Tag Archives: fernandez de kirchner

Argentina

Kirchner 2019 comeback could complicate Scioli presidential bid

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CFK
There’s no constitutional impediment to stop Cristina Fernández de Kirchner from waging a 2019 presidential bid. (Facebook)

Despite Daniel Scioli’s seemingly easy rise over the course of 2015 to become the frontrunner for the Argentine presidency after the October 25 general election, the most persistent criticism he faces is that he will not be his own man in office, but instead a puppet — or even a placeholder — of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.argentina

Term limits are forcing Kirchner to step down, after eight years in office that followed four previous years when her late husband, Néstor Kirchner occupied the Casa Rosada. This year’s election will be the first since 1999 when a Kirchner hasn’t been on the ballot, and there’s already plenty of speculation that Scioli is just a transitional figure designed to bridge two eras of kirchnerismo.

There’s probably something to those rumors. Kirchner herself succeeded her own husband, in what was widely discussed as a plan to pass the presidency between the two (a plan that went sideways when Néstor died in 2010). If her party had won a two-thirds majority in the 2013 midterm elections, it was entirely plausible that they might have amended Argentina’s constitution to provide her a path to a third consecutive term.

There’s nothing necessarily nefarious about Kirchner’s plans, if true, to return to the presidency in 2019. In Latin America, where executive-strong governments are often checked by strict term limits (in many cases, presidents are limited to a single consecutive term), it’s not unusual for popular former presidents to return to office. That’s currently true for two of Argentina’s neighbors — Uruguay reelected left-wing Tabaré Vázquez to the presidency last December after a four-year stint out of office; Chile did the same, where the center-left Michelle Bachelet returned to office, after an equal four-year break, in December 2013.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the sinking popularity of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, a widespread corruption scandal and a tough economy, the widely-loved Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is openly considering a run in the 2018 election after eight years out of office.

Even in the United States, it’s still a good bet to assume that the wife of a former president will face off for the presidency in 2016 against the son and brother of two other former presidents.

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RELATED: Scioli leads in Argentine presidential race after primaries

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But for Scioli, the Kirchner legacy is much more complicated, and the specter of a Kirchner restoration could drain much of his credibility as an Argentine president — especially among a business class that hopes he will (however gently) reverse course on nationalization, capital controls and Argentina’s freeze in global debt markets, pushing Argentina to a more orthodox economy.  Continue reading Kirchner 2019 comeback could complicate Scioli presidential bid →

Argentina

Scioli leads in Argentine presidential race after primaries

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sciolileads

There’s some bit of good news for each of the three contenders battling to win the Argentine presidency on October 25 after Sunday’s primary contest.argentina

Since 2011, Argentine elections have features an all-in primary contest in which every candidate competes both in absolute terms against all the other candidates and both for his or her party (or coalition) nomination. No one doubted that each of the three major contenders would win his inter-coalition primary:

  • Daniel Scioli, the governor of Buenos Aires province, ran unchallenged for the nomination of the governing ‘Justicialist’ Frente para la Victoria (FpV, the Front for Victory) of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, and the bloc won nearly 38.5% of the vote.
  • Mauricio Macri, the more center-right chief of government of the city of Buenos Aires, easily won the nomination of the three-party Cambiemos coalition, with over 24% of the vote nationally.
  • Sergio Massa, the one-time frontrunner, former Kirchner cabinet chief, Tigre mayor and leader of the peronista, if not kirchnerista, Frente Renovador (FR, Renewal Front), easily won the nomination of his own coalition, with over 14% of the vote.

Argentina primary

Those results, though, overstate Scioli’s strength. While the Kirchner-backed candidate has plenty of reason to be thrilled with the primary vote, Macri was facing two opponents for the Cambiemos nomination and Massa faced an own opponent for his own coalition, ‘United for a New Alternative.’

When you add together the votes for the coalitions, Macri can expect to enter the final campaign sprint with something more like 30% to Scioli’s 38% — with Massa’s coalition winning around 20.5%.

argentina primary bloc

There’s no doubt that Scioli’s success demonstrates a perhaps surprisingly united Argentine left, with reform-minded voters pulling away from Massa and towards Scioli (pictured above). Despite a scandal-plagued year, Fernández de Kirchner’s approval ratings are on the rise and, although inflation and other economic woes still plague Argentina, the economy is generally doing much better than neighboring Brazil or Chile and, in any case, better than in 2013 and 2014. Unlike his opponents, Scioli benefits from a truly national political network, which was clear on Sunday — the FpV won more votes in all but three provinces. As the governor of the country’s most populous province, he currently serves 16.3 million of Argentina’s 41.5 million-strong population. Moreover, Fernández de Kirchner and the current government will be doing everything in its power to bolster Scioli’s chances in the next two months.

