The Americas

Americas view

  • This week in print

    Peru's presidential election, Dilma Rousseff's cabinet, crime in Brazil, and the Honduran economy

    Jun 9th 2011, 22:59 by The Economist online

    AFTER falling short in 2006, Ollanta Humala eked out a narrow victory in Peru's presidential election on June 5th. The latest issue of The Economist examines how he beat Keiko Fujimori, and how he is likely to govern. It also looks at the resignation of a top aide to Dilma Rousseff, Brazil's president; how Honduras's economy is recovering from the country's 2009 coup; the unlikely woes of Vancouver's government; and Brazil's murder capital.

  • Peru's presidential election

    A narrow victory

    Jun 8th 2011, 14:38 by D.R.

    I'VE just interviewed The Economist's correspondent in Lima about how Ollanta Humala eked out a victory in Peru's presidential election, and what to expect from him in office. Listen to our conversation here.

  • Impunity in Guatemala

    Two steps forward, one step back

    Jun 8th 2011, 14:28 by A.S. | GUATEMALA CITY

    AFTER years of frustration, Guatemala recently seemed to have turned a corner in its long struggle to institute the rule of law. For a decade after the end of the country’s 30-year civil war in 1996, well-connected criminals had proved nearly impossible to prosecute, because gangs led by veterans of the security services had thoroughly penetrated the state. In response, in 2006 the UN established an independent investigatory agency, the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), which would attempt to root out corruption in the government and judiciary. In 2010 the commission successfully solved the country’s most notorious homicide in years, when it proved that Rodrigo Rosenberg, a lawyer who had recorded a video accusing the president, Álvaro Colom, of plotting to assassinate him just days before he was killed, had in fact arranged and paid for his own murder. CICIG’s former chief, Carlos Castresana, also forced Mr Colom to fire an attorney general suspected of corruption last year by resigning to protest the appointment.

    Last month, however, CICIG suffered a devastating setback. When Alfonso Portillo’s (pictured) presidential term ended in 2004, he lost his immunity from prosecution and immediately moved to Mexico. Two years later Mexico approved his extradition back to Guatemala on embezzlement charges, and he returned to be kept under house arrest in 2008. In January 2010 the United States indicted him for money laundering. The next day Mr Portillo tried to flee by boat to neighbouring Belize. But with CICIG’s help, Guatemalan authorities captured him just minutes before he reached the border.

    Mr Portillo’s trial represented a big opportunity to demonstrate that the powerful are no longer above the law in Guatemala. He was accused of diverting 120m quetzals ($15m) from the public treasury for “secret military spending”, most of which was later stolen. Prosecutors provided ample material proof of Mr Portillo’s involvement in the transaction, including audit documents from the state comptroller, and called numerous witnesses who participated in the transfer. The judge leading the trial, Morelia Ríos, voted to convict Mr Portillo.

    Nonetheless, on May 9th, the tribunal voted to acquit him by a vote of 2 to 1. The court dismissed the testimony of the prosecution’s two main witnesses, because one is currently awaiting trial on fraud charges and the other had been involved with drug traffickers. The judges also argued that the former president did not have direct responsibility for the management of public funds. After the verdict was announced, CICIG released a statement saying that it “reflects the true state of justice in Guatemala”. Shortly thereafter, a local television channel broadcast footage from security cameras in the attorney general’s office, which showed the husband of one of the judges meeting Mr Portillo’s attorney on several occasions.

    CICIG is putting up a fight. On May 31st, it formally appealed the verdict. And even if Mr Portillo is not convicted in Guatemala, he is likely to face justice eventually somewhere, since both France and America have also requested his extradition. But Mr Portillo’s case shows that CICIG’s work in Guatemala is far from over. Even with a recent extension of its mandate, it is only authorised to continue operating until 2013.

  • Economist Asks

    The right call

    Jun 7th 2011, 15:22 by The Economist online

    PERHAPS the most controversial provision of Colombia's new law defining the victims of the country's internal armed conflict was its inclusion of people targeted by the government's own forces. Álvaro Uribe, the former president, strongly opposed extending the category to this group, but Juan Manuel Santos, his successor, got the law approved. The Economist's readers agree with Mr Santos: 83% of them support recognising the victims of state actors.

    This week's Economist Asks poll looks at Ollanta Humala, who won Peru's presidential election on June 5th. Mr Humala ran a populist campaign supported by Venezuela's Hugo Chávez in 2006 and lost, but successfully cast himself as a moderate in this year's race. Do you think his move to the centre is genuine? Let us know.

  • Peru's presidential election

    Second time’s the charm

    Jun 6th 2011, 8:18 by L.C. | LIMA

    IN MARCH Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru’s Nobel Prize-winning novelist, compared a hypothetical presidential run-off between Ollanta Humala and Keiko Fujimori to a choice between “AIDS and terminal cancer”. Last month it was indeed Mr Humala, a populist nationalist, and Ms Fujimori, the daughter of an authoritarian former president, who advanced to the second round. A dismayed Mr Vargas Llosa reluctantly backed Mr Humala. By the narrowest of margins, his countrymen appear to have done the same in yesterday’s election. With 84% of ballots counted, Mr Humala is winning by 50.7% to 49.2%, and holds the lead in 17 of the country’s 26 regions.

