Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies, Fall 2007

BERKELEY BERKELEY REVIEW REVIEW OF OF

Latin Latin American American Studies Studies UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SPRING 2007 FALL 2007

Argentina: Charting the Course Agriculture and Development Democracy and the Chilean Miracle

Table of Contents

BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES FALL 2007 Chair Harley Shaiken Vice Chair Sara Lamson Managing Editor Jean Spencer Contributing Editor Joshua Jelly-Schapiro Design and Layout Greg Louden Contributing Writers Bryce Breslin Martin Carnoy Daniel Coronell Alain de Janvry Roberto J. González F. Daniel Hidalgo Benjamin Lessing Sarah Moody Laura Nader Neal P. Richardson Elisabeth M. Sadoulet Juan Gabriel Valdés Photography Kike Arnal Felipe I. Camus Dávila Felipe Canova Julián Castro Suarez Eskinder Debebe Steve Deager Júbilo Haku kool_skatkat Robin Lasser David R. Léon Lara Ricardo Martins Jude Mooney César Muniz William Neuheisel Celeste Marina Orrego Olivares Meredith Perry Brian Snelson Roberto Stelling takomabibelot Farol Tomson Francisco Varnet Roberto Vinicius Huong Worley Gabriela Zamorano The Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies is published by the Center for Latin American Studies, 2334 Bowditch Street, Berkeley, CA 94720.

Contents Comment

Harley Shaiken

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Bryce Breslin

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Alain de Janvry & Elisabeth M. Sadoulet

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Harley Shaiken Interviews Foreign Minister Jorge Taiana

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Harley Shaiken

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Juan Gabriel Valdés

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Laura Nader & Roberto J. González

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Photo Essay

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Daniel Coronell

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The Art of Fernando Botero

Sarah Moody

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Cuba’s Academic Advantage

Martin Carnoy

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Benjamin Lessing

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F. Daniel Hidalgo & Neal P. Richardson

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Sara Lamson

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Joshua Jelly-Schapiro Interviews Rebecca Solnit

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Democracy and the Chilean Miracle Agriculture and Development: The Latin American Difference Argentina: Charting the Course Firm Steps on Uncertain Ground Latin American Voices: Juan Gabriel Valdés Fifty Years: From Autonomy to Dependence The Zapotec Rincón: People of Talea The Little Cold War

Paramilitaries at the Polls The Economy of Land Conflict in Brazil The Bitter for the Sweet Borders and Crossers

Front cover: The Floralis Genérica, a giant hydraulic flower sculpture in Buenos Aires’ Plaza de las Naciones Unidas, with photosensors that cause the petals to open and close at sunrise and sunset.

Photo by Steve Deager.

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Fall 2007

Comment

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Photo by David R. Léon Lara.

known professors of Agriculture and Resource Economics any of the scholars and public figures featured at UC Berkeley, discuss agriculture and development in a in this issue of the Review are grappling with the Latin American context. “Agriculture has shown its capacity toughest challenges in Latin America: democracy, to trigger economic growth, reduce poverty and deliver development and globalization. Their findings range from environmental services,” they write. “Yet, this power has contemporary issues to historical examinations; from increasingly been underused, at high social and environmental economic analyses to cultural reflections. In all, these costs.” De Janvry was co-director of the World Development essays and interviews bring together a fascinating, thoughtReport 2008, one of the World Bank’s key publications, and provoking and at times provocative mix of scholarship and Sadoulet was a core team member on the report. commentary.

Laura Nader and Roberto J. Gonzalez, both Jorge Taiana, Argentina’s incoming foreign minister, distinguished anthropologists, write about the costs certain gives one of his first interviews in North America paths of development can extract in the context of Oaxaca. for the Review. He speaks about issues of economic “Throughout the world, local knowledge developed over growth, trade and the role of the United States in Latin centuries — a priceless intellectual treasure trove — is America. “If our country has made its mark in recent times,” withering away,” they conclude. “It is as if, within a generation, he emphasized, “it has been through its move to the vanguard the world’s greatest of the defense of human libraries were being rights.” destroyed.”

Juan Gabriel Valdés, Noted Colombian Chile’s former representative journalist Daniel Coronell to the United Nations covers “The Little Cold who sat on the UN War,” the freeze in the Security Council during relationship between the run-up to the Iraq Colombia and Venezuela. war and then went on Coronell examines the to lead the UN mission causes and consequences in Haiti, comments of this diplomatic train on Charles Ferguson’s wreck, finding that “both award-winning film on nations are headed by the Iraq War, “No End strong men who — in Sight.” Ambassador notwithstanding opposite Valdés will be visiting Harley Shaiken accompanies State Senator Gilberto Cedillo to a CLAS event. political leanings — the Center for Latin possess great similarities.”

American Studies (CLAS) Coronell has received Colombia’s most prestigious award for in February 2008. journalism — the Premio Nacional de Periodismo Simón Manuel Castells, the highly regarded sociologist and Bolívar — several times, most recently as “best columnist” in pioneering scholar of the “information society,” explores October 2007. the sources of Chile’s economic success and challenges a An interview with Rebecca Solnit, an award-winning widely held stereotype: he finds that a post-dictatorship writer and public intellectual, concludes this issue with “democratic liberal inclusive model” deserves the credit, not a meditation on landscapes and divides. At a time of the economic policies of the Pinochet dictatorship. Castells considerable tension over the U.S.–Mexico border, Solnit highlights the importance of the Chilean model for all of reminds us that the Río Grande is “not a divide between Latin America, pointing to the economic benefits of social things but an oasis in a dry land that brings them together.” change. “Redistribution actually means expansion of the — Harley Shaiken domestic market,” he states.

Class of 1930 Chair, Center for Latin American Studies Alain de Janvry and Elisabeth M. Sadoulet, both wellCENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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Article Title

Plaza de Armas, Santiago, Chile.

Photo by Roberto Stelling.

BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

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CHILE

Democracy and the Chilean Miracle

by Bryce Breslin

Photo by Meredith Perry.

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ow can Latin American countries articulate economic growth, social development and democracy in a sustainable model of development?

How can this goal be achieved in the context of the growing integration of global markets and increased interdependency among nations? With these questions, Manuel Castells opened his recent talk for the Center for Latin American Studies. The model elaborated by Chile, he argued, has emerged as the most viable — indeed, the only viable — response to these challenges in Latin America. Yet contrary to the standard view, which has framed the “Chilean Miracle” as a triumph of the neoliberal economic policies and reforms first implemented under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–90), Professor Castells offered an alternative explanation of Chile’s success: the 17 years of measured state intervention and social redistribution, comparable to Roosevelt’s New Deal, that elected governments have pursued since Chile’s return to democracy in 1990.

Castells, a world-renowned scholar of communications and the “information society” who was for many years a professor in Berkeley’s Departments of Sociology and City and Regional Planning, first reviewed the economic theory of development that dominated the last quarter of the 20th century. After the stagflation of the 1980s, Latin American nations came under increasing pressure — both internal and external — to adopt a model of economic development based on liberalization, privatization, deregulation, adoption of austerity measures and containment of social demands.

This theory dominated much of the 1990s, in Castells’ words, “…a period marked by the so-called Washington Consensus, labeled ideologically as neoliberal policies.”

While for many this model seemed the only possible solution to the challenges of development in the context of globalization, its trajectory as a tenable approach turned out to be remarkably short-lived. By the first years of the new century, most Latin American nations had written off neoliberalism as socially regressive and politically unstable.

In addition, many countries subsequently elected leftleaning administrations in a widespread rejection of the Washington Consensus. Castells pointed to Mexico and Colombia as the sole exceptions to this political backlash in the region.

With this new era of political leadership has come

Manuel Castells.

an emphasis on state intervention and policies of social redistribution. It is in this sense, Castells explained, that the ideology of neoliberalism is “dead,” having “defeated itself.” In this same period, however, institutional stability and democracy in the region have regressed: Castells cited a recent study that shows democracy has lost the support of more than 50 percent of the region’s population. In its place, he argued, has arisen a form of populism that subordinates democracy to broader projects of social transformation and ultimately weakens economic stability.

Such instability currently threatens to lead to another round of economic crisis in Latin America.

Against this backdrop, he argued, Chile — with its sustained economic growth and 17 years of political stability — has stood in sharp contrast. Since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship, Chile has seen a substantial improvement in the living conditions of its population, an unprecedented reduction of poverty and dramatic progress in education, housing and health. “In many ways,” Castells explained, “Chile is the only success story of Latin American development.” In the United States and throughout the world this singular success has largely been attributed to the free market, laissezfaire economic model implemented by Pinochet and his economic czars, known as “the Chicago Boys.” However, the empirical data — which Castells supplied in great quantity, >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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Democracy and the Chilean Miracle

Photo by Huong Worley.

New housing development in Chile.

having carried out research on the subject for a book he published in 2006 — emphatically refutes this notion.

Castells identified two distinct models of development in Chile since 1973: the “authoritarian liberal exclusionary model,” implemented under the dictatorship; and the “democratic liberal inclusive model,” which has been in place since re-democratization in 1990. This second model, Castells insisted, is the hidden story behind Chile’s unprecedented growth and stability. Castells’ direct comparison of the empirical indicators for each of these models was telling: during the 17 years of Pinochet’s dictatorship, Chile’s average rate of economic growth was 2.4 percent. During the 16 years subsequent to Chile’s return to democracy, on the other hand, the economy grew at an average rate of 5.8 percent, while its GDP more than doubled. During the same period, the average rate of economic growth for all of Latin America was 1.1 percent. In fact, Chile’s growth between 1990 and 2006 was the fastest in its history, and according to the IMF, Chile’s was the eighth-fastest growing economy in the world during this period.

Castells provided an extensive index of the democratic inclusive model’s superiority to the authoritarian exclusionary model in economic performance. Among the indicators he cited were: • Inflation, which averaged 27 percent during the dictatorship, while in 2005 it reached 3 percent and currently remains in the single digits; • Unemployment, which was 15 percent in the last Pinochet years and is 5 percent currently; and • Real wages, which, on an index of 100 in 1970, remained stagnant throughout the dictatorship, leveling at 103 in 1989; using the same index, this indicator reached 190 during the democratic period.

BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Every existing empirical indicator demonstrates much higher economic performance in the period since 1990 than in the years before. Yet the greatest contrast between the two models is in the areas of poverty and living conditions. In 1990, 38.5 percent of the population was below the poverty line; today the figure is 17 percent. Extreme poverty went from 12.7 percent to a current 3.5 percent. And in real terms, Chile’s minimum wage has increased by 80 percent during the democratic period.

The key to the new model in Chile? Not what one who has heard the common narrative on Chile’s economic growth would expect. “Most significantly,” Castells explained, “I would say that in most of the economic and social discussions on Chile the key to the story that nobody talks about is the massive redistribution of wealth in housing, health, education and subsidies of all kinds.” The democratic liberal inclusive model follows in many ways the form of traditional social democracy: redistribution of wealth, through taxes, in the form of government transfers. One way to demonstrate the extent of economic redistribution in post-Pinochet Chile is to analyze the most common criticism leveled against Chile’s economy: income inequality.

The difference between the highest-earning 20 percent and the lowest-earning 20 percent is approximately a magnitude of 14, an indicator that has remained essentially the same over the last 30 years. Yet if government transfers are included in the calculation of income, Castells argued, this number decreases to a magnitude of seven in the period after 1990.

The benefits of this redistribution are evident in Chile’s 2002 census data. Education particularly saw dramatic improvements: by 2006, primary education was universal; secondary education had reached 90 percent; and higher

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education doubled in the 1990s and increased by 20 percent again in the first years of the new century. Currently, in the 20 to 29 year-old cohort, approximately 24 percent are enrolled in higher education, a number that is equal to the European Union. Other indicators from the census demonstrate widespread improvement in the Chilean standard of living: 72 percent of Chileans are homeowners; infant mortality is down to 10 per 1,000; and life expectancy is 80 years for women and 71 years for men. The CASEN survey of 2006 also demonstrated the efficiency of state subsidies: 40 percent of education subsidies went to the poorest 20 percent of students, while the top 20 percent received 7 percent. These numbers were the same in every area of government transfers.

“Since 1990,” Castells emphasized, “[Chile’s democratic inclusive model] is clearly superior in economic terms, plus it’s much more redistributive in every possible aspect… and does not require an authoritarian regime.” How does this model work? Castells characterized Chile’s democratic liberal inclusive model as an export-oriented growth model based on an open economy, with extensive liberalization of external and internal markets. In descriptive terms, Castells

described it as based on competitiveness, new lines of export and modernization of the production process.

“But,” he was quick to point out, “with strategic intervention of the public sector: regulating microeconomic policy, tightly controlling credit, organizing studies of external trade and acting very decisively on social transfers.”

The superiority of the democratic liberal inclusive model is also evident in light of two simple ideas Castells offered: development and democracy are complimentary to each other; and, as he succinctly put it, “politics matter in trade.” Progressive democracy and a free, open society have been essential to Chile’s success as an increasingly knowledge-based economy — something that could not have been possible under a repressive, authoritarian regime.

“Redistribution actually means expansion of the domestic market; social policies mean stability of industrial relations; institutionalization means stability and playing by the rules; and getting rid of a dictator means respectability in the world at large.” These important points are concealed in the dominant narrative, which in Castells’ view, falsely credits the military dictatorship with having laid the foundation for Chile’s development. >>

Photo courtesy of www.presidencia.cl.

Former President Ricardo Lagos inaugurates Valparaíso’s rail line in November 2005.

CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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Democracy and the Chilean Miracle

Yet in spite of its many successes, Chile’s current model has several serious problems, as Castells acknowledged toward the end of his talk. Briefly summarizing the most salient of these, Castells mentioned income inequality; uneven health coverage; quality of higher education, particularly in newer private universities; the privatized pension system; marginalization of the native Mapuche communities and land policy in the south; gender inequality in the work place; and the environment.

Castells also pointed to the need

for great strides in technological development and human capital in the near future. He signaled investment in research and development, education and know-how as essential steps in Chile’s bid to establish itself as a competitive, knowledge-based economy founded on informationand technology-based development.

Before closing his talk, Castells took a few moments to reflect on what lessons Chile’s experience since the end of the military dictatorship may hold for other Latin American nations. One such lesson is to be found

Chilean students walk away from desk chairs embedded in the gates of a secondary school during the October 2006 protests.

Photo by Francisco Varnet.

BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

in the progression of Chile’s return to democracy. Successfully instituting democracy, Castells argued, “while managing economic growth and social redistribution, is a lesson for Latin America… It’s not the famous ‘stages theory’: first you grow, then you redistribute, then democracy. No. It’s the other way around: the synergistic relationship between the three levels which reinforce each other. And that’s what the Chilean democratic model has shown to be true.”

Latin America’s current political climate, Castells cautioned in conclusion, is marked by the ascendance of left-leaning governments that, in some cases, have been accompanied by a worrying movement away from democracy. This movement, Castells argued, has been largely supported by polities wearied of the mockery that their nations’ political classes have long made of democracy and democratic values. The old debate over “bourgeois democracy” has reignited in Latin America and regional demagogues have capitalized on popular disillusionment. That Chile is largely beyond this debate marks its importance as a prospective model for others. “Chile,” Castells concluded, “did not need to sacrifice democracy to overcome underdevelopment. This is perhaps the most important lesson that it can offer Latin America.”

Manuel Castells is the Wallis Annenberg Professor of Communication Technology and Society at the University of Southern California, Research Professor at the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona and Professor Emeritus of City and Regional Planning and Sociology at UC Berkeley. He spoke on “Globalization, Development and Democracy: The Chilean Democratic Model” on October 18, 2007.

Bryce Breslin is a graduate student in Latin American Studies at UC Berkeley.

Photo by Celeste Marina Orrego Olivares.