Though she cannot herself run for reelection, Fernández de Kirchner’s close ally Aníbal Fernández (currently chief of cabinet) narrowly defeated Julián Domínguez in the hard-fought primary to win the FpV gubernatorial nomination for Buenos Aires province (and to success Scioli). Furthermore, Fernández de Kirchner is believed to have influenced Scioli to appoint as his running mate Carlos Zannini, a Kirchner loyalist and the presidential legal secretary since 2003. The fortunes of Zannini and Fernández mean that Fernández de Kirchner will wield strong influence in any Scioli administration.

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RELATED: What to expect from
Sunday’s Argentine presidential primaries

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Nevertheless, Scioli’s allies worry that he will be forced into a November 22 runoff against Macri. Scioli’s 38.41% support is a bit short of the 45% he will need on October 25 to win the presidency outright (alternatively, he could win with 40% of the vote so long as he defeats his opponent by at least a 10% margin). The primary results suggest that, barring a massive turn among Massa’s supporters to the ruling party, Macri will get a chance to take on Scioli directly.

Since 1983, the end of a brutal seven-year military junta, no presidential election has advanced to a runoff.

Continue reading Scioli leads in Argentine presidential race after primaries →

Argentina, Buenos Aires

Tight Buenos Aires victory slightly complicates Macri’s presidential hopes

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macri

In one of the most important tests before Argentina’s general election, the hand-picked successor of outgoing Buenos Aires mayor Mauricio Macri, the chief center-right presidential candidate, only narrowly won a July 19 mayoral runoff.buenosairesargentina

Just three weeks out from Argentina’s crucial national presidential primary, the Buenos Aires mayoral results are being reported as a drag on Macri’s presidential campaign, and that’s true — to a degree. Macri’s long-serving chief of cabinet, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta (pictured above, left, with Macri, right), garnered just 51.6% of the vote in a two-way race he was once expected to win easily by a double-digit margin. So while Rodríguez Larreta’s victory extends a three-term governing streak for Macri’s conservative Propuesta Republicana (PRO, Republican Proposal), it fell too far short of expectations. After all, Buenos Aires is the PRO’s heartland — Macri’s reach barely extends beyond the city to the larger Buenos Aires province, let alone the rest of the country.

With an open presidential primary taking place on August 9, however, and the October 25 presidential and parliamentary elections following shortly thereafter, the city’s mayoral election was a key test for Macri, who is trying to succeed Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, herself term-limited from seeking reelection.

Macri essentially occupies the conservative side of the presidential campaign — he hopes to win by picking up support from Argentine moderates and disenchanted kirchneristas without seeming too neoliberal. The winner of the 2015 election will be the first president in 12 years not to be a member of the Kirchner family, and Argentine voters may be ready for a modest change after the 21st century version of peronismo, as personified by the late Néstor Kirchner and his wife, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who hopes to guide the ruling Frente para la Victoria (FpV, the Front for Victory) to yet another term.

Macri, for his part, wants to contrast the strength of his eight-year stewardship of the relatively wealthier city against the record of the FpV’s 2015 presidential candidate, Daniel Scioli, since 2007 the governor of the surrounding (and more impoverished) Buenos Aires province, and of Tigre mayor Sergio Massa, another center-left peronista who broke in 2013 with kirchnerismo to form the Frente Renovador (FR, Renewal Front).

It’s no surprise, by the way, that three politicians from the Buenos Aires region are vying for the presidency — the city, an autonomous federal district, together with the Buenos Aires province, is home to nearly 50% of Argentina’s 41.5 million citizens.

Argentina’s Goldilocks election

All three candidates — Scioli, Massa and Macri — have indicated they would pursue a more investment-friendly administration, and Macri, in particular, benefits from heading the most business-friendly government during the Kirchner era.

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RELATED: Everything you need to know about
Argentina’s impending default

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Macri nevertheless emphasizes that he’ll introduce only gradual shifts in policy, lest voters worry he’ll return to the economic policies of the disastrous 1990s.