    A 48-year-old retired military officer, Mr Humala swears he is not the same candidate who ran in 2006 with the support of Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s leftist president. He has distanced himself from Mr Chávez’s radicalism, and hired advisers from the party of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s moderate former president. At his closing rally on June 2nd, he pledged to keep Peru’s orthodox economic policies in place while ramping up programmes to spread growth more equally, like a free day-care scheme and a pension plan for people over 65 who lack them. If he can gain congressional approval, he also wants to raise the minimum wage and impose a windfall tax on mining companies. Félix Jiménez, his economic adviser, promised that Mr Humala would lead “a government of national reconciliation, of consensus.”

    Ms Fujimori, a congresswoman, tried to cast doubt on Mr Humala’s transformation, accusing him of retaining ties to Mr Chávez. And late in the race Roger Noriega, a conservative American former diplomat, accused Mr Humala’s campaign of taking $12m from the Venezuelan leader. However, no evidence emerged to support the allegation.

    Ms Fujimori may not have spent enough time dispelling concerns about her own candidacy, particularly those of rural voters. Two years ago she said she would pardon her father, Alberto Fujimori, who is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence for corruption and human-rights abuses. Although she later backtracked, her running mates and top advisers all served in Mr Fujimori’s government, as did many candidates from her party’s congressional slate. Tony Palomino, a community activist in Villa El Salvador, in southern Lima, said voters rejected Ms Fujimori because they sensed that she was not in charge of her own campaign. “The people around her, her spokespeople, they were all her father’s allies. This created doubts,” he said.

    Mr Humala, who will be inaugurated on July 28th, will not have long to celebrate his victory. Most investors would have preferred Ms Fujimori, and Juan Carlos Eguren, a conservative congressman, called on the president-elect to name his economic team quickly in order to avoid upsetting the markets. Mr Humala will also need to piece together an alliance in Congress, where his coalition has just 47 of 130 seats. One potential partner that would give him a majority is Perú Posible, the party of Alejandro Toledo, a former president. With such a weak mandate, Mr Humala will need the consensus-building skills he says he has learned in order to govern effectively.

  • This week in print

    Brazilian politics, Peru's presidential run-off, and Colombia's victims law

    Jun 2nd 2011, 16:19 by The Economist online

    JUST months after becoming Brazil's president, Dilma Rousseff now faces a serious test in cooling off the country's red-hot economy. The current issue of The Economist examines her options and provides some suggestions for how to proceed. It also previews the run-off of Peru's presidential election, reports on the new victims law in Colombia, and looks at the denying of American visas to Jamaican wrongdoers.

  • Ecuador's politics

    Not over yet

    Jun 1st 2011, 11:29 by S.K. | QUITO

    AFTER being trapped for hours in a hospital during a police mutiny last September, Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s president, bet much of his political capital on an attempt to shore up his power through a constitutional referendum. On May 7th, he put to voters a package of ten amendments that would allow him to increase his control over the courts and media. The early results suggested a split decision, with most of the proposals narrowly passing but two key measures falling short. However, towards the end of the drawn-out vote-counting process, the Yes camp pulled ahead on both questions. Its lead held up: the National Electoral Council (CNE) announced on May 19th that all nine amendments put to a national vote had been approved, albeit mostly by very slim margins. (The final question, on whether to ban killing animals for public entertainment, was settled at the local level).

    The opposition has cried fraud, and filed hundreds of legal appeals. Its leaders have honed in on low-income neighbourhoods in Guayaquil, the country’s biggest city, as the likely site of the government’s mischief. Many polling stations there reported more than the maximum of 400 voters. Electoral officials have argued the numbers were caused by high turnout from the police and army. But Martha Roldós, an opposition leader, notes that the rolls from those locations include high numbers of women. Even one of the CNE’s directors, Marcia Caicedo, has accused her colleagues of favouring the government and dragging its feet on the opposition’s complaints. Mr Correa’s rivals say they hope their appeals will at least delay the publication of the official results of the referendum and the implementation of its most controversial measures.

    The president, by contrast, has focused on locking in his tenuous gains, touting the outcome as a “ten to zero” landslide. The referendum’s changes to the judiciary will automatically take effect as soon as the CNE releases its final results. But legislative approval is required for its provisions on regulating the media, outlawing “unjustified” wealth, closing for-profit gambling operations and criminalising employers’ failure to register their workers with the social-security service.

    The referendum stipulates that those bills be passed “without delay.” However, it is unclear whether Mr Correa, who lacks a congressional majority, can force lawmakers to vote for them. Although he has the right to dissolve Congress, doing so would require him to stand for re-election as well—a highly unpopular move in a country that has had to vote every seven months on average since November 2006. Instead, he is threatening to try to have legislators who vote against the package dismissed for dereliction of duty—a tactic he used successfully in 2007 against lawmakers who opposed a referendum on a new constitution—and to have the Constitutional Court write the laws itself. There is little hope of legislative compromise: the president recently said he would refuse to negotiate with groups seeking the “submission” of the government, and has vetoed such deals in the past. He has enough support in congress to block any attempt to override his veto.