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Chilean fruit stand.

DEVELOPMENT

Agriculture and Development: The Latin American Difference

by Alain de Janvry and Elisabeth M. Sadoulet

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very year the World Bank prepares a World Development Report (WDR) that deals with a development topic of significance. Recent reports have addressed such issues as equity, the environment, the role of the state, poverty and health. The last WDR on agriculture was in 1982, marking the beginning of a 25 years hiatus during which the attention given to agriculture by governments and development agencies declined — a period during which huge changes have occurred in globalization, integrated supply chains, technology, institutions and the environment, making it imperative to revisit the issue. Indeed, many of the themes that today dominate the international development agenda relate to agriculture and rural societies: hurdles to progress with trade negotiations, the persistence of poverty

and hunger, rising conflicts over water, the impact of climate change, the spread of epizootic diseases, food security in a context of rising prices and biofuels as an option to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and provide alternative sources of energy. It is striking how a sector that had been seen as a “sunset activity” and a drag on development may now emerge as an important source of growth and business opportunities and the solution to many development problems. Revisiting the question of how agriculture can serve development is indeed timely. This is the objective of WDR 2008, Agriculture for Development. Here we review the main messages of WDR 2008 and how they apply — with a difference — to Latin America. >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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Agriculture and Development

Agriculture for Development at a World Scale: A Striking Discrepancy The social dimensions of the agricultural problem are staggering. While the most visible poverty may be in urban slums, the reality is that three out of every four poor people in the developing world live in rural areas, 900 million on less than $1 a day. For 2.5 billion people, half of humanity in the developing world, agriculture is the source of livelihood.

What these figures make clear is that the Millennium Development Goal of reducing poverty by half in 2015 is unlikely to be met without paying more attention to where poverty is — predominantly in rural areas — and what the poor do — predominantly agriculture.

Historical and recent experiences show that agriculture has been highly effective in reducing poverty in numerous countries. China took 300 million rural people out of poverty in the space of 20 years through changes in the land tenure system and market liberalization. Yet, government and donor neglect of agriculture over the last 25 years has prevented agriculture from fulfilling this function in many countries. There are many reasons for this, including shifts in donor priorities toward structural adjustment loans and social protection, falling food prices, quality problems with agriculture projects, opposition to agriculture by environmental groups, dysfunctional ministries of agriculture, rejection of former state-based approaches and development ideas giving priority to industry and urban development. The result today is a striking discrepancy between facts and actions: while 75 percent of the poor are in rural areas, only 4 percent of overseas development assistance goes to agriculture, and it has been declining steadily for the last 15 years while the share of the poor in rural areas remained unchanged.

New opportunities to invest in agriculture are being created on both the demand and the supply sides. The curse of agriculture as a growth sector has historically been lack of effective demand, with food consumption limited by the need for caloric intake. This has been changing in a major way. Dynamic market opportunities are being created for agriculture by changes in consumer demand for high value products, demand for feed imports in the emerging countries, rapidly rising nontraditional exports, regional integration of food markets and the emerging demand for biofuels. For the first time since the food crisis of the early 1970s, food prices are rising sharply on international markets.

Supply response is facilitated by institutional and technological innovations, for instance the use of information technology for financial services and farm extension.

However, these opportunities do not come free of challenges BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

in using agriculture for development. Large economies of scale in supply chains are making it difficult for smallholders to compete in modern food markets. Incomplete institutional innovations leave large gaps for smallholders in such services as finance, insurance and organizations for collective action.

Technological progress in biology applied to agriculture is held back by lack of public investment and regulatory capacity. And resource degradation and climate change are compromising the sustainability of farming systems, particularly for the poor.

Lack of progress in the Doha Development Round of trade negotiations is a hurdle for agriculture in developing countries, but complementary investments to ensure supply response to higher international prices is fundamental for successful development outcomes. Trade distortions in cotton and oilseeds are particularly harmful to developing countries.

But even a favorable outcome of the negotiations will not be sufficient to secure better development opportunities for rural people. Developing countries need to invest in public goods for agriculture such as infrastructure, improved property rights and research and development. They also need to provide level playing fields to enable smallholders to respond to the improved prices. The key issue is to move attention from the statics of price distortions to the dynamics of public investment in agriculture, technological change and new employment and investment opportunities for the rural poor. Success with Doha is necessary but far from sufficient to induce development.

Agricultural growth and environmental conditions are inextricably linked. Agricultural growth’s large environmental footprint can be reduced, and agriculture’s contributions in delivering environmental services can be enhanced.

Agriculture uses 85 percent of fresh water and contributes to about one-third of greenhouse gas emissions globally. Of special importance are the issues of growing water scarcity, soil degradation and deforestation, poor management of intensive agriculture (e.g., overuse of pesticides) and the sector’s contribution to global climate change. Agriculture’s pressure on the environment can be reduced by: correcting perverse incentives (for example, free electricity that encourages overuse of ground water); assigning property rights and recognizing current use rights over land resources; enhancing community capacity to manage resources and devolving control; exploiting new technologies to conserve natural resources; and scaling up innovative approaches to environmental services (e.g., paying landowners not to deforest). Adapting developing country agriculture to climate change is urgently needed to avoid potentially huge costs for the rural poor. As the Stern Report indicates, there is a narrow window of opportunity to make this happen.

Photo by William Neuheisel.

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Coffee beans dry in the sun at a cooperative near Matagalpa, Nicaragua.

Immediate action is required but not forthcoming.

Using agriculture for development requires strong governance. Although agriculture is nominally a private activity, the impact of extensive market failures on agriculture implies that it depends vitally on public goods and state facilitation, coordination and regulation. Yet, governance in agriculture is weaker than that in other sectors in nearly all countries. Redefining the role of the state in agriculture beyond structural adjustment and improving the quality of governance are top priorities in any agenda that proposes to use agriculture for development. Governance issues include the need to reconsider the institutional structure of ministries of agriculture, how agriculture is coordinated with other economic and social sectors, how decentralization of governance can support using agriculture for development (when it is often not a priority for local governments because expenditures on agriculture are paid for locally but create benefits that spillover to other regions) and how community-driven development can be made more effective and equitable. Fixing governance for agriculture also requires more effective delivery of international public goods and leadership by international organizations, many of which were created to fulfill functions vastly different from the current interrelated global agendas they need to address. Major reforms and resource commitments will be

needed for the international community to support national agriculture-for-development agendas.

Agriculture for Development: The LAC Difference How do Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) fit in this perspective? Most countries in LAC are highly urbanized, with a share of the rural sector in total poverty (defined as people living on less than a dollar a day) below 50 percent and a contribution of agriculture to growth below 10 percent. However, some sectors of agriculture have strong comparative advantages and have been growing rapidly, and the agribusiness sector and associated services can be as large as 30 percent of the economy. There are, however, countries (Central America, Paraguay, Haiti) that are still highly dependent on agriculture for growth, and there are states within Mexico (Sinaloa, Zacatecas) and Brazil (Matto Grosso, Parana, Rio Grande do Sul) where agriculture is the engine of growth. Hence, in LAC, agriculture still matters for business and for poverty reduction.

Agriculture is a sector doing better than its people. The main LAC difference is that agricultural growth, which has been reasonable over the long run, does not easily translate into poverty reduction. This is a distinctive LAC feature. >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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Agriculture and Development

The LAC agricultural paradox: This graph maps Headcount Ratio Index, a measure of poverty, against the productivity of agricultural workers.

In many regions, as that productivity has increased, poverty has decreased.

However, in the Latin American and Caribbean countries (LAC), along with Sub-Saharan Africa, this relationship is not as clear.

(Source: World Development Report 2008)

We see above that while agricultural growth per worker has been effective in reducing poverty in China, India, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, this is differentially not the case in LAC. Clearly, there, growth is necessary but not sufficient for poverty reduction. Complementary policies must be put into place. The challenge is to identify what they are and to assess their political, administrative and financial feasibility.

Two Alternative Models Something extraordinary recently happened in Brazil: during the last 10 years both poverty and inequality fell.

How was this achieved? Decomposition of sources of income growth shows that this was mainly due to transfers, such as Bolsa Familia and noncontributory pensions. The rural nonfarm economy also had a role to play. By contrast, agriculture did very little to lift people out of poverty through smallholder farming or wage earnings in the agricultural labor market. Can Latin America do better than rely on transfers to reduce poverty and inequality? The alternative model is for the poor to get out of poverty through their own work, as farm entrepreneurs or wage workers in rural labor markets. How can this be done?

Do bilateral free trade agreements with the United States help or hurt the rural poor? There is a lot of controversy on this topic, with strongly entrenched positions, but in the BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

end it is an empirical question. Countries that have sought or are seeking free trade agreements with the U.S. include Mexico, Chile, the six CAFTA-DR signatories (Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua), Peru, Colombia (not yet ratified by the U.S.) and Ecuador (suspended). The expected impact on food prices (corn in particular) is toward a decline. Will this help or hurt the rural poor? It depends on which side of the market they are on.

The urban poor, the rural landless and also many smallholders are buyers of food. They will benefit. And they are in fact the majority of the poor. Net-seller smallholders will lose and need to be compensated, for example through a decoupled transfer program such as Procampo, which was instituted in Mexico following NAFTA. But the key issue is the ability to respond to the new system of incentives (away from corn and toward high value products and nontraditional exports). Will smallholders have a chance? Procampo did not help beyond transferring cash. Conditions will need to be set up for smallholders to be competitive under the new trade rules. This requires a proactive approach, where the state actively works to enhance their competitiveness. A new role for the state is essential if trade is to help reduce poverty.

The rural nonfarm economy (RNFE) has a key role to play. A remarkable phenomenon in the last 20 years has been the decentralization of national economies away from the

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main cities toward rural territories, with a corresponding increase in access to off-farm sources of employment and income for rural populations. In Mexico, the rural nonfarm economy and remittances provide 75 percent of rural incomes (with farming and the agricultural labor market providing the remaining 25 percent). Promoting the RNFE as a means of reducing poverty requires investing in the skill-formation of rural populations to enhance their employability and a territorial approach to promote the local availability of employment and investment opportunities.

Agriculture will not reduce rural poverty alone. Here again, local governments have a proactive role to play in enhancing the competitiveness of rural territories. In these regions, cooperation among farms and enterprises in rural clusters is the key to being better able to compete.

Agriculture-for-Development: A Time for Action Agriculture has shown its capacity to trigger economic growth, reduce poverty and deliver environmental services.

Yet, this power has increasingly been underused, at high social and environmental costs. Today, concerns with continuing rural poverty and food insecurity for millions,

rising food prices, the uncertain impact of biofuels, climate change, loss of biodiversity, competition over scarce water, rising subsidies in the upcoming U.S. farm bill and stalled international trade negotiations have elevated agriculture to becoming a key player in global and national agendas.

New opportunities exist for a renewed use of agriculture as a powerful instrument for development, ranging from dynamic markets to technological and institutional innovations to new roles for the state, the private sector and civil society organizations. The window of opportunity to make a major difference for development is here, but it will not remain open forever. This opportunity should not be missed, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean, but it requires developing country-level agendas and mobilizing political and financial support for implementation. This is a chance that must not be wasted.

Alain de Janvry, co-director of the World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development, is Professor of Agriculture & Resource Economics and Public Policy at UC Berkeley. He spoke for CLAS on October 1, 2007.

Elisabeth M. Sadoulet, a core member of the World Development Report 2008 team, is Professor of Agricultural & Resource Economics at UC Berkeley.

Photo by takomabibelot.

Bas-relief of “Agriculture� on the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s building.

CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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Charting the Course

ARGENTINA

Charting the Course Argentina enters a new era with President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner taking the reigns as the country’s first elected female head of state in December 2007. But what lies in store for the new administration? After falling into a deep economic crisis in 2001–02, Argentina has experienced an annual GDP growth of more than 8 percent and seen its poverty rate drastically reduced. At the same time, memories of past collapses cast long shadows. In an exclusive interview, Professor Harley Shaiken, Chair of the Center for Latin American Studies at UC Berkeley, asks Foreign Minister Jorge Taiana about the state of Argentina today and the plans and goals of the new administration.

Harley Shaiken: What do you see as the major goals and central challenges for the new administration domestically?

Jorge Taiana: The goals remain the same as four years ago when Argentina was struggling to overcome the deepest economic and political crisis in its history. They could be summarized as the challenge of building a productive, modern and comprehensive Argentina, able to achieve the levels of social advancement and equity that characterized our country during most of the 20th century.

In this regard, it is important to continue working for the insertion of Argentina in the world’s economy in an “intelligent” way, taking into account the close ties between a dynamic international insertion and sustainable development.

That is why, among the great challenges that Argentines face today, we must acknowledge the need to take advantage of opportunities in fields such as trade and investment, exercising control over the risks derived from closer ties with other economies. Consequently, promoting an intelligent insertion in the world’s economy is vital for fully developing our potential. An intelligent insertion, as I understand it, will be comprehensive of the whole project for the country and its society.

As the government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner understands it, there cannot be true development without a network of public health, education and employment.

Therefore, we must continue to improve the results that our country has achieved during recent years — much to BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

the surprise of the rest of the world — based on sustained economic growth, with a stress on industry, and focused on a more equitable distribution of income.

In fact, our country holds first place in the UN Human Development Index for the region, occupying the 38th place in the world. Australia and Canada — two countries with which Argentina has been compared in the past — are, however, situated third and fourth respectively. In this sense, we are still way below the historic indexes for our country as well as our own goals.

To maintain an annual growth rate of 8 or 9 percent is the challenge today. Argentina has just achieved that goal after experiencing uninterrupted growth for the past five years — the longest period of sustained growth in the last 100 years. Besides continuing this rate of growth, Argentina is exerting itself to increase employment, aiming to meet the conditions that define “honest work” in the terms agreed upon at the 2005 Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata.

In Argentina, access to education, and even more importantly, continuation in the educational system and the real possibility of enjoying healthcare, is deeply related to formal employment.

Regarding the educational sector, President Nestor Kirchner’s goal of setting a budget for education at 6 percent of the GDP by 2010 will be achieved by the current administration. It is not just a quantification of expense; it also aims to improve the quality of education and the training of educators in the different levels of the system.

To achieve this goal during the year of the bicentennial of the May Revolution, which initiated Argentina’s struggle for independence, has a deeply symbolic meaning for us. Another challenge is to increase the added value and improve the quality of our products in order to increase our exports and win new markets. To achieve this goal, President Fernández de Kirchner created the Ministry of Science, Technology and Productive Innovation that will face the task of strengthening the interaction of the public and private sectors with the scientific world.

HS: President Fernández de Kirchner has spoken about “Argentina making a mark in the world.” What are your central foreign policy goals, and what do you view as the major challenges?

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Les Eclaireurs Lighthouse, “The Lighthouse at the End of the World,” Ushuaia, Argentina.

Photo by Ricardo Martins.

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Charting the Course

Photo from www.presidencia.gov.ar.

Cristina Fernández de Kirchner at the opening of José Domeño Stadium in Bolívar, Buenos Aires Province.

JT: The challenge set by the President is related to the strengthening of our national identity and perception of ourselves. It is an appeal to raise our self-esteem which suffered considerably during the final years of the past century.

This notwithstanding, Argentines today are aware of being in a promising stage in the life of our nation.

Overcoming the crisis demanded effort and sacrifice, and the road is still difficult. However, the immense energy of its people allowed Argentina to rise up again: institutions were reorganized and improved, the rule of law was strengthened, living standards were improved and the country became governable again.

In like manner, the changes in the Supreme Court of Justice allowed the Judiciary to become more independent.

The country is thus moving to end impunity for the perpetrators of crimes against humanity. This action does not divide the society but strengthens our democracy and the rule of law. Unconstitutional norms that established privileges for certain citizens clearly responsible for human rights violations have been abolished, and these people can be now brought to justice.

