Archive for the 'Latin America and Caribbean' Category

Cristina Kirchner

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on April 3, 2008
in Inside the magazine and Latin America and Caribbean
. 4 Comments

On Sunday, idly flicking through a copy of the Economist on a long train journey, I was mildly amused to find that the magazine had devoted one of its five leaders to Argentina’s food taxes—hardly the most pressing of topics, I thought.

Yet it’s been pressing enough to force Argentina’s newish president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, to cancel a scheduled visit to London for the snappily titled Progressive Governance conference, taking place tomorrow. (She was also due to speak at the LSE this evening.) A rise in tax on soya has led to a national farmers’ strike, involving mass demonstrations and road blockades—and to Kirchner’s biggest crisis since taking office late last year.

Cristina Kirchner has blazed a trail Hillary Clinton hopes to follow—succeeding her husband as national president. Yet, says William Gill in a web exclusive for Prospect, there is little sign so far that Cristina aimed for office for any reason other than to satisfy her extraordinary ambition. Do let us know what you think below.

Closed chapters of Cuban history

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on February 19, 2008
in Foreign affairs, History, In the news and Latin America and Caribbean
. 0 Comments

With Castro officially yesterday’s man, it’s time to talk of new eras in Cuba—of capitalism and all the joys it could bring. While everyone else is doing that, however, it’s also interesting to look at the longer scale, and to consider just how Castro’s 49 years slot into the 516 that have elapsed since recorded history began for the island (not to mention the 3,500-odd years of habitation that preceded this).

Carbon dating suggests that Cuba has been inhabited since at least 2000BC, and was being visited by South America tribes hundreds of years before that. Once settled, it provided a stable home for branches of the Siboney and Guanahatabey peoples for over 3,000 years; they lived by hunting and gathering until the rather more technologically savvy Taino—who understood such technological marvels as pottery—turned up in 1150AD, pushing the existing inhabitants westwards.

The Taino, then, dominated Cuba until 1492—at which point recorded history commenced, along with its traditional accompaniments of disease, massacre, exploitation and incremental genocide. Cuba got off relatively lightly at first (lacking the gold Columbus was so keen to get his hands on) but by 1514 had been settled in seven locations by the Spanish under Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar. By 1550, only around 5,000 survivors of the native population remained; along the way, the Taino chief, Hatuey, mounted a doomed rebellion against the incomers. His reward was to be burned alive and, some half-millennium later, to have a local beer named after him.

Continue reading ‘Closed chapters of Cuban history’

Football, Kosovo and Castro

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on February 19, 2008
in Europe, Inside the magazine, Latin America and Caribbean and Sport
. 0 Comments

While the FA’s attempt to, er, internationalise English football may not have gone down well in every corner, the Champions League, whose knockout stage starts tonight, shows that football can help create a “public space” across national borders. So argues Uefa’s Jonathan Hill in a web exclusive for Prospect.

Also new on the site today is international law and Yugoslavia expert Ana Stanic’s take on the Kosovan declaration of independence. There was no other realistic option than independence, says Stanic, and while Russia and Serbia have no choice but to deal with the new dispensation, there’s certainly a lot they can do to make life difficult both for Kosovo and the EU and Nato missions.

Finally, Cuba-watchers following today’s surprise announcement by Fidel Castro may like to revisit this piece from our June 2007 issue, in which Bella Thomas returns to Cuba after several years to find that despite Fidel apparently on the verge of death, very little seems to have changed on the island.

“Queen Cristina” trumps “La Gorda”

Published
by
Caroline
on October 29, 2007
in Foreign affairs and Latin America and Caribbean
. 0 Comments

News that Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has become the first woman to be elected president in Argentina’s elections may come as little surprise to those who have been following the campaign closely over the last few months.

The sassily dressed Kirchner, whose glamourous appearance earned her the nickname ‘Queen Cristina’ and parallels with Eva Peron, stormed ahead in the polls with 45% of the vote. Fashioning her election in something of “a Hillary” - although not, fashionistas would stress, in a couture sense - Kirchner campaigned alongside her husband, Nestor, the outgoing president and the man credited for seeing Argentina out of its worst economic crisis in 2001, when it defaulted on $80 billion in loans. Indeed, Señora Kirchner is one part of the all-too familiar phenomenon on the international political stage; the powerhouse couple.

Nestor stood firmly by his wife’s side as she celebrated her success, however amidst the celebrations Cristina defiantly asserted that she saw her victory as an “immense responsibility for my gender.” Yet unlike her Chilean counterpart, Michelle Bachelet, the single-mother who was sworn in as Chile’s president last year, Cristina’s inauguration doesn’t mark the rise of a female power surge across South America (a continent known for its machismo).

Kirchner’s principal rival, the left-centrist Elisa Carrió - a chain-smoking, mother of four, ‘fondly’ known as ‘La Gorda’ - had fallen behind the first-lady in the polls in recent months. Carrió’s election platform rested on an anti-corruption campaign, and accusations of “systemic theft” of ballots that have emerged in the hours since Kirchner’s victory, will do little to quell the notions that the incoming president is more about style than substance. Whilst the Argentine election has been fought mainly between the two women, Kirchner’s victory is more of a spousal gift than a feminist triumph. The Clinton’s, doubtless, know all about this type of ‘Giving.’

Welcome to post-panamax

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on September 3, 2007
in Economics, Energy, Environment and Latin America and Caribbean
. 0 Comments

Logically enough, the maximum possible size of ship it is possible to fit through the Panama canal is called a “panamax”—which happens to be 294.1 metres in length, 32.3 metres in width, 12.0 metres in draft and 57.91 metres in height, or around 65,000 tonnes displacement (if you’re planning on taking cargo through the canal any time soon, you can read about the exact vessel requirements here).

Today, however, the buzzword for shipping is “post-panamax” (PPMX), which describes ships larger than at least one of these dimensions. And there are more and more of these around. Oil supertankers have existed since the Suez canal was closed between 1967 and 1975, a result of the Six Days War, but it wasn’t until 1988 that container ships of PPMX dimensions first appeared, when five were built by American President Lines (APL). Now there are around 200 PPMX container ships in the world, and the number continues to grow. It was to the great relief of the shipping industry, then, that work finally began today on a long-awaited $5bn project to widen the Panama canal.

Shipping is big business—but you may be surprised at just how big it is, and how fast it’s growing. As John Vidal recently noted in The Guardian, it is now responsible for transporting 90% of world trade; while carbon dioxide emissions from ships, which do not come under the Kyoto agreement or any proposed European legislation, could rise by as much as 75% in the next 15 to 20 years if current trends continue.

And it’s very much “our” problem. According to the 2006 figures, European countries account for over 20% of world shipping tonnage, compared to a measly 1.4% by the United States. Tonne-for-tonne, shipping compares favourably to air and road transport; but the real debate centres on just how sustainable the transportation of such huge volumes of product across the world is in the long term. With almost every shipyard in the world currently working at maximum capacity, the move towards larger and larger vessels has something of a double edge.

And don’t forget the Northwest passage, a potentially major linking route for shipping that’s widening all by itself …

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