    No matter how many of the referendum’s measures are approved, Mr Correa’s bid to use it to strengthen his political position has come up short. Just one of the ten questions got over 50% support; given the numbers of blank or spoiled votes, the rest merely obtained a plurality. And although he remains broadly popular, his approval ratings have been in steady decline this year. If the populist president really wants to firm up his hold on power, he will need to campaign less and govern more effectively.

  • Economist Asks

    Yes she will

    May 31st 2011, 15:33 by The Economist online

    ARGENTINA'S president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has not yet announced whether she plans to run for re-election this year. But The Economist's readers aren't convinced by her waiting game: 81% of them expect she will be a candidate.

    This week's poll addresses Colombia's new victims law, which will provide compensation not only to people targeted by the country's guerrillas and paramilitary groups but also by government forces. Do you think it should have incorporated state actors? Let us know.

  • Education in Brazil's north-east

    The missing link

    May 27th 2011, 17:43 by H.J. | SALGUEIRO AND SUAPE

    AS NOTED in last week’s print edition, Brazil’s long-impoverished north-east is catching up fast to the rest of the country. Infrastructure projects like ports and railways, as well as scores of new factories, are going up across the region. Yet no matter how much physical capital the north-east can accumulate, in the end its prosperity will depend on its human capital. And when it comes to education and training, notes Alexandre Rands of Datamétrica, a consultancy, a “crystallised gap” still yawns between the north-east and the rich south. Around one-fifth of the region’s adults are illiterate, twice the proportion in Brazil at large.

    The lot of poor nordestinos (north-easterners) has certainly improved over the last two decades. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Brazil’s president from 1995 to 2002, conquered the hyperinflation that hit their income hardest. His successor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, built on Mr Cardoso’s income-transfer programmes and increased the minimum wage. Nearly six in ten of working-age nordestinos with an income earn no more than the minimum wage—more than twice the proportion in the south-east.

    At one mega-construction site in the town of Salgueiro, where two branches of a railway leading to the ports are being built, the least-qualified employees earn around 600 reais ($375) a month on top of their living costs, and sleep four to a prefabricated room. Nonetheless, the rooms are air-conditioned, neat and comfortable. Nearby are shared television rooms and games rooms with pool tables and subutteo. A film is shown every night and at weekends there are religious services.

    In education, however, the gains have been more halting. State governments are making an effort. Ceará has already opened 130 professional and technical schools, and has 100 more in the pipeline. The idea is that high-school students will attend classes in the morning as normal and then spend the afternoon learning a trade. If you travel around the interior of Ceará, says Adail Fontenele, its infrastructure secretary, in many towns the nicest building you see will be its new professional school. The state government is also building a Centre for Technical Training at Pecém that is scheduled to open in 2013, and will eventually graduate 12,000 workers a year.

    There is so much work to be done, however, that the private sector is trying to fill in the gaps itself. Vale, a big mining firm, runs one programme that takes on 1,200 high-school graduates each year and gives them a year of full-time training: three months of basics, mostly mathematics and Portuguese, and then more job-specific technical preparation. Although there were 50,000 applicants last year, many did not fulfil the basic requirements. In the end the company had to look outside the two states where these employees would be working, Pará and Maranhão, to fill the slots. Another Vale scheme sponsors 170 high-school students each year to go to private school in the morning and technical college in the afternoon. These well-trained young people will end up benefitting the company, either directly if they end up working for it or one of its partners or suppliers, or indirectly, simply by increasing the pool of well-qualified labour. Vale’s regular workers also double as instructors. Americo (nicknamed Capitão—Captain, naturally), who sat in a crane cabin 25 years ago but now operates two machines remotely from an air-conditioned room, supervises 40 trainees a year on the use of the equipment.

    The region’s younger workers are also trying to make up for the deficiencies of their schooling and move up a rung in life themselves. Over and over again during my week in the north-east I heard plans to participate in cursinhos, or “short courses”, from everyone from construction workers to drivers to hotel staff. Erica, a civil engineer in charge of quality control at Petrobras, the state-controlled oil company, has been working since age 16, but is on her first job in booming Pernambuco state. Asked about her future, she laughs and says: “I’m at the top now!”, and then tells me that there are two things she wants me to know: that she is proud to be a woman in this job, and proud to be a north-easterner.

    Nordestinos are on average poorer, blacker and less educated than natives of the south-east, and prejudice against them is commonplace. One acquaintance in São Paulo to whom I said I had heard that nordestinos were starting to return home because the economy was doing so well up there exclaimed: “Go! Go! Good riddance to them!” Well, they are going—and I feel happy for them and privileged to have witnessed it.

  • This week in print

    Crime in Mexico, Argentine and Honduran politics, and hazardous moose

    May 26th 2011, 16:44 by The Economist online

    MEXICO City and the surrounding suburbs of Mexico State are simultaneously among the country's safest states and its most corrupt. This week's issue of The Economist explores what lessons policymakers can learn from their contrasting approaches to fighting crime. It also assesses whether Argentina's president will run for re-election and when Honduras's deposed one will return from exile, and warns readers to be careful to avoid moose while driving in Newfoundland.