If our country has made its mark in recent times, it BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

has been through its move to the vanguard of the defense of human rights. The courageous actions of our country on this subject are perhaps inversely proportional to the horror endured by the tortured, the exiled and the disappeared during the last dictatorship. Another mark that we may have made is to prove that autonomous growth can be achieved by decisions that safeguard the interests of the nation, regardless of the standard recipes pushed by international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund. The legacy of this kind of model was a level of extreme poverty never seen in our country, as well as an external debt equivalent to 160 percent of GDP. Today the poverty level has shrunk from 60 to 23 percent and the extreme poverty level from 27 to 8 percent. The external debt equates to 60 percent of the GDP. On foreign policy we can say that we are traveling a different road, abandoning the “automatic alignment” policy of the 1990s. Our foreign policy is focused on our commitment to serve the national interest.

This point of view has properly reinstated in our agenda both historic claims and present needs. Within this framework we have engaged in a more active role in multilateral organizations. The interrelation between development, human rights and collective security are the

foundation of our international stance.

In the multilateral arena Argentina will continue to act to procure a more equitable and democratic set of rules for decision-making. The negotiations at the World Trade Organization are particularly significant to us because on them depend the liberalization of agricultural markets — a sector in which our country has comparative advantages — and the achievement of an adequate flexibility to exercise our industrial policy.

There are, of course, other long-standing and permanent objectives of Argentine foreign policy. I would like to mention, in particular, a permanent and unrenounceable objective of the Argentine people, which constitutes a true State policy enshrined in our National Constitution, and which is the recovery of the full exercise of Argentine sovereignty over the Malvinas, South Georgias and South Sandwich Islands and the surrounding maritime areas.

Argentina will not give up in pursuing the objective that the United Kingdom, which unlawfully occupies these parts of the Argentine national territory, desists from its rejection to find a negotiated settlement of the sovereignty dispute existing between the two countries and thus make it possible to comply with the obligation to find a just, peaceful and lasting solution. This obligation derives from the United Nations and is equally pending on both parties.

The international community not only recognizes that this anachronistic colonial dispute exists and is still pending a solution but reiterates to both parties the obligation to find a negotiated solution as soon as possible. Therefore, Argentina reiterates its permanent willingness to resume the sovereignty negotiations and expects that the United Kingdom abandons its intransigence.

HS: The United States has recently signed free trade agreements with Peru, Colombia and Panama. President Fernández de Kirchner has spoken about strengthening Mercosur and deepening the relations among its members.

Is there a conflict between these two directions? What do you view as the future of economic integration in the Americas?

JT: As the main strategic axis of our foreign policy, Mercosur is the framework in which we will work to increase our strength and pursue a greater leadership role in Latin America and the world.

Mercosur constitutes a state policy that, unlike others, has endured through the democratic era to the present. This was made possible thanks to the reassertion of bilateral ties with our neighbors. President Fernández de Kirchner wanted to make this point particularly clear by visiting Chile, Brazil

Photo courtesy of the Argentine Foreign Ministry.

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Jorge Taiana.

and Paraguay immediately after being elected and even before taking office.

Mercosur must be deepened and enlarged. The full inclusion of Venezuela, currently in progress, will result in a block generating 75 percent of the South American Gross Product. The desired addition of Bolivia and Ecuador will make the region even more significant, improving its position with regard to other blocks and countries.

Complex and delicate as it is, there has been permanent progress in this effort. We are currently working to decrease the asymmetries between the member nations. As you well know, the relative size of the countries that form the block is very dissimilar. For that reason the larger partners — Brazil and Argentina — will concede differential advantages to the smaller partners, Paraguay and Uruguay.

The other free trade agreements that certain Latin American countries have signed — Chile for instance — concern circumstances and economic structures that regard those states. It is true that such a structure is incompatible with the economic integration of those countries as full members of Mercosur. However they can join as associated members, as in the case of Chile, Colombia and Peru.

This noncommercial dimension of Mercosur deals with such fundamental issues as the integration of policies on immigration, education, health, security, etc. and currently involves 10 South American countries. >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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Charting the Course

Photo from Associated Press.

An Argentine peacekeeper deployed in Haiti.

HS: Some observers have pointed to a political continuum of governments on the left in Latin America from President Chรกvez on one end to President Lula on the other. Is this perception correct and, if so, what place does Argentina occupy?

JT: We must be aware that to label a government as leftist can lead to oversimplification. If the point of reference is the neoliberal model of the 90s, then clearly the majority of the governments in the region are on the left. If making sovereign decisions regardless of the dictates of international financial organizations is to be leftist, then we are on the left. However, in Argentina we prefer to define ourselves as a government clearly committed to democratic values and the defense of the national interest, in other words, to the well-being of its citizens. We understand that the economy must be at the service of the people. Therefore we place the state as the regulator of the injustices that can be generated by a market subject to forces devoid of any ethical values. This position is intimately linked to our conception of human rights in a wide sense that includes social and economic rights. Such rights become imperative at the moment of effectively BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

exercising civic and political rights, which otherwise would become empty husks. We are convinced that the context in which human rights can truly be exercised and respected is the context of democracy. Argentines cannot split democracy from human rights. These form a binomial that leads to liberty and social justice.

The idea of development, as has been said before, is also central to our position. To achieve it, we consider the role of innovative and productive companies to be vital, as opposed to pure capital speculation. The national government permanently supports and assists such industries, counseling and representing them all over the world for instance, as we do at my own ministry. The Argentine government, like others in the region, may be branded as leftist by those who assign labels to simplify reality. I would say that the region is looking to defend its national interests. By that we mean nothing less than the well-being of our citizens, always within the context of respect for international law.

HS: What role would you like to see the United States play in Latin America?

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JT: The United States and Latin America have strong cultural and economic bonds that have matured over time. For example, until a very few years ago the idiomatic difference was a gap. Today, notwithstanding the traditional expansion of the English language in the world, the importance of Spanish in your country is remarkable. Culture becomes thus a privileged bridge.

Our country has undertaken some actions in conjunction with the United States. Among the best known is the fight against illegal trafficking. Also, we have taken part in several joint peace-keeping operations within the framework of the UN, in particular in Haiti, with the participation of several other Latin American countries.

On this matter it has to be remarked that Argentina understands that multilateralism is the most efficient instrument to win the war against hunger, poverty, exclusion and environmental degradation and rejects unilateral actions in situations that may disturb the peace and international security.

For Argentina, good economic results for both countries are fundamental. In fact, American companies based in our country can bear witness to the economic recovery that we are undergoing. In foreign capitals it is well-known that today Argentina offers a combination of good qualities due to its healthy macroeconomic situation, the decision to back productive efforts and a favorable international context. North

Americans understand this because they have consistently increased their investments. Today we are working with them to continue to increase those investments.

We also wish to strengthen the exchange of technology and science with the U.S. in varied fields. The new Ministry of Science, Technology and Productive Innovation is thus a new venue for dialogue and cooperation between our countries.

These goals are based on the coincidence of wellestablished values in both societies, such as the consolidation of democracy, human rights, civil liberties, international security, nonproliferation and the fight against international terrorism, organized crime and narcotrafficking.

Jorge Taiana is the Foreign Minister of Argentina.

Harley Shaiken is Class of 1930 Professor of Letters and Science. He is Professor in the Graduate School of Education and the Department of Geography and serves as Chair of the Center for Latin American Studies at UC Berkeley.

The Center would like to thank Héctor Timerman, Argentina’s Ambassador to the United States, for facilitating this interview.

Photo from www.presidencia.gov.ar.

Cristina Fernández de Kirchner concludes her presidential campaign at an October 2007 rally.

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Firm Steps on Uncertain Ground

MEXICO

Firm Steps on Uncertain Ground

by Harley Shaiken

W

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Photo by Júbilo Haku.

hen Vicente Fox, the presidential candidate of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), unexpectedly upended 71 years of PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) rule in 2000 he unleashed a brief period of widespread optimism in Mexico.

Since leaving office in late 2006, however, that euphoria has turned to anger. Today, the once popular Fox has become mired in scandal, caught between a corporate-owned Hummer and allegations about the funding of his lavishly remodeled ranch house.

While Fox proclaims his innocence, many political observers now view his presidency as largely transitional, characterized by legislative gridlock and tepid economic growth.

Felipe Calderón, Fox’s former Energy Minister and a long-time PAN member, achieved a razor-thin victory in a bitter July 2006 election and managed to maneuver through a bruising follow-up. Now that the dust has settled after Calderón’s first year in office, a key question concerns the forces shaping Mexico’s political terrain in a post-Fox era.

Sergio Aguayo, a professor at the Colegio de México and a noted public intellectual, sought to provide a context for this question in a public talk entitled “Governors, Billionaires, Drug Cartels and Mexican Democracy.”

The talk, the core of a book on which Aguayo is working, offered a provocative thesis: Fox’s defeat of the PRI at the polls, followed by six years of political drift, has led to the cratering of the all-powerful Mexican presidency. The vacuum left at the top

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has been filled by a potent new set of autonomous actors including governors, billionaires and drug dealers, among others. The result is decentralization without democracy.

Aguayo developed this thesis by exploring three themes: a critique of the legacy of the Fox presidency; an analysis of the 2006 presidential election; and, finally, a moderately optimistic sense of current developments.

A Splendid Candidate, A Lousy President “Fox was a splendid candidate but a lousy president,” Aguayo maintained, arguing in fact that Fox should be remembered as “one of the worst Presidents in Mexican history.”

Consider the new opportunities for governors. One of the signal, though less visible, transformations has been a massive shift of billions of dollars — $46 billion or about 30 percent of the federal budget in 2003 alone — from the national government to the states. This funding windfall combined with far looser state-level oversight has made some governors “the new mandarins in Mexican political life.”

Given the vacuum at the top, unsupervised cash translates into powerful political fiefdoms with little accountability.

The very wealthiest also had cause to celebrate under Fox. Ten Mexican billionaires on the Forbes list of the world’s richest people saw their accumulated fortunes rise 237 percent to $84 billion between 2000 and 2006. The problem was not the stellar success of the Mexican business elite but rather the political cronyism and monopoly practices that made it possible.

The November 2006 Economist inveighed against the “many vestiges of the old order” that “involve monopoly power, public and private, political and economic.” Aguayo put it more directly. “Mexico is a “paradise for monopolists,” he said, and a “hell for consumers.”

And, if all this weren’t enough, organized crime has moved aggressively and violently to rake in a larger share of the spoils. Billions of dollars are at stake in the export of illegal drugs such as cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine; the import of illegal weapons from hand guns to grenade launchers; and, in a particularly troubling new development, a large upsurge in the sale of drugs domestically in Mexico.

“In the old days, there were rules,” a one-time PRI official told the Washington Post in November 2006 concerning what drug dealers could or could not do under the old regime.

“We’d say, ‘You can’t kill the police. If you kill the police, we’ll send in the army.’ We’d say, ‘You can’t steal 30 Jeep Cherokees a month; you can only steal five.’”

Complicating matters considerably, former soldiers and deserters are finding their way into the murderous militias of the drug lords. During the Fox presidency alone, 123,000

[After Fox], “the vacuum left at the top has been filled by a potent new set of autonomous actors including governors, billionaires and drug dealers, among others.

The result is decentralization without democracy.” military personnel deserted, and many reportedly are pursuing lucrative new careers. Aguayo pointed out that the going wage for a soldier is $300 a month while a hit man can earn $3,000 a month.

The burgeoning Mexican domestic drug market has unleashed a vicious turf war among increasingly ruthless cartels. Ordinary Mexicans are concerned, terrorized, angry and caught in the crossfire. Executions attributable to organized crime almost doubled from 1,200 in 2004 to 2,120 in 2006 and were already approaching 1,500 in mid-2007, poised to set a new record for the year.

The cartels have become so powerful they destabilize the state, putting police, journalists and political leaders on their payroll where possible or murdering them when necessary.

“Years of government inaction under former President Vicente Fox,” according to Mexican political scientist Denise Dresser, “have left key institutions infiltrated with cartel accomplices, hundreds of police officers dead, scores of judges assassinated and dozens of journalists missing.” She estimates that cocaine traffickers funnel as much as $500 million a year into bribes, more than double the annual budget of the ministry of the Mexican attorney general.

President Calderón, assuming office in December 2006 with his legitimacy in question, made a bold move by sending the army into states he viewed “as kidnapped” by organized crime. He deployed thousands of federal troops into eight states accounting for 40 percent of Mexican territory and 24 million people, almost one-fourth the national population.

The move jump-started Calderón’s popularity, propelling his poll approval numbers to 68 percent in spring 2007, almost double the share of the vote he received less than a year earlier.

2006 Elections: Context and Count The 2006 elections became particularly critical given the drift and deadlock that had set in during the Fox years. Aguayo termed the contest the “elections of crony capitalism” to emphasize the outsized influence of the wealthiest Mexicans. >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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Graph courtesy of Sergio Aguayo.

The effect of negative campaigning; Calderón’s attack ads first ran in February 2006.

The final official vote count left the two leading contenders in a virtual dead heat: 14,916,927 votes (35.89 percent) for Felipe Calderón versus 14,683,096 for Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) (35.33 percent), a difference of 233,831 votes or 0.56 percent of the total.

Was there electoral fraud? The country remains deeply divided on the question. An August 2007 poll indicated that 50 percent of Mexicans believe Calderón won a clean election while 40 percent feel fraud took place.

Emphasizing that the election had to be judged according to Mexican legal standards, Aguayo laid out four criteria that would indicate fraud: first, the incumbent president works in favor of a candidate; second, physical force is used; third, legal norms are violated; and, finally, the institutions organizing the election are biased.

The good news was the absence of major violence. The bad news, according to Aguayo, was the failure on the other three counts. And, clearly it wouldn’t have taken much to throw the final result in an election this close.

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The November 2006 Economist matter-of-factly pointed out that “Mr. Fox, along with Mexico’s richest businessmen, weighed in on Mr. Calderón’s behalf,” as did business and trade associations.

The Calderón camp was also the first to deploy negative campaigning, legally prohibited in Mexico, according to Aguayo. A negative ad from the campaign, one of three shown during the lecture, had a video clip of a hectoring Hugo Chávez seemingly morph into a video of López Obrador denouncing President Fox as a “chachalaca,” an annoying chattering bird, all under the banner of intolerance. Admittedly, this ad wouldn’t cause much of a stir in a U.S. context but is proscribed in a Mexican setting.

The negative campaigning likely contributed to plummeting poll numbers for López Obrador. In February 2006 he was 10 points ahead of Calderón in the polls, a leading position he had by-and-large occupied for over two years. After the negative campaigning kicked in, López Obrador tumbled into second place.

The PRD campaign was slow to challenge the ads, and the electoral institutions were slow to react. While waiting for a ruling, López Obrador himself eventually began running negative ads. By the time the electoral tribunal finally ruled that the negative ads had to be withdrawn, the damage had already been done.

The López Obrador campaign had more than its share of foibles and disasters. The PRD candidate, for example, in calling Fox a chachalaca for giving speeches denouncing his candidacy wound up offending many Mexicans who view the presidency with respect. The former Mexico City mayor also skipped the critical first of two presidential debates reinforcing an imperial image.

Aguayo, though long associated with the left, admitted to having voted for Fox in 2000 in the hope of jump starting a democratic transition in Mexico. This time around he signed a public statement in favor of López Obrador. “I was shocked by the brutality of negative campaigning and the intervention of Fox,” he said.

What happened election day?

Aguayo maintained that there are unanswered questions and that a thorough exploration of all aspects of the election could prevent electoral fraud in the future.

In his view, however, the 2006 presidential race was more transparent than previous Mexican elections. He argued that whatever electoral fraud did indeed occur was of a different character than previous campaigns: this time around “irregularities” were less extensive and not a “state” operation but had a different, more diffuse, set of actors.