Presumably to win Fernández de Kirchner’s support, Scioli last month named as his running mate Carlos Zannini, a fierce Kirchner loyalist who has served as the president’s legal secretary since 2003. But Scioli has emphasized that he wants to remove, however slowly, the capital controls of the Kirchner era, and to govern in a less interventionist and inflammatory manner.

Massa has positioned himself in between Scioli and Macri and, though his poll numbers seem to have dipped, seemed like the wide frontrunner following his breakout performance throughout Buenos Aires province in the October 2013 midterm elections.

Why the Buenos Aires mayoral race probably
won’t be important to the October election

While there are a lot of reasons why Macri could still lose the presidential race, it’s not particularly clear that either Scioli and the governing FpV or the upstart Massa should take too much comfort from the Buenos Aires mayoral election.

Continue reading Tight Buenos Aires victory slightly complicates Macri’s presidential hopes →

Argentina

Everything you need to know about Argentina’s impending default

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CFK

It ultimately took an American hedge fund to unite the Argentine people behind the increasingly unpopular presidency of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.argentina

Now, after a prolonged fight that has its roots in Argentina’s last debt default over a decade ago, a fight that has weaved its way through the corridors of power in Buenos Aires, via the banks of New York and London, into the highest court of the United States, and with consequences that will reverberate from Brasília to Caracas, Argentina is now defaulting, once again, on its debt obligations.

How did Argentina end up in this situation? And what will happen if Argentina, which technically entered default at midnight earlier today, doesn’t arrive at a deal with its creditors?

Here’s a primer on everything you need to know about the Argentine default — and why it’s such an odd, twisting and ultimately fascinating story about Latin American politics, global finance, US constitutional law and the ‘north-south’ dynamic of international relations. Continue reading Everything you need to know about Argentina’s impending default →

Argentina, Venezuela

Will Venezuela or Argentina be the first to crumble into economic crisis?

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kirchnermaduro

I write tomorrow for The National Interest about the dual economic crises in Venezuela and Argentina.argentinaVenezuela Flag Icon

The similarities between the two economic crises are uncanny — inflation, capital controls, dollar shortages, overvalued currencies, shortages, etc.

But the similarities don’t stop there.  Both countries currently fee political limitations to force policy changes to avert crisis — and that limit the political capital of the leaders of both countries, Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, to enact reforms:

Accordingly, normal political channels seem blocked through at least the end of 2015, despite the fact that both countries should be considering massive economic policy u-turns that will require significant amounts of political goodwill neither Maduro nor Fernández de Kirchner possess. But there’s an even greater inertia lurking beyond even the routine political impasse—a kind of political dead-hand control in both countries, on both a short-term and long-term basis.

First, both Venezuela and Argentina remain tethered to the political ideologies of chavismoand kirchnerismo, even though their proponents, Chávez and Néstor Kirchner, are now dead. Those policies may have worked over the last decade to achieve certain goals, including greater social welfare and poverty reduction in Venezuela and a rapid return to economic growth and competitive exports for Argentina. But it should be clear by now that chavismoand kirchnerismo are unable to provide answers to their respective countries’ economic woes today.

Even more broadly, I argue that beyond the shortcomings of chavismo and kirchnerismo, Venezuela faces a long-term resources curse and Argentina faces the long-term legacy of protectionism and statism of peronismo, which in each case underlie the current economic crises.  What’s more, the IMF-sponsored reforms in 1989 that led to the massive Caracazo riots in Venezuela and the IMF-approved lending tied to Argentina’s 1990s ‘convertibility’ crisis that led to the 1999-2001 peso crisis have undermined orthodox economic policymaking:

What’s more, ill-conceived attempts to rupture those dominant paradigms through orthodox ‘Washington consensus’ reform processes led to economic and political disaster. In both countries, leaders experimented with neoliberalism, facilitated by the misguided zeal of the International Monetary Fund, without enacting any corresponding safety nets or shock absorbers. The resulting crises led both countries to double down on their prevailing ideologies, thereby, ironically, making economic reform today even more difficult.

In both cases, the political, historical and economic legacies have prevented the broadly moderate, business-friendly, social democratic middle courses that much of the rest of South America has embraced to wide success, including Colombia, Peru, Chile, Brazil.