  • Armed conflict in Colombia

    A concession to reality

    May 26th 2011, 12:15 by S.B. | BOGOTÁ

    FOR the nearly 4m people that Colombia’s judiciary has officially recognised as victims of right-wing paramilitaries, leftist guerrillas and rogue government forces, there was never any doubt that the country has long been mired in an armed internal conflict. However, Álvaro Uribe, the president from 2002-10, staunchly refused to apply that label to the fighting in Colombia. Instead, he insisted that the country only faced a “terrorist threat”.

    His defence minister and successor, Juan Manuel Santos, is proving to be more open-minded. On May 24th the Senate passed a government-sponsored bill recognising the existence of an armed conflict in Colombia and offering compensation and reparations to those who have lost land, lives and limbs in the war since 1985. “There has been an armed conflict in this country for some time,” Mr Santos said, hailing the law as “historic”.

    The law calls for returning or granting land titles to the millions of internally displaced people who were forced off an estimated 6.6m hectares (16.3m acres) during the fighting, and offers monetary compensation for those who lost loved ones. It is carefully phrased to avoid giving any recognition or legitimacy to the FARC. But to Mr Uribe’s dismay, its classification of the victims of the conflict—distinguishing them from those of common criminals—includes those targeted by state actors. During Mr Uribe’s presidency, some army units gruesomely shot innocent civilians and dressed their corpses in guerrilla uniforms to inflate their body counts.

    But Colombians who have always known there was an armed conflict also know it is not over. Although Mr Uribe’s tough security policies crippled the FARC, the guerrillas still have about 8,000 members and retain their ability to conduct attacks. Earlier this week they opened fire on a boat in the remote department of Chocó, killing three civilians and trapping more than 200.

    Mindful of the ongoing threat, on the same day that the victims law was approved, Rodrigo Rivera, the defence minister, unveiled an ambitious new security plan to break up criminal gangs, finish off the guerrillas and reduce drug trafficking by the end of Mr Santos’ term in 2014. Just in case, however, the law will accept new victims until 2021.

  • Economist Asks

    No free lunch

    May 23rd 2011, 21:58 by The Economist online

    THE Quebec government's recently announced Plan Nord, a development strategy for the northern part of the province, promises both to safeguard the region's ecosystem and grow its economy. The Economist's readers expect it to have more success with the latter goal than with the former: 61% of them said they think the plan will hurt the environment.

    This week's Economist Asks poll turns to Argentina, where Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the president, has not yet announced whether she will run for re-election this year. Do you think she will be a candidate? Let us know.

  • The drug trade in North America

    Ecstatic traffickers

    May 23rd 2011, 21:45 by M.D. | OTTAWA

    THE ever-increasing body count in Mexico’s drug war has focused Americans’ attention on the gangs south of the border. When it comes to shipments of ecstasy, however, they are looking in the wrong direction. Because the drug is a synthetic compound that can be manufactured anywhere, Latin America’s warm climate does not provide the same advantage that it does for cocaine or opiates. Instead, it is Canada that has an edge, because its large population of Asian immigrants gives its organised-crime groups easy access to Chinese suppliers of ecstasy’s precursor chemicals. In the year to October 2010 American customs officers seized 1,460 pounds (662 kg) of ecstasy at the northern border, and just 24 pounds at the southern one.

    Stemming the flow of ecstasy—which sells for two to three times more in the United States than in Canada—along an 8,891-km (5,525-mile) border has proven to be extremely difficult. The frontier, long called the world’s longest undefended border—although it has recently been rechristened as unmilitarised—runs through vast tracks of wilderness, over mountains, through the middle of the Great Lakes, and down the main streets of some small towns. Moreover, because Canada and America are each other’s biggest trading partner, a balance must be found between securing the border and impeding the 35m vehicles that cross each year.

    The United States beefed up its border controls after the September 11th attacks. Although its measures were principally aimed at fighting terrorism, they have made life more difficult for traffickers as well. It increased the number of customs agents along the Canadian frontier from 300 to 2200 and brought in new technology, including Predator drones and surveillance balloons in the air, and thermal imaging cameras and remote video-surveillance systems on the ground. It has also sought greater cross-border cooperation: Canada recently agreed to give the United States 22 additional radar feeds to help detect smugglers crossing over on low-altitude flights. Alan Bersin, the commissioner of America’s Customs and Border Protection agency, told a Congressional committee on May 17th that information-sharing with Canada had increased significantly. It is likely to improve further under the agreement signed in February by Barack Obama and Stephen Harper, Canada’s prime minister, to explore deeper continental security ties, and as a result of a law passed in January requiring America’s government to produce a “Northern Border Counternarcotics Strategy”.

    Yet while the United States may be clamping down at the 122 land border crossings with Canada, patrolling the gaps between them remains difficult. Traffickers in Quebec ride snowmobiles in winter and all-terrain vehicles in summer, while those in British Columbia make use of helicopters and boats. Indian reservations that straddle the border, allowing residents to pass freely into either country, are particularly porous: American authorities estimate that 20% of all high-potency marijuana smuggled from Canada passes through New York’s St. Regis Mohawk Reservation, which is known as the Akwesasne Reserve on the Canadian side. The more America tries to crack down, the more ingenious the smugglers become.