“We are no longer a presidentialist, authoritarian country,” he said. “We are a more unsure and unpredictable country.”

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able to deepen its democracy and prosper in a turbulent and uncertain world.

Moment of Optimism?

Photo from Associated Press.

Aguayo closed on an optimistic note, pointing to Sergio Aguayo is a professor at the Center for International the expanded role of civil society — consumers, human Relations at El Colegio de México and a columnist for Reforma. rights groups, gender rights organizations and others — as He was Visiting Scholar at the Center for Latin American potentially an important force in shaping Mexico’s future.

Studies in fall 2007 and spoke on October 23, 2007.

He also hailed a September 2007 constitutional Harley Shaiken is Class of 1930 Professor of Letters and amendment on electoral reform, passed with the support of Science. He is Professor in the Graduate School of Education all three political parties, as an important step in the right and the Department of Geography and serves as Chair of the direction. The amendment’s passage was a sea change from Center for Latin American Studies at UC Berkeley. the brawl that greeted Calderón’s inauguration in the same chamber less than a year earlier and the This statue of former President Vicente Fox in Boca del Río, Mexico legislative paralysis during the Fox years. was toppled on the night before its dedication.

This amendment was part of a complex bargain with the opposition — both the PRI and PRD — in the congress. Calderón wanted, and got, a tax reform that could boost his government’s tax take (excluding oil) from 10 to 12 percent of GDP by 2012.

In return, he supported an opposition demand for electoral reform that, among other things, prohibits political advertising except for official time slots, a move that could cost the country’s largest television network 8 percent of its election year revenues. And, there are new restrictions on negative campaigning.

Not everyone is happy. Jorge Castañeda, Fox’s first foreign minister and himself a one-time presidential candidate, skewered the electoral reform amendment in a September 2007 Newsweek column. “The putative reform is the result of collusion between the three main parties,” he wrote, “to virtually eliminate the possibility of anyone else entering the electoral arena.” He views the new limits on negative campaigning as “arbitrary and authoritarian” and feels the lawmakers have managed the “defenestration of the widely respected Federal Electoral Institute,” the organizers of the 2006 election.

As Calderón begins his second year in office, he has proven a more savvy political actor than many predicted. The real challenge, however, is not his political survival but rather whether Mexico is CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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Latin American Voices

Latin American Voices: CLAS hosted a screening of the award-winning film “No End in Sight” on the UC Berkeley campus in April 2007, prior to its commercial release. “It’s a sober, revelatory and absolutely vital film,” the New York Times said of Charles Ferguson’s documentary that scrutinizes U.S. policy decisions in Iraq. Drawing on surprisingly frank interviews with an impressive array of high-level government officials, military personnel and journalists, Ferguson´s film explores questions related to U.S. diplomacy, political and military oversight and the role of ideology in shaping policy.

But how has the U.S.-led war in Iraq been received in Latin America? What implications, if any, have there been for U.S.–Latin American relations? Seeking responses, the Center for Latin American Studies asked Latin American scholars, journalists and public intellectuals to respond to the film. Commentators included: Roberto Guareschi (former editor of El Clarín, Argentina); Daniel Coronell (News Director of “Noticias Uno” and a columnist for Semana, Colombia); Sergio Aguayo (Professor of International Relations at El Colegio de México and a columnist for Reforma); Javier Couso (Professor of Law at the Universidad Católica de Chile); and Juan Gabriel Valdés, Chile’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations (2003–03) and a member of the Security Council during the deliberations prior to the invasion of Iraq. Ambassador Valdés’ comments appear below.

U.S. military convoy in Iraq in 2003.

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he film “No End in Sight” made a profound impression on me. And it brought to mind an event that took place in October of 2002, during my term as Chile’s Representative to the United Nations. At a lunch given by the Mission of Ireland to the United Nations, the ambassadors from the Arab countries allied with the United States gave us their perspectives on the proposed war in Iraq, which was already looking inevitable.

“It will take them 15 days to win the war and 30 years to get out of there,” said the Egyptian ambassador. “The Americans, fascinated by technology, have lost the capacity to gather human information: the CIA has no idea what a pound of bread costs in Iraq,” added the Jordanian ambassador. “They’ve sidelined all the experts on the Middle East and brought in loyal Cheney supporters to make decisions they know nothing about,” commented the BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Ambassador of Saudi Arabia. “The Shiites, with the support of the Iranians, will not rest until they erase every vestige of Sunni power,” the Algerian ambassador maintained. “Iran will emerge from this as the great power of the region,” said another. “A catastrophic scenario would envelop even Turkey,” several affirmed. And on and on.

That day, the Arab ambassadors to the United Nations accurately predicted what would happen in Iraq during the years following the American invasion. The aforementioned comments were copied directly from notes I took at the meeting.

It is surprising to think that, at that time, the Arabs were getting the same response from the United States as the representatives from Mexico and Chile, who were Elected Members of the UN Security Council during the lead-up to the Iraq war. Whenever we asked U.S. representatives how

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Juan Gabriel Valdés

Photo courtesy of Charles Ferguson.

connected to the personal tragedies of the people interviewed in the film. I feel the essential honesty of what they express. I share, as a sincere friend of the United States, their indignation about the absolute irresponsibility of those who decided on this war and planned the occupation of Iraq. I cannot stop thinking about Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil when I see Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld describe “the irrelevance” of the sacking of Baghdad. And I realize that this banality of evil is always covered by a blind ideology which selects the facts that favor it and distorts them until a complete lie is created that must, sooner or later, smash up against reality.

Finally, I think that this documentary is very inspiring in that it allows us to see that the Iraqis’ terrible pain is, with time, creating a deep moral wound in the United States. This makes me share the deep desire that is alive in every friend of the United States all over the world: that the situation may soon change. For this to happen, the first step is inevitably the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq.

This movie is a painful and brilliant effort. It may help us reach the light at the end of the tunnel.

Ambassador Juan Gabriel Valdés and then-Secretary General Kofi Annan at the UN.

Photo from UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe.

they were planning to deal with the aftermath of the military victory, we were told that, if we were good friends, we should trust them. “We know what we are doing and you, as a good friend of ours, should also know what to do: Support us.”

That was invariably the response. Washington’s instructions to U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte seemed to be, “Don’t talk about the war — and even less about the occupation.”

The main difference was that while we Latin Americans could only “suspect” the Arabs “knew” very well what would come later, after the occupation. I, for one, could never have imagined that the irresponsibility was so great.

Today I see that the American people couldn’t either.

How could this have happened? How is it possible that the most powerful country on earth made such stupid decisions that are so opposed to its own national interest?

Because of my experiences at the UN, I feel very closely

To read all the commentaries, please visit the Center for Latin American Studies’ website at http://clas.berkeley.edu.

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From Autonomy to Dependence

Photo by Gabriela Zamorano.

MEXICO

Talea, nestled in the mountains of northern Oaxaca.

Fifty Years: From Autonomy to Dependence

by Laura Nader and Roberto J. González

N

ot even the Spanish Conquest could destroy the foundation of knowledge upon which the Zapotec-, Maya-, and Nahuatl-speaking peoples built their respective civilizations. For more than 5,000 years, the indigenous communities of Mesoamerica domesticated and cultivated corn, beans, squash, chilies and other crops to sustain themselves; wove cotton and wool for clothing; constructed entire cities of stone and earth (the remains of which are visible even today); used acupuncture, massage and natural pharmaceuticals for healing; and created stable and durable political institutions.

But over the last 50 years, “development” has accomplished what generations of conquistadors could not achieve: the near destruction of an autonomous indigenous village in the Rincón Zapotec area of Oaxaca, Mexico.

Both of us have watched this process unfold in Talea, a bilingual Zapotec village in Oaxaca: Nader since she initiated BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

anthropological research there in 1957 and González since the 1990s. We returned to Talea together in the summer of 2006 with a video photographer to document the changes that have transformed the lives of villagers and made them less autonomous and more dependent.

Talea has undergone frequent transformations since the Spaniards founded it in 1528, and with each change knowledge has flowed in and out of the area at variable speeds.

In the wake of the Conquest (and as a result of the activism of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, author of The Devastation of the Indies), the Spanish crown took measures to protect indigenous people from the brutal predations of the colonists, establishing “Indian republics” that allowed indigenous people to maintain self-provisioning communities which lasted well into the 20th century.

After initial contact, the Zapotec villagers pragmatically adopted crops, technologies and knowledge. Taleans began

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raising chickens, pigs, oxen and other animals introduced by Europeans; cultivating Old World crops including oranges, sugar cane and later coffee; using ceramic tiles as roofing material, in the Mediterranean fashion; and preparing their fields for cultivation with plows similar to those used by Spanish peasant farmers.

Other changes swept the region following the Conquest.

By the 1700s, silver mining was among the most profitable enterprises in Oaxaca, and lucrative mines were established near Talea which were exploited until the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910. As a result of their isolated locale, many Taleans began producing goods that the miners needed, including boots, soap, matches, bread and other provisions, and much of the knowledge needed to produce these items was borrowed from outside the region and added to local ingenuity.

In the 20th century, the pace of change accelerated in response to international events. The Bracero Program, a Mexican guest worker program created by the United States in the mid-1940s to help meet wartime labor shortages, attracted over a dozen Talean men to work in American agriculture. They returned to Talea with ideas about what

>>

Photo by Gabriela Zamorano.

A Zapotec campesino.

constituted “progress.” They began to plant coffee bushes amidst the corn and beans, and sought transport for their agricultural produce out of the region. They lobbied the Mexican government, and by the 1960s a road was built connecting Talea and the Rincón to the outside, under the auspices of the Papaloapan Commission (a development program modeled after the Tennessee Valley Authority).

Potable water and electricity followed in rapid succession.

Talea and the region were transformed. The road that was to allow the export of coffee, fruit, avocados and other crops simultaneously enabled merchants to import consumer goods that undermined the regional economy. The road also made it easier for large numbers of people to migrate out of the village, and today there are hundreds of Talean natives living and working in Los Angeles, Seattle, New York and other cities throughout the U.S. In the wake of this tidal wave, some Talean knowledge was forgotten; some was erased; some was plundered; some was abolished; and later, some was reclaimed.

During August 2006, we interviewed elders and photographed four aspects of village life: agriculture, healing, architecture and governance. What we discovered

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about the process of knowledge loss was both disturbing and inspiring.

Subsistence farming is today an endangered vocation.

In the wake of NAFTA, cheap U.S. corn flooded the government-subsidized CONASUPO stores, and local corn was undersold. As a consequence, for many families the temptation to stop farming is strong. They want cash and consider it easier to earn wages in the state capital (Oaxaca City), Mexico City or the U.S. rather than toil in the fields.

Those who continue farming are sometimes ridiculed by their peers.

Yet the agricultural system that Talea’s farmers have developed over centuries is sustainable, sophisticated and scientific in its own right. The villagers continue the ancestral practice of polycropping — cultivating corn, beans, squash and now coffee in the same field — which has important ecological advantages. This is the part of the world where corn originated, and seven distinct varieties of corn are cultivated in Talea alone. The farmers of the Rincón are performing a priceless service for humanity by serving as stewards of corn biodiversity, but valuable knowledge about farming, food and the local ecosystem is rapidly disappearing as the result of a virtual exodus of young Zapotecs. In the meantime, fertile land is being abandoned and along with it locally specific expertise — knowledge erased.

Another vocation in peril is that of the healer, or curandera. We spent an afternoon with a curandera of more than 50 years experience, who uses dozens of herbs collected from her garden, a lush patio that is a veritable pharmacopoeia. In addition to herbal teas and poultices, she uses suction “cupping” techniques similar to those used in Chinese medicine to treat a wide range of illnesses. Other healers use massage and acupressure.

We filmed the curandera treating a young woman suffering from susto (literally “fright” or trauma-induced stress) who had previously been misdiagnosed by a physician trained in Western medicine. (The physician’s poor diagnosis led to the patient having a molar needlessly removed.)

The corridor of the curandera’s adobe home served as the treatment room. She first listened intently as the patient described her symptoms (extreme anxiety, headaches, nausea, loss of appetite), then draped her body in a cloth and treated her with a limpia (or “cleansing”). The curandera began her treatment by dousing a bundle of herbs, including arnica, with alcohol, setting it alight, and rapidly whisking it over the patient’s cloaked body. Within minutes of treatment, the patient appeared more relaxed.

Later, our videographer Kike Arnal made a trip to the local health clinic where he also filmed patients being treated.

In one memorable scene the doctor — an outsider assigned to

work in Talea — speaks to the patient from behind a massive typewriter. The bureaucratic impulse contrasts starkly with the intensely personal treatment provided by the curandera.

Yet curandismo is in peril of disappearing. No young people in Talea are being apprenticed at the moment, and it is entirely possible that the handful of people currently practicing will be the village’s last generation of healers — knowledge forgotten.

Not so long ago, Talea’s buildings were made of local materials. Villagers made their homes using adobe bricks, fashioned from earth and straw and topped with ceramic tiles produced in a nearby village. They organized work parties (similar to barn-raisings) called gozonas in which neighbors came together to complete the task.

In the early 1900s, they constructed a stately municipal palace and a massive church using large stones, bricks and mortar from a mixture of limestone and sand procured locally. Both structures were inspired by paintings, and the Taleans ingeniously adapted regional building materials in order to recreate foreign architectural styles. Village leaders completed these impressive works with obligatory communal work, known as the tequio. This indigenous labor system required each able-bodied man to provide several days of work each month with no pay (in lieu of paying taxes) to realize ambitious projects that would benefit the community of 2000 people.

Today, gozona and tequio are breaking down. Many Taleans told us that time is too important now, claiming that there is simply not enough time to organize work parties or to dedicate a day of service to public works. For many, time is money, and cash is probably more important (and prestigious) today than at any other time in Talea’s history.

Perhaps this is why cement block homes have become so popular in the village, even though they are poorly insulated and unstable in seismic zones. Concrete homes provide a conspicuous way of displaying the owner’s wealth — and modernity.

On the other hand, some Taleans are holding on to architectural knowledge — reclaiming it — while creatively adopting new techniques borrowed from elsewhere. Among them is a man who received a college degree in Mexico City and returned to the village to raise his young family in a safer environment. He earns a comfortable income from his work at the community’s credit union but is decidedly against a cement block home. Instead, he began building an adobe home that integrates local and “outside” knowledge and techniques in new ways. For example, his adobe bricks are much neater than traditional versions and thus less prone to cracking since an expert from a neighboring village shared a new technique: setting the bricks out to dry in the evening, so continued on page 31 >>

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The Zapotec Rinc贸n: People of Talea

Zapotec musician.

Photo by Kike Arnal.

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People of Talea

Zapotec worker.

Photo by Kike Arnal.

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A healer or curandera (at left) prepares to treat a patient for susto (stress-induced trauma).

Photo by Kike Arnal.

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People of Talea

Zapotec girl.

Photo by Kike Arnal.

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Photo by Gabriela Zamorano.

that they expand slowly. Other techniques — such as applying lacquer to the adobe with a mixture of egg whites and cactus mucilage — were borrowed from architects in the city. The home is a wonderful example of architectural syncretism — knowledge gained and knowledge reclaimed.

Finally, village governance, the subject of a PBS film “Little Injustices,” is slowly losing its autonomous base. The presidente, once elected by the village to serve without pay is now a state-paid employee, and local democracy is suffering.

The pattern of governance in Talea is a combination of aboriginal, colonial and recent Talea’s municipal palace, built using traditional methods.

Mexican influences.

