictatorship" in Venezuela. Sounds like an oxymoron, but it isn't. He takes on a recent legislative initiative in Venezuela to change the Venezuelan constitution (oh, written by a Constituent Assembly almost entirely dominated by Chavez supporters back in 1999, by the way).

On the heels of the Bolivarian movement's recent referendum success, some want to take out the line which limits any president to two six-year terms. That's a fairly standard practice in almost all democratic nations, for reasons that don't need restating. Here's the story; be forewarned.

Last week, amid still-to-be-proved opposition charges that he stole the Aug. 15 vote, an influential pro-Chávez legislator in Congress announced a push for an amendment of the Venezuelan Constitution that would allow Chávez to be reelected ad infinitum, much like Cuba's president-for-life Fidel Castro.

Chávez, who has said he wants to remain in power until 2021, has remained noncommittal about the constitutional amendment, saying it's something to be decided "later on."

The constitutional changes proposed by pro-Chávez legislator Luis Velásquez Alvaray and endorsed by Chávez's Fifth Republic Movement leader William Lara would change Article 230 of the constitution, which states that the president serves a term of six years and "can be reelected immediately for a new term, only for one time." The text would be modified to eliminate the words "and only for one time."

As reported by the Caracas daily El Nacional, the explanatory section of the bill says that it's the sovereign right of the people "to be able to extend [the president's term] for the consecutive periods it deems convenient or necessary for the interests of the country. No law, and much less one of constitutional rank, can put obstacles to such exercise of sovereignty."

The proposed constitutional amendment comes after two Chávez-backed legislative proposals that are likely to be passed by Congress shortly: a new press law putting restrictions on what private television networks can say, and a separate national police law that would create a national police force, thus stripping opposition mayors from running their cities' police forces.

Earlier this year, Chávez already took what may be the most dangerous step toward an
"elected dictatorship": He expanded the Supreme Court from 20 to 32 members, stacking it with his loyalists. Now, a solidly pro-Chávez Supreme Court will be the ultimate judge on issues such as Chávez's reelection and press censorship.

Government critics say Chávez is behind the bill to amend the constitution. But Chávez-backed National Assembly President Francisco Ameliach took distance from the project late last week, suggesting that the pro-Chávez camp is, at least in public, divided over the issue.

On Friday, I called the man who probably knows Chávez best: Luís Miquilena, his former mentor, campaign chief and interior minister. Miquilena, who quit in 2002 as the undisputed No. 2 in the Chávez government, told me from his home in Caracas the 1999 Constitution drafted by Chávez and Miquilena "is becoming a nuisance to Chávez."

Miquilena, a former Communist Party leader who took Chávez under his wing after the 1992 coup attempt, says Chávez may not have ordered his congressman to draft the bill, but he is giving him his tacit approval.

"It's a trial balloon, aimed at creating the necessary climate for a third reelection," Miquilena said. "A move like that needs a lot of lobbying, and Chávez is probably letting this proposal float to see how it goes, and act accordingly."