  • This week in print

    Brazil's north-east, Colombian football and bribery in Mexico

    May 19th 2011, 16:12 by The Economist online

    BRAZIL'S north-east has long been its poorest region. However, the latest issue of The Economist reports that massive investments in the area are helping it to catch up to the prosperous south. It also checks in on efforts to reform Colombian football and offers a geographical guide to corruption in Mexico.

  • Bribery in Mexico

    A state-by-state guide to graft

    May 19th 2011, 16:00 by T.W. | MEXICO CITY

    “I AM confiscating your driving licence. You can collect it at the police station on Monday, but you will have to wait all day, maybe longer. Shall we settle the matter here?” Your correspondent is by no means the only person to have been approached for a bribe in Mexico (he declined). Households paid around 200m backhanders to companies and public officials last year, according to a report published on May 10th by the Mexican branch of Transparency International, an anti-corruption outfit, which we have plotted as a map (above) in this week’s print edition. At 165 pesos ($14.10) per bribe, officials are charging 20% more for their corrupt services than they did in 2007.

    The survey quizzed 15,000 homes on whether they had paid bribes in the course of completing 35 tasks, from installing a phone line (2% had) to running a street stall (23% had). Mexico is only averagely corrupt by Latin American standards. But corruption varied widely by state: if stopped by traffic police in Tamaulipas, nine times out of ten motorists were expected to cough up; in Quintana Roo, “only” a quarter of such stops result in palms being greased. Overall, the most corrupt places were Mexico City and the adjacent state of Mexico, whereas the cleanest was the peninsular state of Baja California Sur.

    Not coincidentally, they are respectively the most- and least-densely populated parts of the country. Eduardo Bohórquez, head of Transparency’s Mexico office, reasons that in over-populated places there is excess demand for public services, which allows officials to auction off the scarce resources they manage. The poor are especially likely to be targeted for demands for bribes and acquiesce to them, he says.

    It is not all bad news. Since Transparency’s first survey in 2001, it has become easier to access government aid programmes without having to pay people off, which Mr Bohórquez believes reflects a strengthening of the country’s democracy. The postal service and electricity market are cleaner, thanks to reforms in both sectors. Most federally-run programmes have been getting less corrupt. The mixed performance of the states has no obvious link to which party runs them.

    But overall, things are little better than they were a decade ago. Traffic police, the worst offenders, have got even greedier. Hospitals are more open to speeding up appointments with a little financial encouragement; more school certificates are being bought than before. Justice is still for sale: nearly a quarter of those who had dealt with state prosecutors said they had paid to influence their case. Transparency reckons that the public paid some 32 billion pesos in bribes last year. As long as policemen and judges are for sale, the cost to society will run much deeper.

  • Economist Asks

    Just say no

    May 16th 2011, 18:06 by The Economist online

    ECUADOREANS recently voted on a package of constitutional reforms that would give broad new powers over the courts and media to Rafael Correa, the president. The vote on the most controversial questions was very close, but among The Economist's readers, it was a landslide: three-quarters of them said they would have rejected the amendments if given a vote.

    This week's Economist Asks poll looks at the Quebec government's plan to promote economic development in the northern part of the province while simultaneously safeguarding the area's ecosystem. Do you think the proposal will help or hurt the environment? Let us know.

  • Haiti's new president

    Martelly takes over

    May 16th 2011, 17:23 by P.B. | PORT-AU-PRINCE

    MICHEL MARTELLY, a bawdy singer turned politician, swept to victory in Haiti’s presidential election this year as the candidate representing youth and change. “Haiti has been sleeping,” he shouted at his inauguration on May 14th, addressing a crowd of dignitaries including Bill Clinton; various Haitian leaders; and, outside the palace gates, a few thousand ordinary Haitians crammed together under a blistering sun. “Today she will wake up, stand up!” It was only the third peaceful democratic transition in the country’s history, which is replete with coups, interim governments and dictatorships. And it was the first time ever that a democratically elected Haitian president fitted the red-and-blue presidential sash on a successor from the opposition.

    Yet the day’s festive spirit—fuelled by expenditures estimated between $2m and $4.5m—was tempered with reminders of how little progress has been made since a devastating earthquake struck Haiti in January 2010. Mr Martelly’s inaugural mass was held at the National Palace, which looks much as it did the day after the quake: a jumble of collapsed roofs, deflated domes, and splayed windows revealing dusty office furniture. Some of the tent cities housing the more than 600,000 Haitians who still have not found new homes after the quake were visible from the palace lawn. And just as Mr Martelly prepared to take the presidential oath at the temporary Parliament building, the power went out. Some Haitians saw the outage as an ill omen, while others accused the opposition-dominated legislature of trickery.

    Mr Martelly addressed many of the country’s woes, including both the slow pace of rebuilding and the country’s longstanding poverty, unemployment and poor infrastructure. He said he would emphasise security, court investments, help to expand the middle class and make education free and universal—an oft-repeated campaign promise that won wild cheers. He also pledged to fight to make primary education compulsory.