Even today, all male citizens are local knowledge developed over centuries — a priceless expected to serve periodically in various annual municipal intellectual treasure trove — is withering away. It is as if, positions which are ranked in a hierarchy. By ascending the within a generation, the world’s greatest libraries were being hierarchy one assumes greater authority and responsibility. destroyed. In the words of biologist Dr. David Ehrenfeld, However, much of the traditional system has been “our concept of progress prevents us from realizing that dismantled, and the influence wielded by the villagers has skills and knowledge can simply vanish from the world.” waned. In the past, influential leaders known as principales Unless the process is reversed, we may be faced with the presided over nightly meetings where issues pertaining to enormous (and perhaps impossible) task of reconstructing Talea’s collective well-being were discussed, including it to secure the future. Civilizing, modernizing, developing building the church and municipal palace. and democratizing missions need rethinking.

We interviewed one of the elders, an 86-year-old man, who was considered a principal and had acted as an administrative, legislative and judicial advisor in village government. He told us that in the early 1970s, the position of principal was abolished. The nightly meetings were suppressed, and the village authorities no longer managed public works. State officials began to decide technical matters such as what and where to build.

He also noted that “progress” did not necessarily mean improvement. For example, the decision to cement over the paths in town has led to waste — rainwater now flows straight down to the river, bypassing the home gardens itonce watered. The elder’s portrayal of events in Talea indicated that the process of coming to an agreement by sharing experience was lost now that the collective wisdom of the principales is no longer present — knowledge abolished Talea’s disappearing knowledge isn’t just a Zapotec problem: it’s a global problem. Throughout the world,

Laura Nader is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is author of Harmony Ideology: Justice and Control in a Zapotec Mountain Village. She spoke for CLAS on October 22, 2007.

Roberto J. González is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at San José State University. He is author of Zapotec Science: Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.

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The Little Cold War

COLOMBIA

The Little Cold War

by Daniel Coronell

A

n attempt by the Venezuelan president to end the long captivity of 54 hostages held by Colombian guerillas has devolved into the most serious crisis in relations between the two countries in their history. And all because the proof of life didn’t arrive on time.

The story began on August 15, 2007. That day, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez received permission from his Colombian counterpart, Álvaro Uribe, to attempt to negotiate an exchange of prisoners between the government of Colombia and the communist guerrilla fighters of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).

The goal was that the FARC would liberate the captives, a few of whom have been in captivity for more than 10 years, and that in exchange the Colombian government would release more than 400 imprisoned guerilla combatants.

Many analysts thought that Chávez was the right man for the job. The FARC defines itself as a “Bolivarian organization” and has expressed sympathy for the government of Venezuela.

At first glance it seemed a political “win-win” situation.

Uribe would be relieved of the responsibility for finding a way to approach the FARC, which has proved elusive during his five years in power. Chávez would bolster his international image by taking a leadership role in resolving a humanitarian problem which, due to the presence of three Americans and a French-Colombian citizen in the group of captives, has high visibility in Europe and North America.

Furthermore, the two could alleviate their respective internal pressures: In Colombia, 16 members of congress from Uribe’s governing coalition are in prison and 40 are under investigation for alleged connections with rightist paramilitary groups, while in Venezuela, Chávez is confronting an opposition enflamed by a referendum which, had it passed, would have amended the Constitution to eliminate presidential term-limits and consolidate his power. (The referendum was defeated on December 2 by a narrow margin.)

The political expedience and the humanitarian veneer of the agreement augured good things for the two leaders’ relationship. Three months later, however, Chávez and Uribe are mutually denouncing each other in terms never before used by the presidents of these two “sister” nations.

BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

A Clash of Images The recent histories of Colombia and Venezuela are marked by the politics of the cult of personality. Both nations are headed by strong men who — notwithstanding opposite political leanings — possess great similarities.

Presidents Hugo Chávez (left) and Álvaro Uribe meet in an…

The rightwing Uribe maintains approval ratings upwards of 70 percent thanks to a strict security policy and a hard line stance towards the guerilla groups many blame for the country’s ongoing violence. Chávez, who touts his “21st century socialism,” has funded his ambitions with a flood of revenue resulting from the rise of oil prices to

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nearly $100 a barrel.

Every Sunday, Hugo Chávez appears on “Hello, President” his program on the state-run television channel. Wearing his customary red shirt, the president uses this hours-long platform to promote his government, to denounce his detractors and, occasionally, to sing. It was on this program some months ago where he addressed the president of the United States, saying in deliberately rustic English, “You are a donkey, Mr. Danger.”

The Colombian president also likes to appear on television. Saturdays, Álvaro Uribe — dressed like a peasant — spends up to 12 hours in front of the cameras directing his Community Council. He recites from memory statistics

Photo from AFP/Getty Images.

… August 2007 summit to discuss the hostage exchange. of dubious veracity that demonstrate the achievements of his government, scolds his subordinates, solves community problems in the region he is visiting and rancorously denounces his few detractors.

For men like these, determined constructors of their own image, ceding the spotlight is a tall order.

As the hostage negotiations wore on, Chávez’ “Hello, President” became a nightmare for his Colombian counterpart.

In one memorable episode that featured Chávez’ signature laid-back Caribbean style, the Venezuelan president addressed the camera as if he were speaking to the chief leader of the FARC, Manuel Marulanda: “Marulanda, Marulanda, I want to talk to you.” Then, turning immediately toward another camera he continued, as if speaking to the Colombian president, “Uribe, if Marulanda wants to come here to talk to me, give him an airplane… give him a cup of coffee.”

In the Andean formality of the Colombian capital, Chávez’ pitch was interpreted as a recognition of the guerillas’ political legitimacy. “It puts the president and the outlaws on the same plane,” stated a close Uribe aide in a radio interview.

The first week of November, Iván Márquez, a member of the FARC secretariat, went to Caracas to meet with Hugo Chávez.

In this meeting, the guerilla leader promised to hand over proof of life for all the hostages up for exchange, including the ex-presidential candidate Ingrid Betancort, whose fiveyear captivity had garnered significant attention in Europe because of her dual French and Colombian citizenship. He also offered to show evidence of the survival of the American contractors Keith Stansell, Marc Gonsalves and Thomas Howes who fell into the hands of the FARC when their airplane — one of many used to monitor coca production as a part of the U.S.-funded Plan Colombia — was brought down by guerilla fighters in the country’s southern jungle.

The FARC’s promise was an important development; the last evidence that the captives were still alive was presented four years ago.

The Colombian government, however, received news of this advance with reserve. The photograph of the guerilla leader at President Chávez’ side on the steps of the Palacio Miraflores was read not as a step forward in the mediation but rather as a humiliation for the Colombian state.

President Uribe declared that it was inconceivable that “a terrorist would pose as a great political leader on the international stage.”

To Uribe’s even greater annoyance, the international profile of the negotiations continued to grow. Chávez increased the number of parties involved without consulting the Colombian government. A few Democratic members of the United States Congress were informed of developments.

The president of Brazil, Lula da Silva, expressed his support for Chávez’ mediation and offered his country as a possible site for the captives’ eventual release. >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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The Little Cold War

Photo from AFP/Getty Images.

Relatives of people kidnapped by guerrillas cast shadows over their pictures during a protest in Bogotá.

The president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, interested in developments because of Ingrid Betancourt’s involvement, began to talk with Chávez, ignoring Uribe, who — at the express request of the French head of state — had in June unilaterally released 150 guerilla fighters, including Rodrigo Granda, known as the FARC’s “foreign minister,” in an unsuccessful attempt to facilitate Betancourt’s release.

On November 20, while Hugo Chávez was visiting Paris, the first winds of a long-threatened storm began to blow. The proof of life, which Chavez had announced would appear that day, failed to arrive. Perhaps the person who most needed the evidence was the president of France. Sarkozy, who was in the midst both of handling a strike precipitated by his efforts to revamp the pension system and a scandal concerning alleged child-trafficking in Chad involving French officials, would have been able to alter this difficult domestic agenda with a photo or a video of Betancourt, who had become something of a cause-célèbre in France. But nothing arrived.

In a long press conference, the Venezuelan president tried to focus his remarks on the king of Spain, who a week before at the Ibero-American summit in Santiago de Chile had told Chávez to “shut up.” He spoke about oil, Iran and his impending referendum in Venezuela; the French press-corps, however, pressed him to comment on the humanitarian exchange in Colombia.

BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

It was then that Chávez revealed that Uribe was willing to meet with Manuel Marulanda, the leader of the FARC. It didn’t take long for the Colombian president to react.

In a communiqué released that afternoon, Uribe’s office affirmed that the president had spoken of this possibility with Chávez, in confidence and as an element of negotiation. It added that this meeting would be possible only after the liberation of all the hostages and as a part of final armistice negotiations with the FARC. The statement concluded that it was now necessary to have a deadline for Chávez’ mediation, to ensure that the process would produce results; the deadline was set for December 31, 2007.

The announcement in effect condemned Chávez’ mediation to failure. Uribe was asking him to do in one month what no one in Colombia had been able to achieve in five years. Events quickly took a turn for the worse.

The Days of Rage The FARC had been unwilling or unable to send the evidence of the hostages’ survival on time. Chávez, however, was confident that he could get Uribe to extend the deadline if the promised letters, photos and videos arrived

by November 30. Chávez was to be aided in obtaining this material by the Colombian senator Piedad Córdoba, a member of the opposition Liberal party, who was Bogotá’s

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United States government could take advantage of the occasion to attack Venezuela from Colombian territory.

Two hours later, Uribe counterattacked. In a less vehement tone but using equally irreversible language, Uribe said that Chávez was lying; that he had an expansionist plan for the continent; and that he was a “legitimizer of terrorists” who seemed intent on installing a FARC government in Colombia.

In the following days Chávez escalated his rhetoric further. He recalled his ambassador to Colombia (a move normally meant to signal an impending rupture of diplomatic ties) and threatened that as long as Álvaro Uribe continued in power Venezuela would have relations “neither with him nor with the Colombian government.”

Uribe, by contrast, toned down his belligerence. Trade between Colombia and Venezuela totals $6 billion per year, and Colombia — whose exports to its neighbor are more than three times its imports — has a great deal more to lose than Venezuela should trade

be curtailed. A million Colombians would lose their jobs if trade were to be interrupted.

No one knows who will take the next step. In an interview three days before Venezuela’s referendum, the country’s foreign minister, Nicolás Maduro insinuated that relations with Colombia could be officially broken off.

Meanwhile in Bogotá, in the early dawn of November 30, the Colombian army captured three messengers who were carrying the evidence of the hostages’ survival that could have prevented all of this. There were photographs and videos of various captives, among them the three Americans and Ingrid Betancourt. She doesn’t speak; she looks very thin and immensely sad.

Colombian journalist Daniel Coronell is News Director of “Noticias Uno” and a columnist for Semana. He was Senior Visiting Scholar at the Center for Latin American Studies at UC Berkeley in 2006–07.

The Colombian government released this photo of Ingrid Betancourt on November 30, 2007.

Photo from Associated Press.

chief representative in the mediation.

Senator Córdoba was working from Caracas so that the members of the Colombian establishment would maintain their confidence in Chávez’ mediation.

While working from Miraflores, Córdoba placed a call to the commander of the Colombian army, General Mario Montoya. In the midst of their conversation, President Chávez walked by and asked the senator with whom she was speaking. Upon the senator’s response, Chávez asked to speak with the general. He offered Montoya a greeting and then asked him how many members of Colombia’s armed forces were in the hands of the FARC. Both the Venezuelan president and the Colombian senator affirm that the exchange lasted less than a minute.

When Uribe learned of the conversation, he determined it to be a violation of protocol and sufficient reason to terminate a process which, it was becoming apparent, provided many advantages to Chávez, some to the FARC and none to him.

Uribe terminated the binational negotiations in a statement released November 22. Once again, the captive’s families were left without hope.

The initial reaction from Caracas was tempered. The Venezuelan government expressed its surprise at Uribe’s move but voiced its respect for the sovereign decision of the Colombian government.

Three days later, however, on “Hello, President,” Chávez exploded.

He said that Uribe was a liar; that his attitude towards Venezuela was disrespectful; and that Colombia deserved a better president.

In addition, he threatened that economic relations would suffer. Promising to put relations with Colombia “in the freezer” he ordered the Venezuelan military to go on maximum alert because the

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The Art of Fernando Botero

ART

The Art of Fernando Botero

By Sarah Moody

“M

BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

© Fernando Botero. Image courtesy of Marlborough Gallery, New York.

useums are afraid to show works that reveal the truth.” So claimed Professor Peter Selz in a lecture inspired by the exhibition of Colombian artist Fernando Botero’s “Abu Ghraib” series organized by the Center for Latin American Studies last spring.

The University of California, Berkeley was the first public institution in the United States to show the powerful series. The approximately 100 drawings and oil paintings resulted from Botero’s shock and rage at what had happened at that Iraqi prison. As part of a series of talks related to the exhibit, Selz examined Botero’s development as an artist in relation to topics of violence and considered the importance of the paintings today.

Professor Selz began with a discussion of Botero’s artistic development. After winning second prize in the Salón de Artistas Colombianos in 1952, Botero used his winnings to travel to Europe to study the Old Masters. He began in Spain, copying the work of El Greco, Velázquez and Goya. In Florence, he studied the location of generouslyproportioned, verisimilar bodies in real spaces, focusing especially on the work of Masaccio and Piero della Francesca and the sensuality of Rubens. Botero then visited the Sistine ceiling in Rome before traveling to Mexico and turning to the famous muralists Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, whose paintings of strong, powerful human figures were important to Botero’s own approach.

Though he often recreated his predecessors’ paintings, Botero did

“Pear” by Fernando Botero, 1976.

not always approach the originals reverentially. According to Selz, Botero considered the Mona Lisa more a part of pop culture than a work of art, as can be seen in “Mona Lisa, Age 12,” painted in 1959. In the Colombian painter’s rendition of the famous work, he gives the subject a mischievous,

almost deranged expression in place of the original’s calm smile. Botero’s compulsion to quote became a recurring theme throughout his career; to cite only a few examples, he took on the oft-portrayed figure of Christ in “Ecce Homo” of 1967, painted an obese pear in 1976 in response to René

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and violence. His painting “Massacre in Columbia of 1999” interprets a historical event and forefronts the individual pain and horror of violent death in a color scheme dominated by his customary bright pastels. Another painting from the same series, “The Earthquake,” portrays the crumbling of colonial architecture into rubble, in a

Menil Collection, Houston, TX, USA/ The Bridgeman Art Library.

Magritte’s “The Listening Room” and reinvented Titian’s “The Rape of Europa” in 1995, placing the subjects in a space that resembles a bullring. The clear note that sounded across these echoes of others’ work, giving them coherence, was Botero’s constant interest in rounded, solid, voluminous form.

“The Listening Room” by René Magritte, 1952.

By the turn of the millennium, Botero was known worldwide for his visual vocabulary based on sensual human shapes. Focusing on what Botero calls “poetic transformation,” Selz explained that the painter is interested in “the truth and in the authenticity of the painting as a painting, which is very different from verisimilitude.” He often works with universal themes, interpreted through particular, individual subject matter, such as a city street in Latin America in “The Street” of 2000. Botero “delights in the human form and paints with great sensuality.”

In 1999 Botero began to focus on political themes and to depict violence in his paintings, seeing a moral necessity, according to Selz, in leaving testimony to the madness of war

world thrown off balance and ravaged by the unexpected. It is similar to “Massacre” with its cheerful palette in discord with the somber subject matter. Botero’s images of pain, which hadn’t previously been a frequent topic of his work, draw on a history of depictions of violence that includes Goya’s “Disasters of War” paintings, the works of German artists such as Otto Dix during the interwar period and Picasso’s “Guernica.”

Selz next turned to more contemporary artists’ treatment of violence, noting that in the last year the amount of art being produced on themes of violence has grown enormously. Photographic reenactments of the Abu Ghraib pictures by Clinton Fein, a South Africa-native and >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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The Art of Fernando Botero

© Fernando Botero. Image courtesy of Marlborough Gallery, New York.

“Mother and Child” by Fernando Botero, 2004.

resident of San Francisco, approach the same subject with alternative media. Leon Golub painted interrogation scenes strikingly similar to Botero’s “Abu Ghraib” paintings, except for the former’s inclusion of interrogators, which Botero’s paintings generally excise. Another American painter who has recently tackled the issue of torture is William Wiley, known for his disruptive, confrontational sense of humor that, for Selz, “simultaneously represents and converts reality.”

With his strong sense of deconstruction and incoherence, Wiley’s work follows the modernist attitude that, “in order to present reality, we must change the mode of presentation.”

Botero participates in this modernist approach only in that his work disrupts viewers’ expectations, but it in fact partakes more directly of older artistic traditions, such as those of BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Italy’s Renaissance. This extensive familiarity with artistic tradition is evident in the “Abu Ghraib” series, in which crucifixion is a strong theme, alongside noteworthy formal elements stemming from the Renaissance, such as the triptych, a careful use of perspective and the strong, structuring device of prison bars as a background.

Despite overwhelmingly positive reviews during the series’ first exhibition in the United States, at the Marlborough Gallery in New York, no American museums initially accepted the offer to host the exhibit. Selz attributed this reluctance to the corporate funding of many museums, which creates apprehension toward controversial topics.

This past summer Botero decided to donate the series, which was never intended for sale, to UC Berkeley, in part to ensure its continued availability to the public.

While the series is currently traveling, if all goes well, it should return to a permanent home by the Bay.

Professor Emeritus Peter Selz, of the History of Art Department at UC Berkeley, was a sculpture and painting curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and later the founding director of the Berkeley Art Museum. Professor Selz spoke for CLAS on October 15, 2007.

Sarah Moody is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Photo by Brian Snelson.

Fall 2007

EDUCATION

Cuban students cross Plaza Vieja in Havana.

Cuba’s Academic Advantage

by Martin Carnoy

W

hen the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) gave math and language tests in 1997 to third and fourth graders in 13 Latin American countries, researchers were only mildly surprised to find that pupils in Cuba’s lowest income schools outperformed most upper middle class students in the rest of the region. These test data confirmed years of anecdotal evidence that Cuba’s primary schools are by far the best in the region and may be better than schools in neighboring Florida.

Four years ago, I and two of my doctoral students at Stanford, Amber Gove and Jeffery Marshall, set out on an ambitious research project to discover why Cuban elementary schoolers are so successful. We analyzed the UNESCO data econometrically for seven Latin American countries focusing on the impact of family, schooling and social capital variables

on student performance. We then focused on three of those countries — Cuba, Brazil and Chile. We filmed more than 30 third grade math lessons, about ten in each country. We also interviewed teachers, principals and ministry officials, and we visited university teacher training programs.

We found that Cuban children excel academically for fairly straightforward reasons: they attend schools intensely focused on instruction, staffed by well-trained, regularly supervised teachers in a social environment that is dedicated to high achievement for all. The Cuban system combines quality teaching, high academic expectations and a tightly controlled school management hierarchy with well-defined goals and responsibilities — a combination that distinguishes Cuban education from other systems in Latin America.

Cuban children grow up in a society that is strictly controlled but supports children’s health and learning. >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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Cuba’s Academic Advantage

Graph courtesy of Martin Carnoy.

that Cuban teachers seem to know more about the subject matter they are teaching and have a clearer idea of how to teach it effectively. Children with knowledgeable, pedagogically proficient teachers who care deeply about them are bound to learn more in school. And the reason Cuban schools are staffed with effective teachers, we discovered, is that teacher training programs focus heavily on teaching so that children learn.

Then, when the young teachers start out in a school, they are closely mentored by the school’s administration and other teachers, who have a clear idea of exactly what is good teaching and what is not.

These are all features of high quality education that could be adopted by any country in Latin America. Schools in the United States could also learn from the Cubans, especially when it comes to Comparing mathematics scores for Cuban students (red) with raw scores (dark green) and scores adjusted for various social context factors (light green) in Brazil and Chile. supporting schools with social programs, training teachers and Compared to other Latin American countries, students tightly monitoring every pupil’s progress throughout report little student-to-student violence in Cuban schools. elementary and middle school.

The government guarantees employment to adults, provides Our comparison of Cuba with Brazil and Chile reveals reasonably good health care to all, enforces child labor laws other lessons for good schooling. Brazil has a highly so that children find it difficult to seek work outside the decentralized education system, where each state and home and makes parents accountable for their children’s municipality runs its own elementary schools. Schools have well-being. Even children from disadvantaged families are a lot of autonomy and teachers are trained in universities provided good nutrition, attend school regularly and do their that decide how to best train their teachers, with very little homework. If students’ families are not being sufficiently control from state governments. Everyone — parents, supportive academically, school authorities make home visits teachers, administrators — has many choices, and teachers to assess the home environment. have the freedom to teach the way they want, with almost no Strict government social controls are not compatible supervision by principals. Sound familiar? It’s like the U.S. with individual adult liberties, but they do assure that system and almost every other system in the hemisphere, lower-income children get what they need at home, live in and like them, it works well for children from better low-crime environments, are able to study in classrooms educated families and not very well for almost everyone else. with few student-initiated disturbances and attend schools Although we extol local control, many school principals and that are more socially mixed. In Cuba, low-income children’s communities do not have the resources or organizational rights are far better protected than in other Latin American skills to assure high quality education. countries; adults’ rights and, to a much lesser extent, upperChile has decentralized even farther, again with little middle class children’s rights are reduced. Cuban students success. Almost half of Chile’s students go to private schools, can learn more in these conditions than similar low-income most to private schools where students get vouchers equal to children who have to work for wages and who sit in frequently the amount spent on public school students. But like Brazilian disrupted classrooms in schools that are highly socially students, Chileans don’t perform nearly as well as Cubans. stratified.

Our classroom videos and interviews showed why: when Children in Cuba also attend schools with generally high left to their own devices, schools, whether public or private, quality teaching. They usually stay with the same primary can’t overcome low standards and expectations, inadequate school teacher for the first four years and spend most of the teacher training and their pupils’ social environment. school day under that teacher’s care. On average, we observed Much more than in Chile or Brazil, the third grade math BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

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lessons we filmed in Cuba focused on problem solving and math strategies. Cuban teachers were much more likely to have students solve math problems from worksheets during class, then analyze their solutions in full class discussion. A much higher fraction of Cuban pupils in the classrooms we filmed, including classrooms in two distant rural schools, were fully involved and seemed to be “getting” the concepts being taught. The closest thing we found elsewhere to this type of teaching and level of student engagement was in a high cost Chilean private school.

Many analysts in the United States and at the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank think that more decentralized systems with greater school autonomy, and, even better, vouchers, charter schools and other “privatized” alternatives to publicly managed schooling will make for great education. The Brazil-Chile-Cuba comparison suggests that they will not, because they fail to address the question of who will change the social environment in which children grow up, who will set and enforce high standards in the classroom and who will take responsibility for training the teachers to implement those high standards. Cuba’s success tells us that only when government takes these tasks seriously does every

child get a shot at good schooling.

Our comparison of Cuban with other Latin American countries’ primary schooling should also cause other nations in the region to consider carefully what it will take to transform their educational systems. Good teaching is fundamental to good education, but good teachers do not appear spontaneously. They must be trained, first in high quality teacher education programs that have clear objectives, then on the job by highly trained, experienced supervisors whom teachers trust and who know what good teaching is.

Most Latin American countries have politically powerful teachers’ unions that will have to be included in any drive to upgrade the quality of teaching, and that will not be easy.

Yet, anything short of taking on this reality will fail to make a serious dent in raising educational quality in the region.

Martin Carnoy is Vida Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford University. His book, Cuba’s Academic Advantage, is published by Stanford University Press. He spoke for CLAS on October 11, 2007.

Photo by Felipe I. Camus Dávila.

Empty desks at the Instituto Nacional de Chile.

CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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Paramilitaries at the Polls

Photo by Julián Castro Suarez.

A Medellín comuna.

COLOMBIA

Paramilitaries at the Polls

By Benjamin Lessing

“T

he fighting here was intense, house by house.”

My guide walks me over to a lookout and gestures to the shanty-covered hillside rising in front of us. The scene looks vaguely cubist — a haphazard assemblage of brick dwellings and the narrow, odd-shaped passageways between them. He points to a cul de sac far below, the only relatively open space in view. “From there up to the radio tower there are no streets, just these little stairwells and catwalks. It took us two weeks, and many lives, to take the tower.”

We are in Comuna 13, one of Medellin’s most notorious shantytowns, the day before the 2007 Colombian elections.

My guide, an agent of DAS (the Colombian FBI), along with several of our police escorts, participated in the bloody 2002 military invasion of this neighborhood known as Operation Orión. Tomorrow we will return to watch the polls, but today we are getting a history lesson.

Invited by the Organization of American States to participate in its Electoral Observation Mission of Colombia’s 2007 elections, I arranged to be assigned to Comuna 13. The story of this community over the last 20 years is a microcosm BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

of the larger Colombian conflict, particularly with regard to the consolidation of paramilitary power. Infested early on by delinquent bands associated with Pablo Escobar’s cartel, in the 1980s and 1990s the community increasingly became a hotbed of guerrilla activity due to its strategic location at the border between Medellín’s urban sprawl and the forested sierra beyond. By the late 1990s, the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias Colombianas) and the ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional) — Colombia’s two main guerrilla groups — together with the smaller CAP (Comandos Armados del Pueblo), had formed a shaky alliance and divided up control over Comuna 13’s neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, with paramilitary groups expanding and consolidating under a few national umbrella organizations (first among them the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or AUC), regional paramilitary leader “Don Berna” made a play to wrest control of Comuna 13 from the guerrillas, leading to innumerable armed clashes. In late 2002, with Medellín attracting international attention for its record-breaking rates of armed violence, the newly-elected president Álvaro Uribe Vélez ordered the police and army to secure the

Fall 2007

neighborhood and cleanse it of armed groups.

Operation Orión involved 3,000 government troops and lasted close to a month — leaving 19 soldiers and 24 guerrillas dead — but it did effectively end the guerrilla occupation.

Don Berna’s paramilitaries — who suffered no losses — were subsequently allowed to fill the power vacuum and dominate the neighborhood. According to many accounts, including a CIA report leaked to the Los Angeles Times last May, this was intentional: paramilitary leaders helped plan and execute Operation Orión, allegedly working together with, at a minimum, top military commanders. Whether or not Uribe or his closest staff cooperated with paramilitaries remains one of the most hotly contested issues in Colombia today.

In Comuna 13, as in most of the areas they came to control, the rule of the paramilitaries was shockingly violent. Unlike the guerrillas, who usually target infrastructure, transport and other economic and military resources, paramilitary groups overwhelmingly victimize noncombatants. A full 70 percent of their armed actions between 1988 and 2004 were massacres of four or more defenseless civilians, according to CERAC, a Bogotá think tank that has compiled the most complete database available on the Colombian conflict. The brutality of the paramilitaries’ attacks, nominally aimed at rooting out leftists and collaborators, have left countless communities scarred, terrorized and, all too often, displaced.

But there has been a secondary casualty of paramilitary power, more difficult to measure but no less important: democracy itself.

Guerrillas and Paramilitaries: Two Distinct Threats For anyone concerned with the roots and trajectories of Latin American democracy, Colombia has always been a standout case. Though often weak and highly circumscribed, some form of democratic government has ruled the country nearly without a break for over 100 years. Moreover, civilian rule has survived periods of extreme partisan violence as well as the half-century of guerilla warfare that has rendered part of the national territory beyond the control of the state. Deleterious as these episodes have been, the rise of the paramilitaries and their extraordinary expansion between 1996 and 2004 presented a new — and in many ways more dire — threat to Colombian democracy. While the demobilization process that Uribe initiated in 2004 has begun to roll back the paramilitaries’ overt armed presence, their influence is still felt throughout the country. Accurately assessing the severity of the threat will require not only careful and creative empirical observation but also a nuanced understanding of the protean nature of paramilitary power.

It is easy enough to portray Colombia’s plague of armed violence as essentially a three-way battle between the paramilitary groups, the guerrillas and the armed forces.

The paramilitaries are frequently conceived of as the mirror image of leftist groups like the FARC: a parallel threat to state power from the other end of the ideological spectrum. As with any simplification, there is a grain of truth here: both paramilitaries and guerillas are sophisticated armed groups with well-developed hierarchies, a recruiting strategy that often targets the same pool of economically disadvantaged youth and internal economies that increasingly rely on profits from the drug trade. But this viewpoint glosses over crucial differences in the groups’ objectives, their modus operandi and, perhaps most importantly, their linkages with society and the state.

A foundational difference between the AUC and the FARC is that the latter’s declared mission (however implausible) is to overthrow the state and erect some kind of Marxist government in its place, while the former’s raison d’être is to protect citizens (in practice, the richest and most powerful citizens) from the actions of the guerrillas — in particular the threat of kidnappings and the appropriation of property.

Both the AUC and FARC engage in illegal activities, and both do things (such as enforcing social order and imposing taxes on residents) that only states are supposed to do, but only the latter does these things in order to bring on the collapse of the state. Paramilitaries, by contrast, are essentially defenders of the status quo. As a result, paramilitary–state relations are fundamentally unlike guerrilla–state relations.

Notwithstanding any government rhetoric condemning paramilitaries and even the occasional symbolic repressive action, the interests of the paramilitaries and those of the state frequently overlap.

Of course, the interests of paramilitaries and the state also diverge: in order to survive and maintain their territorial dominion, the paramilitaries have had to keep the state weak in strategic, localized sectors. But in places where the state already lacked sufficient reach to establish a monopoly on the use of force, paramilitaries have usually been perceived as a bulwark against guerilla encroachment — and their long-term corrosive effect on state capacity has been largely ignored. Paramilitaries have often been able to present beleaguered state forces with a viable quid pro quo — in one case delivering corpses to an army battalion to be “legalized” and counted as official FARC casualties in exchange for freedom from persecution — that leave groups of officials better off at the price of the state’s overall cohesion and long-term efficacy. The contrast with guerrillas could not be starker: where the FARC constitutes a direct, head-on threat to the state’s control over the national territory, >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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paramilitaries’ apparent cooperation frequently masks an oblique attack, weakening the state from within.

Social Linkages and the Road to the Ballot Box Cooperation between paramilitaries and the state has been facilitated by the specific types of social linkages paramilitary leaders enjoy. Many are former army or police officers; others come from social strata that permit them to maintain cordial relations with important members of society. As defenders of the status quo, including, centrally, the property rights of wealthy landowners and large corporations, paramilitaries have received the sympathy and frequently the largesse of these groups. In one infamous case, the Chiquita banana company made “security” payments of over $1.7 million to the AUC between 1997 and 2004, even after the AUC was designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. government in 2001 and Chiquita was advised to stop by the U.S. Justice Department in 2003. Such high-level connections mean that, although there is certainly a stigma attached to the paramilitaries, leading most elected officials to publicly denounce their activity, channels of cooperation among politicians, powerful economic actors and paramilitaries remain open.

The combination of these social linkages and overlapping interests has fomented what is perhaps the most sinister form of paramilitary power: its penetration into the electoral arena. While paramilitaries are certainly not the first group to practice clientelism in Colombia, they have intensified the traditional interaction between marginalized communities and powerful local patrons by essentially replacing the state in the areas they control. Through the threat and all-toofrequent practice of lethal violence against the residents of these areas, paramilitary leaders gained an invaluable bargaining chip when negotiating with state agents: the votes of millions of Colombians.