    Many other leaders have made similar vows. But Mr Martelly actually has a reasonable plan to start paying for his education plans: by taxing the Haitian diaspora. He hopes to raise the cost of calls to Haiti from the United States by $0.05 per minute, and levy a $1 flat charge on remittances, which account for $1.8 billion a year—a quarter of Haiti’s GDP. Those levies would raise $86m per year, according to his aides. With taxation also comes representation: last week Parliament amended the constitution to allow the 2m-4m members of the diaspora to vote and hold lower political office. Getting the proposal through the opposition-controlled legislature will be a stiff test for the president, a political novice.

    Mr Martelly’s biggest strength is his popularity. Although turnout was low, at just 23% in the run-off, he won by an overwhelming margin. In the days preceding the inauguration, the rubble-choked streets were strung with banners and streamers, and the walls filled with murals of Mr Martelly’s smiling face and shiny pate. One was captioned “Bienvenue au Pouvoir, President Martelly!” And Godspeed, too.

  • Mexico's drug war

    Number-crunching in Jalisco

    May 15th 2011, 10:23 by T.W. | MEXICO CITY

    SINCE Mexico ramped up its fight against organised crime at the end of 2006, it has made impressive progress in arresting or killing the leaders of the country’s murderous drug-trafficking “cartels”. By the end of last year, ten of the 24 most-wanted were dead or detained. On Friday, another senior villain bit the dust. But the violence has continued to rocket. Official figures for 2011 aren’t out yet, but the news reports this year have so far seemed no less bloody than last.

    Many commentators, including this newspaper, have suggested that in some cases taking out cartel leaders has sparked even more violence, as deputies have fought over succession rights, and other cartels have moved in to hit their rivals while they are weak. An interesting article this month in Nexos magazine by two Mexican government officials argues that in at least one case, this was not the case. The story (in Spanish) is worth a read. (Google does a slightly wonky but more or less intelligible translation here.)

    The authors totted up the murders in the states of Colima, Jalisco and Nayarit throughout 2009 and 2010. Halfway through 2010 an important boss in the Sinaloa cartel, Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel, was killed by the army in Jalisco. Coronel had been in charge of the port of Manzanillo, and his death sparked a scramble among other narcos to control the area. The number of murders in the region during the second half of that year was much higher than during the first half. But the government’s researchers point out that violence in the region actually surged a good two months before Coronel’s killing. Further, they say, the rate of increase in killings before Coronel’s death was higher than it was afterwards—six extra killings every five weeks, versus one. Had he not been taken out, they speculate, the violence might have been even worse.

    The article doesn’t tackle other regions—it would be interesting to see what the authors made of the case of Morelos, for instance, which erupted after the killing of Arturo Beltrán Leyva towards the end of 2009. Maybe such an analysis is in the works. It also shows the limits of the government’s anti-kingpin strategy: Coronel’s killing didn’t lead to a fall in violence around Jalisco; nor did it even cause the high levels of violence to remain stable. Instead, the security situation continued to deteriorate—it just deteriorated at a slower rate than previously. That might be an achievement of sorts, but after four years of war against the cartels, the government must surely have hoped for more to boast about by now.

    But at the very least the research underlines the improvements that Mexico has made in analysing and keeping track of crime data, which in the past have been unreliable and hard to get hold of (and for many crimes still are). Now, you can download three years of homicide statistics, broken down by municipality, from the presidency’s website. Excel spreadsheets are pretty cold comfort to the states that remain wracked by violence. But the faster the government understands the nature of its crime problem, the faster it might start to reduce the killing.

  • This week in print

    Education in Mexico, a tight refendum count in Ecuador and Canada's boreal zone

    May 12th 2011, 16:05 by The Economist online

    MEXICO'S schools are among the best in Latin America. Sadly that is rather faint praise, as a powerful teachers' union and an inefficient bureaucracy have kept the country's education system ranked last among its OECD peers. The current issue of The Economist recounts how greater parental involvement is helping the next generation to learn. It also reports from the close count in Ecuador's constitutional referendum, looks at the tension between conservation and development in Canada's boreal forest and reviews the expansion into India of Cinépolis, a Mexican cinema company.

  • Bogotá's politics

    Take a seat

    May 10th 2011, 11:30 by S.B. | BOGOTÁ

    COLOMBIANS have long assumed that companies who win public-works contracts often pay a “commission” to the government officials signing the deals. Corruption remains widespread, but the country’s courts are beginning to crack down. Last week the mayor of Bogotá, Samuel Moreno, was suspended for three months during an investigation of his alleged negligence in overseeing the infrastructure budget.

    Bogotanos have been in a grumpy mood for months, as expansions to the bus system and road-construction projects have snarled traffic. Many locals blame the slow pace of building on a kickback scheme involving Mr Moreno’s brother Iván, who was arrested in April for allegedly charging contractors a 6% “commission” to do business with the city. “I hope they put that mayor in jail,” said Jairo Martínez, a 23-year-old taxi driver, as he maneuvered through improvised detours and bottlenecks. “This is all I’ve known, traffic jams, construction sites and potholes.”