Rumors of cooperation between paramilitaries and politicians have accompanied the growth of paramilitary power over the last 10 years, but its true extent has only recently come to light in the wake of the “para-politics” scandal of 2006 and 2007. The public revelation of the secret Ralito Pact — a statement of solidarity and mutual protection signed in 2001 by the country’s top four paramilitary commanders and more than 50 members of congress, governors, mayors and other public figures — set off a political avalanche; one year later, 15 congressmen are in jail, another 36 are under investigation and at least 300 separate cases have been opened by the Colombian Justice Department.

Beyond the headlines, the rise of the paramilitaries has changed the face of Colombia’s political system. From the 19th BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

century until 1991, Colombia was ruled by what was perhaps the most entrenched two-party system in the Americas. Even the constitutional reform of 1991, intended to open up the political system to new parties, initially failed to dislodge the Liberals and Conservatives from their position as hegemonic political forces. But the 1998 election marked the beginning of their downward trajectory: after barely winning a majority of Senate seats between them in 1998, the two parties lost that majority in 2002, and by 2006 together controlled only 36 of 100 seats. In 1998, 28 smaller parties held 32 seats; by 2002 there were 44 parties holding 58 seats — many from departments with the strongest paramilitary presence. The ability to form a micro-party around a handful of novice candidates, as well as the increased autonomy of Liberal and Conservative incumbents from their party leadership, served the interests of paramilitaries, who require opportunistic politicians willing and able to trade policy concessions for votes. Thus the nature, timing and geography of this fragmentation, combined with the evidence now surfacing in the “para-politics” investigations, has led many analysts to see the collapse of Colombia’s two-party system as fundamentally driven by the consolidation of paramilitary power.

The good news is that the worst may be over. A 2003 political reform has successfully reduced the number of political parties and made them somewhat more ideologically coherent. More controversial is the paramilitary demobilization initiated by Uribe in 2004. Though the AUC has been disbanded, many paramilitary leaders have been jailed and thousands of paramilitary rank and file have handed over their guns and entered “re-insertion” programs, critics argue that leaders retain control from prison while many groups continue to operate under new names with more localized leadership, frequently taking advantage of government payouts without truly demobilizing. The Uribe government has certainly succeeded in banishing the word “paramilitary” from the official lexicon: “Paramilitarismo no longer exists in Colombia” is the new party line, and the nondemobilized groups are now known strictly as “Criminal Bands.” But how much has real paramilitary power been curtailed?

Turning the Corner?

The demobilization program in Medellín has been particularly well-funded and well-implemented. Armed violence plummeted under center-left mayor Sergio Fajardo (2004–08), and he remains highly regarded by both the public and a majority of analysts. Today, Medellín seems clean, safe and friendly — nothing like the terrifying images from the 2000 film “La Virgen de los Sicarios” (“Our Lady

Photo from AFP/Getty Images.

Fall 2007

A Colombian soldier sorts weapons collected from a demobilizing paramilitary squad.

of the Assassins”) or the days of Pablo Escobar. In Comuna 13 the atmosphere is one of wary tranquility: the war is over, but, my police escorts warn me — and by their very presence make clear — violent crime has not disappeared.

Nonetheless, the overt armed presence of nationally organized paramilitaries is a thing of the past, making this an excellent place to use elections to study the dynamics of paramilitary power. Since elections give citizens the chance to make public choices between political alternatives, they offer a rich and compelling snapshot of the interests, preferences and power relations at play within a community. A fine-grained statistical comparison of results from the pre-demobilization (but post political reform) 2003 election, when the paramilitaries ruled openly, with the (still unreleased) final tallies from 2007 will, I believe, give us a better understanding of how paramilitary power functioned both at its height and in its current, ambiguous state.

On Election Day, I was able to observe the polling places firsthand, speak with officials and oversee the entire voting process. I saw no physical violence or armed coercion, and national observers with experience in the neighborhood confirmed that the situation had improved. In 2003, it had not been uncommon to see armed groups going door to door, waking up residents and forcing them at gunpoint into vans that drove them down to the polling stations. Nothing like that happened this time around. Inside the polling stations I saw only minor violations of protocol and nothing

that looked like systematic intimidation. If there was armed coercion, it had become more circumspect.

The initial results were promising: of the 14 exparamilitary leaders who ran for local office in the comunas of Medellin, only one was elected. Moreover, the Colombia Viva party, which grew out of the disbanded AUC, received only 6,000 votes, as opposed to more than 20,000 four years ago. Nationwide, the number of undisputed mayoral candidacies (a good measure of intimidation from armed groups) fell from 25 to 11. In El Tiempo, the nation’s largest newspaper, prominent paramilitary specialist Alfredo Rangel was confident enough to proclaim “The End of ‘Para-politics.’” I prefer to await the results of my statistical research before passing judgment, but the early signs do give hope that Colombia, or at least Medellín, has turned a corner. Consolidating these advances, and ensuring that paramilitary power continues to wither, will be crucial not just for residents of Comuna 13 and communities like it, but for all Colombians. Only when even the most disadvantaged members of society can vote, organize, advocate and simply live their lives without fear of violent reprisals, will the promise of Colombian democracy be realized.

Benjamin Lessing is a doctoral student in the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley.

His research was partially funded by a CLAS Tinker Summer Research Grant.

CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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Land Conflict in Brazil

BRAZIL

The Economy of Land Conflict in Brazil

By F. Daniel Hidalgo and Neal P. Richardson

Photo by César Muniz.

Mario Lago Landless Workers Movement Camp in Ribeirão Preto, Brazil.

I

n the early 1990s, rural northeastern Brazil faced a severe economic crisis. Droughts led to crop shortfalls, which paralyzed sugarcane refining facilities throughout the region, threatening the livelihood of workers dependent on the agrarian economy.

In Água Preta, a municipality hard hit by the crisis, newly unemployed plantation workers turned to one of the few options they had left: direct BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

collective action. With the support of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) — the Landless Workers Movement — the plantation workers organized and invaded unused land. The workers, as recounted by geographer Wendy Wolford, forced the government to expropriate moribund plantations and redistribute the land.

As the social movement with the largest membership in Latin America,

the MST has captured the imagination of activists and scholars throughout the world. By challenging the extremely unequal distribution of land in Brazil — the world’s eighth most unequal nation, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization — through a two-decade-long campaign of land invasions, the MST has successfully kept land reform on the national political agenda, even under governments with pro-market economic programs.

According to the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), a church-based rural organization, over 660,000 families — more than 3 million individuals — participated in land invasions in Brazil between 1988 and 2004. Roughly 440,000 families received land from the government during this period. These invasions have in many cases been accompanied by violence and intense political conflicts.

Given the scale and prevalence of land conflict in Brazil, it is important for social scientists and policymakers seeking to best serve the needs of the rural poor to understand its origin.

Economic deprivation led to rural conflict in Água Preta, yet how true is this for Brazil in general? Where is rural conflict most likely to occur?

Building on the valuable insights of anthropologists and sociologists, we describe here our recent efforts, co-authored with Suresh Naidu and Simeon Nichter, to understand the link between economic conditions and rural conflict using statistical analysis.

Despite the complexity of land politics, we believe that through careful research design, modern quantitative tools can shed light on important facets of rural conflict.

Photo from Associated Press.

Fall 2007

Landless workers build housing after a land seizure.

The Challenge Even with good data at hand, evaluating the causes of rural conflict through quantitative analysis is challenging. If we collect data on rural conflict and economic conditions, can we accurately infer the relationship between economic trends and land invasions?

While the raw data may say that poor economic conditions and increased rural conflict go together, correlation is not causation. Economic downturns may be associated with other, unobserved events that increase conflict, and those other events could also be driving rural mobilization. If we could measure and control for all of these factors, there would be no problem. But unfortunately, we cannot. Furthermore, land conflict may be both cause and effect of economic disruptions, making it difficult to untangle one from the other.

If social scientists, like biologists and chemists, could perform experiments, it would be more straightforward to answer these questions quantitatively. In an imaginary (and clearly unethical) experiment, we could randomly select a few dozen communities, apply an economic shock (the “treatment”), observe the amount of rural conflict that occurs, and then compare these selected communities to a

randomly chosen group of other communities (the “control”) that did not receive the shock. Because the treatment was assigned randomly, we could be sure that the difference between the two groups was caused by the economic shock.

Of course, this kind of experiment is impossible. Hence, social scientists must find other ways to investigate the roots of rural conflict.

Natural Experiments One approach is to get nature to do the randomizing for us. Social scientists accomplish this by seeking out research opportunities called “natural experiments,” which can be powerful aids for establishing causation. In our case, we reasoned that variation in annual rainfall is basically random, but can have potent effects on the agrarian economy of rural communities. Thus, random fluctuations in rainfall year to year acted as our experiment.

Following the pioneering work investigating the economic causes of civil wars by UC Berkeley economist Edward Miguel, we collected rainfall data from across Brazil and examined how randomly applied economic shocks — derived from fluctuations in rainfall — led to increased rural unrest. Moreover, we investigated the kinds of communities in which these economic shocks cause the most conflict. >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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Our Findings The analysis confirmed that sudden drops in rural income, caused by drought or flood, lead to land invasions.

When rural workers are faced with economic hardships, they are more likely to be mobilized to invade land because they have few alternatives.

Our statistical method required two steps, using a procedure known as instrumental-variables regression.

First, we examined the relationship between rainfall and agricultural income: how did too little or too much rain affect income within municipalities? We found that deviations from normal rainfall, both positive (floods) and negative (droughts), led to lower agricultural income.

Second, we took our first-stage estimates of agricultural income as caused by rainfall and examined the effect on land conflict. This method allowed us to exploit the random variation in income caused by nature.

We found that a drop in agricultural income by one standardized unit increases the chances of a land invasion by around 15 percent, on average. Income shocks affect not only the incidence of land conflict but also its intensity: greater drops in income lead to more land invasions and more families participating in them Yet the average effect we estimated masks huge regional

differences in how likely the rural poor are to organize. Why do hard times in some places lead to so much more conflict than in others? To answer this question, we examined how the effects of our “experiment” varied across different kinds of communities. We found that by far the most important characteristic that predicts where conflict will occur in hard times is inequality in land ownership.

For example, the effect of an income shock is six times greater in Pará, one of the most unequal states, than in São Paulo state, which has one of the least unequal distributions of land ownership. Água Preta, the example we began with, also typifies this relationship. The concentration of land in that municipality is high even for Brazil, making it particularly ripe for rural mobilization.

We interpret this result in two complementary ways.

On the one hand, land invasions are costly to organize and implement. Consequently, the MST may target its activities on larger landholdings, allowing it to concentrate on one big invasion rather than multiple, scattered efforts. On the other hand, the concentration of landownership means that a greater share of the population is asset poor. Without land or other possessions, the rural poor are more vulnerable to economic shocks because they lack the means to sustain themselves through a bad growing season. Joining a landless movement and occupying land is also a relatively more An MST demonstration in Pernambuco.

Photo by Felipe Canova.

BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Fall 2007

attractive option when one does not have assets to leave behind.

In addition to land inequality, we find that different patterns of land tenure also mediate the effect of income shocks. For example, tenant farmers, with their rent determined prior to the growing season, suffer greater hardship from a failed harvest.

Regardless of whether a drought hits, the rent must be paid. When owners cultivate their land, by contrast, they have one less expense to pay — as well as an asset to borrow against in order to make it through the year.

Our research identifies two economic factors — income shocks and the structure of rural landholding — that contribute to causing land invasions across Brazil. Understanding the causes of conflict can suggest solutions to reduce tensions in the Brazilian countryside and to improve the lives of the rural population.

Conflict over land is costly in terms of time, money and human life. Social movements expend great effort organizing and defending land occupations, and landowners spend immense resources to counter the invasions. Even if an invading group can hold onto their claim through the initial process of occupying the land, the legal battles that follow can drag on for years. More importantly, land invasions can turn violent. The CPT reports that in the past decade, 367 people have been killed in conflict over land.

Our findings have several policy implications for reducing rural conflict.

First, social assistance programs in rural areas would be one way to limit the vulnerability of rural workers to income shocks. Targeted transfer programs, particularly during periods of drought, could provide a form of income insurance to the rural poor so

Photo by Roberto Vinicius.

Conclusion

A young boy plants an MST flag as his family unloads their belongings.

that joining a land invasion seems less attractive. Indeed, anecdotal evidence suggests that the success of the targeted antipoverty program, Bolsa Familia, may explain a recent fall in conflict.

Second, reducing the extreme concentration of landownership would also ease rural tensions. Currently, the vast majority of land redistribution is ad hoc, occuring only in direct response to land invasions. This is unlikely to be the best way to reduce enduring inequalities and diminish conflict. A

coherent, institutionalized program of land reform that targets the neediest could be more efficient at achieving both goals. While historically such efforts at comprehensive redistribution have stalled, our research highlights the mounting costs of failing to address stark inequalities.

F. Daniel Hidalgo and Neal P. Richardson are Ph.D. students in the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley.

CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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The Bitter for the Sweet

Photo courtesy of Bill Haney.

Children bathe in a Dominican batey.

CINE LATINO

The Bitter for the Sweet

by Sara Lamson

The Price of Sugar Directed by Bill Haney (2007) Not rated, 90 minutes

I

nland from the Dominican Republic’s all-inclusive resorts and sandy beaches, far from the eyes of all but the most adventurous tourists, long stretches of two lane highway roll out through vast swaths of sugarcane. Roughly 500,000 tons of sugar are produced on the island every year, making it the country’s most lucrative cash crop. The workers who cultivate and harvest the cane are, however, rarely Dominican: they are Haitian immigrants and the children of Haitian immigrants born in the Dominican Republic, many of whom have no rights and are not recognized by the Dominican government. Living in isolated, rural bateyes BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

(sugar company housing), these workers toil in conditions similar to those endured by their enslaved forebears who once made Saint Domingue the wealthiest colony in the world.

“The Price of Sugar” a new documentary by director Bill Haney, explores the lives of these Haitian laborers. The film follows the story of Father Christopher Hartley, an Anglo-Spanish disciple of Mother Teresa who moved to the Dominican Republic in 1997 to minister in the parish of San José de los Llanos, a town which lies in the midst of some of the nation’s largest sugar plantations. The film recounts Father Hartley’s nearly decade-long struggle to better the living and working conditions of his flock, whose lot he equates with modern-day slavery. Narrated by Paul Newman and illustrated with often stunning videography, the documentary captures a shocking panorama of life in the bateyes and cane fields.

Upon arrival in Los Llanos, Hartley is warned not to enter the bateyes. Ignoring the injunction, Hartley enters the company-owned communities to begin working with the residents. Galvanized into action by what he saw — workers with lost fingers and inadequate clothing; rampant malnutrition and child labor; crowded and decrepit housing; and a near complete lack of access to education, healthcare and other services — Father Hartley becomes an organizer among the workers, informing them of their rights and encouraging collective action. Working by night as an advocate for their cause, he labors to alert human rights organizations and others who might take an interest in his work.

If the film focuses largely on the immediate conditions in the bateyes — most of which are owned by the oligarchic Vicini clan, the film’s designated villain and among the most powerful families in the Republic — it also looks outward to see how Haitian workers arrive in these communities. Tipped off by a disgruntled Vicini buscone (human trafficker), Haney films Father Hartley and a colleague as they travel to a popular crossing-point for migrants on the mountainous Haitian–Dominican border. There they interview migrants and border guards who admit to looking the other way when Haitian laborers are brought across. The camera captures the action as the migrants are stripped of identification, loaded into trucks and driven directly to the plantations. Once on the plantations, workers are not allowed to leave, a policy enforced 24-hours a day by armed guards.

The second half of the film traces the response to Father Hartley’s efforts. Confronted first with anonymous death threats, he is later challenged directly by the Vicini Corporation. In a drought year, as fires plague the plantations, Hartley is accused of inciting arson. Gaining notoriety throughout the country and in international media circles, he is publicly denounced as an enemy of the Dominican Republic, a country where anti-Haitian animus has a long and sometimes violent history.

Hartley attributes the backlash to vested interests seeking to undermine his ministry and feed upon Dominican fears of “haitianization” of the country. “Take all of the Haitians back to Haiti!” shrieks television host Consuelo Despradel on her popular national TV program, decrying the “meddling” of Father Hartley. As tensions escalate, the Vicini clan petitions the Catholic Church to have Father Hartley removed from the country.

Haney’s film, if at times cloying in its depiction of the pious Hartley’s tale, still provides powerful ammunition to those in the international community outraged by the plight of Haitian workers. Its vivid scenes of human trafficking, exploitation and discrimination are supported by recent

Photo courtesy of Bill Haney.

Fall 2007

Father Hartley with a sugarcane worker.

reports from human rights organizations and the U.S. Department of State, whose 2006 country report on the Dominican Republic cited deplorable working conditions in agriculture — particularly in the sugar sector.

Where “The Price of Sugar” stumbles is in placing the situation it depicts within the broader political, economic and legal system in which it takes place. The audience is told that the United States has a preferential-trade agreement with the Dominican Republic and that this agreement forces Americans to buy Dominican sugar at up to double the world price. This implies increased profits for the corrupt sugar producing elite, while an estimated 650,000 cane workers continue in slave-like conditions. “Most American families would be very embarrassed to know at what price they put sugar in their coffee in the morning,” Hartley suggests.

While these statements are incendiary, it remains unclear what choices viewers have or which American companies are involved in the Dominican sugar trade. It is a curious shortcoming in a film seemingly framed as an appeal to consumer awareness.

Likewise scant attention is paid to the longstanding policies that have allowed for a consistent pool of Haitian workers in the Dominican Republic and helped preserve the status quo with respect to their rights and living and working conditions. “The state is responsible for the presence of the Dominico-Haitian and Haitian community,” claimed Roxanna Altholz, Associate Director of the International Human Rights Clinic at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law following the CLAS-sponsored screening of the film.

“The government forcibly recruited thousands and thousands of Haitians to work the plantations when those plantations >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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were state-owned.” Notwithstanding this history, the state today disenfranchises the Dominico-Haitian community, denying Dominican birth certificates to the children of Haitian immigrants born in the Dominican Republic.

“Without birth registration, without their birth certificates, they cannot vote, they cannot marry, they cannot own property, they cannot study,” explained Altholz, who in 2005 litigated a successful case at the Inter-American Court brought against the Dominican government for denying nationality to two children of Haitian ancestry who had been born in the country, and who, according to the constitution, had the right to Dominican nationality. While the court ruled against the Dominican Republic, the government ignored the ruling and has found a legal loophole to continue denying birth registration to similar individuals. Now, according to Altholz, the state registers these children with birth certificates of a different color and in a different book. What this system ultimately means is that these children not only inherit illegality from their parents, but “are now from birth categorized as second-class individuals.”

In the bateyes of Hispaniola, as in so many places where the economy depends on cheap migrant labor, the struggle

to eliminate regimes of second-class citizenship and better the living conditions of workers remains difficult. Those in the Dominican Republic who dare to speak on behalf of Haitians’ rights face popular scorn and the familiar xenophobe’s refrain, “Haitians are stealing Dominican jobs.”

Just this past year, internationally regarded human rights activist Sonia Pierre faced death threats and even an attempt by the government to strip her of her nationality for working to protect the rights of Haitian immigrants. Father Hartley was himself forced to leave the country in October of 2006, and the makers of the “Price of Sugar” are now facing a defamation lawsuit brought by the Vicini corporation.

On October 30, 2007, the Center for Latin American Studies hosted a screening of the documentary, followed by a discussion with Mariah Lafleur, a PeaceCorps volunteer in the Vicini bateyes and UC Berkeley Public Health graduate student and Roxanna Altholz, Associate Director of the International Human Rights Clinic at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law. Sara Lamson is Vice Chair of the Center for Latin American Studies.

A Haitian man harvests Dominican cane.

Photo courtesy of Bill Haney.

BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Fall 2007

BOOKS

Borders and Crossers

by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

Storming the Gates of Paradise Landscapes for Politics

by Rebecca Solnit University of California Press, 429 pp. $24.95

Cover art courtesy of University of California Press.

T

hough Henry Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” is for many Americans an unavoidable standby of high school civics, it is a fair bet to claim that if some recall the principles of citizenship it espoused, few recollect the particular policies its author opposed. In July of 1846, the naturalist left his pond-side meditations to spend a night in the Concord jail protesting the United States’ war against Mexico, which had begun in earnest a few weeks before when a group of American settlers seized a Mexican garrison in Sonoma, Alta California. Two years later the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded Mexico’s northern half to the United States, thereby concluding a war which “Mexico never forgot,” writes Rebecca Solnit in her new book, Storming the Gates of Paradise, “and the United States can never quite remember.”

A celebrated essayist and cultural historian who has in recent years been compared to writers ranging from John Muir and Joan Didion to Thoreau himself, Solnit is the author of books including Hope in the Dark, A Field Guide to Getting Lost and River of Shadows: Eadward Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2004. Now, in Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics, Solnit collects a body of her writings from the past 10 years. The essays included — which first appeared in journals as varied as Orion, The Nation and The London Review of Books — range, like all Solnit’s work, across geography and art, literature and history. All, however, are unified both by Solnit’s sparkling prose and by her distinctive mode of exploring connections between landscape and politics — an approach through which she has succeeded, according to the writer Michael Pollan, in “reinventing the genre we call nature writing.”

In a September talk for the Center for Latin American Studies, Solnit read from “39 Steps Across the Border and Back,” an essay that opens from a rafting trip down the Río Grande — passing “water, rock and prickly pear” — to

take in the immigration debate, environmental history and militarization of the border. The essay includes a scene which finds Solnit standing in Sonoma’s central plaza during the sesquicentennial commemoration of the Bear Flag Revolt, an occasion during which the remarks of anti-immigration California Governor Pete Wilson are met by a chanting group of Latino protestors. Overhearing an elder couple perturbed at the protestors’ presence, Solnit offers the couple a possible explanation for the group’s disquiet. “Young lady,” the man tells her, “California was never a part of Mexico. You should go to college and study some history.” Solnit spoke over e-mail with CLAS’s Joshua Jelly-Schapiro.

JJS: Reading these pieces, I found myself thinking often of that old J.B. Jackson axiom of which geographers are so fond — that “landscape is history made visible.” Would you say that this idea is important to you? What is it, for you, that >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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writing about landscape allows one to see, or perhaps make visible, beyond the landscape itself?

RS: Well, with all due respect for J. B. Jackson, I’m not sure that history is made visible in a lot of these places. On the one hand if it was, we might have hideously traumatic scars visible all across the continent that would take away any of the respite, beauty and hope these places have. On the other, we might not have quite the amnesia plague afflicting the modern imagination. The landscape itself is often mute about its own history, and the job of the landscape historian, the writer, the storyteller is to keep that history alive and to teach people to see what can be read there and connect what can be seen to what can’t. A lot of Native American cultures have really dense layers of topographical information in their stories, so that the places give meanings to history and viceversa: they keep each other alive. But by stories.

In Hope in the Dark, I wrote about all the places across the West that hadn’t been dammed, or logged, or mined, or bombed because of heroic struggles off-site, struggles whose success was that so little human trace was left on the land itself — that no trace of the plans for ski resorts or extractive industries or sprawl were visible — and concluded, “All these places are places of absence, or at least the absence of devastation, a few of the countless places in which there is nothing to see, and nothing is what victory often looks like.” This question of what can and can’t be seen is really interesting to me.

JJS: “It’s a place that taught me to write,” you write in the introduction to these essays. What do you mean by that?

RS: In my mid-twenties I began going to the antinuclear protests at the Nevada Test Site (NTS), where the U.S. and UK set off more than a thousand nuclear explosions in what was somewhat misleadingly called testing — misleading because they were full-scale nuclear explosions, mostly much larger than those in Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and there were real consequences for the people, animals and land downwind. The anti-nuclear movement that gathered at the NTS to resist testing as a step toward peace and disarmament and nonproliferation drew from a fantastically rich array of global cultures — downwinder Mormons, radical Western Shoshones and Paiutes, atomic veterans, renegade physicists, Japanese hibakashu [atomic survivors], Quakers, pagans, anarchists — lots of anarchists — and others. To tell the story of the place itself in the context of indigenous history, of the colonizing of the American West, the Euro-American fear and loathing and misunderstanding of deserts, the history of the making of the atom bomb, the cold war and all these radical antinuclear and peace movements — it required BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

bringing together voices, or modes of writing, that had been separate for me, and still are in much conventional writing.

I had to be a journalist, a memoirist, a historian, a cultural critic — and so in writing about the Nevada Test Site in 1991 and after I learned to weave together lyrical, critical, historical and reportorial voices. This free-roaming hybrid mode is still central to my style. And it isn’t just style, but a way of being radically inclusive of ideas, experiences and information.

JJS: One of those landscapes that features prominently here is The Border — by which in this country, or in California at least, we mean the border between the United States and Mexico. And that border, as you emphasize here, is as much a kind of mental barrier as it is a physical one: the line in our national consciousness that separates Resident from Alien, Us from Them, Order from Chaos.The essay “39 Steps Across the Border and Back,” however, departs from an experience of the border as place. I wonder if you could describe your impetus for traveling to the border, and what you found there.

RS: Well, I’ve crossed the border several times recently in Tijuana–San Diego, but my most significant experience of it was during a two-week rafting trip down the Río Grande at the point where it stops separating New Mexico east from New Mexico west and begins to separate Texas from Mexico proper. It’s always weird to go to the border and find that this huge line in the North American imagination is not a huge line in the landscape, unless it’s a manmade one, an imposition. On the Río Grande, for example, everything moves freely from one side of the river to the other, particularly the birds, and the terrain is pretty much the same.

It’s not a divide between things but an oasis in a dry land that brings them together. And of course the history of this line is the history of brute force and arbitrary cartography.

So actually seeing the border undermines the rhetoric of some divinely ordained difference between us and them — and yet profound differences have grown up between the two sides. Then too if you can think systemically, you can see that NAFTA displaces Mexican farmers, who come here for work and keep the U.S. agricultural industry afloat, or that the migratory birds ignore borders altogether to summer in the north and winter in the tropics, for example, and that all this ecology is intimately tied together. That is, facts and encounters can sabotage the idea of the border.

JJS: In Bill McKibben’s review of this book (in the Los Angeles Times), he described these essays as “an attempt to nail down the sources of… power, to pin them to the page.” I wonder how you feel about that description. What’s different, or

Photo by Farol Tomson.

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View on the Río Grande.

similar, about writing about how power acts on a landscape where its not immediately visible — in the middle, say, of the Black Rock Desert, or of a Silicon Valley office park — and a landscape where power is made manifest — outside the FTAA meeting in Miami, say, or along the border in the time of “Operation Gatekeeper”?

RS: One of the strange shifts of our time is the disappearance of public space and accountability, which go together. If your locality is being ravaged by a corporation from overseas, it’s hard to find a place to confront them. Of course the corporate-globalization deals of our day are in part about making corporations even less accountable and more free to exploit with impunity. The entertaining thing about these deals is that they are often made in big, high-profile summits.

And since the WTO foundered during the extraordinary millennial insurrections in Seattle on November 30, 1999, these summits have had to happen in increasingly isolated locales, often with a mini-police state erected around them for dozens of miles: law enforcement, shut-downs, fences, helicopters and more. Which in a funny way demonstrates their true nature, which is not, to say the least, democratic.

Really there are three kinds of sites at which you can

confront power. There’s the site of the damage or issue itself — for example Ogoni women in Nigeria seizing oil-extraction sites. Then there is the confrontation with the power at its source — which has been so effective in San Francisco that Chevron moved to suburbia and Bechtel is relocating its headquarters to suburban Washington, D.C. And then there’s the Greenpeace approach, where you don’t have to go to where the whaling or rainforest destruction is or to the corporate headquarters or summit, but to hang a banner wherever the public and media are. Placelessness is problematic, but you can in essence make places to take stands. Up to a point. The placelessness of Silicon Valley, which I wrote about in one of the oldest essays in the book, makes it hard to resist what those companies are doing there.

JJS: There are a few essays here dealing with the affinity that seems occasionally to crop up between environmentalists and xenophobes. You write, for example, about the Sierra Club’s attempted takeover by anti-immigration activists a few years back. Could you talk a little about this — about how and why these two versions of preserving the “national garden,” as you call it, might overlap? >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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to win their case.

RS: A lot of old-school environmentalists come from the tradition of putting a fence around something. You save places by making them national parks or preserves or land trusts, which is a way of saying, screw up the rest of it, but leave this patch alone. It’s a very fragmentary way of dealing with the problem, though plenty meaningful at times. But extrapolating that to consider the United States some sort of national park that you put a fence around and keep people from invading is lunatic.

For one thing, it’s not the undocumented immigrants who set policy, create sprawl or consume resources at lunatic rates. For another, you have to think systemically about every place. The survival of the songbirds of the United States and Canada is dependent in part on the well-being of habitat in Mexico and Central America. NAFTA has everything to do with creating the new wave of poverty that pushes a lot of people into migrating. For yet another, the economic impact of Latino immigrants, documented and un-, is debatable, but you can see that banishing them would devastate agriculture, construction, food service and a lot of other arenas. Because environmentalism is so unmitigated a good, a lot of people and groups who are really anti-immigration for other reasons (like racism and fantasies of an ethnically pure culture) have tried to co-opt environmental arguments and organizations

JJS: You speak here of being “pro-Latinoization” of the US. What exactly does that mean to you?

RS: I am a great believer in pedestrianism and public life and space, and these are things that come to life in neighborhoods that are Latino or are becoming that way. I wonder sometimes if we will suburbanize these immigrants from the south before they truly urbanize us — and I see that urbanization, that valuation for public life and space and contact with strangers — as a good. I also admire a lot of Latin American intellectuals — Eduardo Galeano, Ariel Dorfmann, Subcomandante Marcos — and movements and hope that just as the ordinary immigrants might revitalize public space, so a Latinoization of political life might bring some of that radical but romantic idealism to a U.S. left that is too often unimaginative, adversarial, defeatist and generally gloomy (thanks in part to amnesia about the ways the world has been changed by radical movements in the past half century, naiveté about how change works — by which measure, cynicism can itself be naive — and a pervasive sense that hope is uncool).

Rebecca Solnit.

JJS: In A Book of Migrations, one of your first, you wrote about an experience traveling in Ireland, the country from which many of your own forebears came — and whose poor emigrants were of course once discriminated against in this country in much the same manner as Latinos often are today. “The longer I passed through the Ireland that both the Irish and the Irish-Americans seem to imagine as a solid foundation,” you wrote in that book, “the more it seemed instead to be made up of a continuous flow of discontinuities and accelerating movements, of colonizations and decolonizations, liberations, exiles, emigrations, invasions, economic pendulums, developments, abandonments, acculturations, simulations.” It strikes me that the same could be said of the lands on both sides of the Río Grande.

Nations, like places, are never so pure or discrete as some of us might like them to be, are they?

RS: I couldn’t agree more, and writing that helps people see that this fluidity is something to embrace, not flee from, is one of my big aspirations.

Photo by Jude Mooney Photography.

BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Essayist and cultural historian Rebecca Solnit read excerpts from her anthology, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics, at an event sponsored by CLAS on September 10, 2007.

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a graduate student in the Department of Geography and a contributing editor of the Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies. A full version of the interview is available at http://clas.berkeley.edu.

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Ms. Homeland Security.

Photo by Robin Lasser. Reprinted from Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics.

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Photo by kool_skatkat.

The lights of Iquique, Chile.

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