    For now, the mayor himself has not been charged with graft. He has promised to fight his suspension in the courts and refused to resign. Alejandro Ordóñez, the inspector general, said the suspension was “preventative”, to ensure that no further wrongdoing takes place while Mr Moreno’s failure to stop the corruption is investigated. But the suspension can be extended, and Mr Moreno’s term runs out at the end of 2010. In the meantime, María Fernanda Campo, the education minister, has been named interim mayor. She will be replaced as soon as Juan Manuel Santos, the president, receives and chooses from a list of three candidates that will be sent to him by Mr Moreno’s party, the left-of-centre Democratic Pole.

    Few will miss Mr Moreno: fully 84% of the city’s residents had a negative image of him, according to a Gallup poll taken a week before his suspension. The same poll found that 72% of bogotanos feel the situation in the city—including traffic, security and quality of life—is worsening. “Anyone is better than this,” said Mr Martínez.

  • Economist Asks

    Go it alone

    May 9th 2011, 16:52 by The Economist online

    FOLLOWING the crushing defeat of Canada's Liberal Party in the country's recent federal election, many political strategists have urged the proud centrist party to merge with the leftist New Democrats, who replaced the Liberals as the official opposition. The Economist's readers, however, oppose this recommendation: 58% of them said the Liberals should remain an independent party.

    This week's question addresses Ecuador's May 7th referendum on constitutional reform, whose result will be announced on May 17th. The president, Rafael Correa, has said it is crucial for the advance of his socialist "revolution", but critics warn it will give him a dangerous amount of power. How would you have voted? Let us know.

  • Ecuador's politics

    Counting his guinea pigs

    May 9th 2011, 16:29 by S.K. | QUITO

    EVEN Rafael Correa’s fiercest critics would concede that Ecuador’s populist president is an electoral juggernaut. Between his referenda and campaigns for office, he has won six straight votes. On the evening of May 6th an exit poll predicted that he had made it seven in a row, with a controversial 4,000-word referendum on constitutional reform that critics warn could endanger freedom of speech and defendants’ right to a fair trial. Shortly after the polls closed the government’s preferred pollster, Santiago Pérez, reported that all ten questions in the package had been approved, with an average of 62% of the vote. Mr Correa jubilantly announced that he had achieved all three of his targets: passing all the proposals, having a majority of the country’s 24 provinces vote for them, and securing their approval by an ample margin.

    The president may well have triumphed yet again. However, it is now clear that he burst into a celebratory song-and-dance routine far too fast. Counting the votes has been painfully slow: by the evening of May 8th, less than 45% had been tallied. Moreover, the count in many districts has been temporarily suspended because of administrative problems like missing ballots or signatures, leading the opposition to fear fraud. (Mr Correa insists that “if there was any fraud, it was against us.”) The National Electoral Council has said it will probably resume counting as early as May 10th, but that it does not have to publish its final numbers until a week later.

    The official results released so far show a relatively close race, with the government currently leading by more than two
    percentage points on just four of the questions. The measures are losing in half of Ecuador’s provinces, mainly those in the Andes and the Amazon basin. Because Mr Correa’s 2008 constitution only requires a majority of the valid vote to pass a referendum, seven of the ten amendments do appear likely to succeed, including those making it easier for prosecutors to hold criminal suspects without trial and requiring the owners of banks and national media to divest their holdings in other industries. But the amendments reforming the top judicial oversight body and creating a regulatory council that would ensure “responsibility” from the media are in danger of rejection.

    Last year Ecuador’s police staged a mutiny that Mr Correa insisted was a coup attempt. He responded to their uprising by launching the referendum campaign, which if approved would both expand his power and demonstrate his popularity. The president invested everything he could in its passage: he raised salaries for the police, army and bureaucracy, distributed sheep to indigenous farmers and implored voters to “trust in your president” while refusing to debate his opponents. Anything less than the resounding victory he prematurely proclaimed on election night will be seen as a setback for his socialist “revolution”.

  • Corruption in Cuba

    The cleanup continues

    May 6th 2011, 21:14 by The Economist online

    CUBA’S recent crackdown on corruption has just claimed its most prominent victim. On May 5th Granma, the state newspaper, announced that a court had given a 20-year sentence in absentia to Max Marambio, a Chilean businessman and sometime close friend of Fidel Castro. Mr Marambio made a fortune through a stake in Rio Zaza, which has long held a near-monopoly selling fruit juice and long-life milk on the island. The report did not spell out the specifics of the conviction, but said said that Mr Marambio and Alejandro Roca Iglesias, the former food minister, had caused “considerable damage to the nation’s economy” and “impaired the ethical behaviour of various officials and subordinate workers”.

    Mr Marambio was once the chief bodyguard for Salvador Allende, Chile’s socialist president. He accepted Fidel Castro’s invitation to take refuge in Cuba after Allende was toppled and died in a 1973 coup. The two men got on. In the 1990s he reinvented himself as a businessman, and was one of the first individuals allowed to form a joint enterprise with the Cuban government.

    In 2006 Mr Castro fell ill and handed the country’s day-to-day leadership to his brother Raúl. Two years later Raúl formally became president, and promptly began attacking Cuba’s endemic corruption. In 2009 he started sending officials to inspect the books at the country’s state companies. Soon several executives—all of whom supposedly earn a state salary of around $20 a month—were jailed or placed under house arrest. Rogelio Acevedo, who fought alongside the Castro brothers in the 1959 revolution and was thought to be incorruptible, was sacked as head of the aviation regulator following allegations that he had leased the state airline’s planes off the books, and that millions of dollars in cash were found at his home. Pedro Álvarez, who for many years headed the government agency that buys food from the United States, fled the island before an investigation against him was completed, and is currently believed to be living in Florida. The former CEO of the national cigar producer and several of its senior executives are in prison.

    Despite Mr Marambio’s ties to the elder Mr Castro, his turn was bound to come. The government accused Rio Zaza of bribing staff and ministry officials, taking a lax attitude towards theft and overcharging the Cuban government for payments to its suppliers—some owned by Mr Marambio. He has not been seen on the island since 2009, and refused to comply with the government’s order for him to return last year, telling a Chilean radio station that “there's a new government in power made up of people with few ethics and scruples” and that he was “being persecuted by a bunch of thugs". He did not send a lawyer to represent him at the trial. The Cuban authorities instead provided him with one of their own, making the verdict a foregone conclusion.

    For the president, an even harder task than rooting out corruption may be replacing the crooked officials he ousts. So far, Mr Castro has mainly drawn on his former colleagues in the Cuban army. GAE.SA, a holding company that functions as the military’s business arm, has been a prime beneficiary, and is now thought to control around 40% of the country’s economy. Its president, Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja—who is also Raúl Castro’s son-in-law—was appointed to the Communist Party's Central Committee at the recent party congress. Whereas Fidel Castro would occasionally trust somewhat maverick businessmen, General Raúl Castro is sticking to what he knows.

  • This week in print

    Canada's election, World Cup preparation, Latin American housing prices and Mexican monopolies

    May 5th 2011, 16:13 by The Economist online

    AFTER falling short in 2006 and 2008, Stephen Harper's Conservatives have at last won a majority in Canada's Parliament. The current issue of The Economist breaks down the country's new political landscape. It also checks in on Brazil's preparation for the World Cup, housing prices in Latin America, a new competition law in Mexico, and the tasty Peruvian anchovy.

  • Truth and reconciliation in Honduras

    A road back for Zelaya?

    May 4th 2011, 18:31 by T.W. | MEXICO CITY

    HONDURAS has been struggling to end its political limbo since its president, Manuel Zelaya, was ousted in a coup backed by the courts and legislature in 2009. Despite holding reasonably free and fair elections later that year, the country remains barred from the Organisation of American States (OAS), an important regional talking shop. Porfirio Lobo, the new president, has decent approval ratings at home but cannot settle into the job while his government is unrecognised by many Latin American countries. Mr Zelaya remains in exile in the Dominican Republic.

    On May 2nd Honduras took what may be an important step in the road to rehabilitation. A court decided to drop the last of the charges that were levelled against Mr Zelaya following his removal. Some, relating to his alleged attempt to prolong his time in office, had already been ditched; the latest and final ones to be dropped concerned straightforward corruption. Prosecutors will appeal the decision, but if the court’s ruling stands, a major obstacle has been overcome. The head of the OAS, José Miguel Insulza, said in a statement that “the main condition for readmitting Honduras has therefore been fulfilled.”

    Later this month another landmark will be reached, when a truth commission publishes its delayed report into what happened on the morning in 2009 when the president was bundled out of his home in his pyjamas. Though Mr Zelaya has refused to co-operate with the commission, labelling it a stitch-up, I’m reliably told that its report will find that the events of June 28th did indeed constitute an illegal coup d’etat. Free of charges and partially vindicated by the truth commission, would Mr Zelaya make his return?

    Not necessarily. For a long time, Mr Zelaya’s position was that he would not re-enter Honduras as long as he risked arrest for the various charges against him (now lifted), which he has always claimed were politically motivated. But as it became more likely that those charges would be dropped, Mr Zelaya changed his position slightly: in an interview in March, he seemed to imply that he would not return under any circumstances, claiming that “there are people who want to liquidate me and are still alive, and they have great power.” He has yet to respond to the court’s decision to drop the remaining charges against him.

    Were Mr Zelaya to return to Honduras, it might unite the opposition movement, which has so far been badly split. But coming back down to earth in Tegucigalpa, the capital, would also force Mr Zelaya to engage with the day-to-day politics of the country, which is grappling with a weak economy and an appalling crime wave, among other problems. While in office, he did not always show much aptitude, or even interest, in tackling such issues. A withering, leaked assessment by the United States ambassador—who opposed the coup—stated that Mr Zelaya’s aim was “to enrich himself and his family while leaving a public legacy as a martyr who tried to do good but was thwarted at every turn by powerful, unnamed interests.” If a comfortable life as a martyr really is all that Mr Zelaya seeks, it may be some time yet before he stirs from his Dominican beach.

About Americas view

In this blog, our correspondents provide reporting, analysis and opinion on politics, economics, society and culture in Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada.

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