Argentina

Despite lame-duck challenges, CPK and kirchneristas win Argentine midterms

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(163) Plaza del Congreso

The big story from the Argentine midterm elections is the rise of Sergio Massa as the frontrunner for the 2015 presidential election and the likelihood that the era of kirchnerismo is coming to an end.  The fact that Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has been absent from the campaign trail following emergency brain surgery earlier this month, which followed her party’s weak showing in August’s open primaries, only seemed to amplify the narrative that her presidency is entering its lame-duck phase.argentina

But amid the hype over Massa’s rise and the curtail calls for kirchnerismo, it may have escaped attention that Fernández de Kirchner’s ruling Frente para la Victoria (FpV, the Front for Victory) actually won Sunday’s midterm congressional elections.

Voters elected one-half of the 257-member Cámara de Diputados (Chamber of Deputies), the lower house of the Argentine National Congress.  Before the elections, Fernández de Kirchner and her allies control 132 seats — and that’s exactly the number they will control after the elections:

chamber2013

It helped that the Front for Victory was defending just 38 seats in the midterms, which certainly limited exposure and potentially greater losses for the kirchneristas.  But make no mistake — Fernández de Kirchner and her allies will continue to control Argentina’s legislative branch for the final two years of her presidency, even if it will become trickier to pass bills into law.

In absolute votes, the Front for Victory and its kirchnerista allies far outpaced any other broad coalition of parties at the national level, winning 11 of the country’s 23 provinces:

argentina2013

Two other blocs each won about a quarter of the vote. Continue reading Despite lame-duck challenges, CPK and kirchneristas win Argentine midterms →

Argentina

Kirchner health problems complicate midterm elections campaign

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cristina

Even before her latest health scare, Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was appearing increasingly like a lame-duck president.argentina

Prevented from running for reelection under the two-term limit in the Argentine constitution, Kirchner’s ruling Frente para la Victoria (FpV, the Front for Victory) was already struggling in midterm elections that will determine nearly half of the Argentine legislature.

But Fernández de Kirchner was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery to remove blood from the surface of her brain, which followed a previously undisclosed subdural hematoma suffered after the president fell in August.  She was instructed by doctors to rest for 30 days, all but guaranteeing that the leading figure in Argentine politics would be on the sidelines as the country votes.

That might actually be good for the FpV’s chances, given the unpopularity of kirchnerismo these days — a decade after her husband Néstor Kirchner first won election, Fernández de Kirchner leads a government that’s struggling to stop inflation, slow rising crime and turn around a weakening economy.  The Argentine government’s dysfunctional exchange rate policy has led to the emergence of a black market for US currency.  Moreover, Fernández de Kirchner is still battling some of the holdout creditors from Argentina’s 1999-2001 debt crisis even as Argentina remains shut out from capital global markets, which has left the Argentine treasury sometimes grasping for liquidity.

Meanwhile, her former ally Sergio Massa is leading the charge against her in the province of Buenos Aires, by far the largest province in Argentina (it’s home to 15.5 million of Argentina’s 41 million residents). Massa, also a center-left peronista, served as the chief of the cabinet of ministers from 2008 to 2009 before winning election as the mayor of Tigre.  But he’s broken with Fernández de Kirchner in the midterm elections, and he’s founded a rival entity, Frente Renovador (Renewal Front).  As Tigre mayor, he’s focused on crime prevention, and as he looks to the national stage, he’s also emphasized reducing crime and corruption.  As a peronista alternative to kirchnerismo, Massa has defined himself as a business-friendly, center-left candidate, who’s embraced the push for greater social and economic justice over the past decade, but who prefers a less unorthodox approach to economic policy.

Massa’s Renewal Front defeated the Front for Victory in August’s open primaries — a sort of dress rehearsal for the actual midterm elections — by a margin of 35.1% to 29.7%, a gap that could grow on Sunday as Massa’s popularity has grown.

Argentines will choose determine one-half of the composition of the 257-member Cámara de Diputados (Chamber of Deputies) of the lower house of the Argentine National Congress and one-third of the composition of the 72-member Senado (Senate), the upper house.  Due to the staggered nature of elections, and the fact that the Argentine opposition did much better in the 2009 midterm elections than in the 2011 general election (when Fernández de Kirchner easily won reelection), the FpV will only be defending 38 of its 116 seats in the Chamber of Deputies.  So there’s still a wide chance that the kirchneristas will still control the legislative branch of government — in any event, the FpV will almost certainly remain the largest party in the Congress, and because of the regional nature of Argentina’s many opposition parties, the FpV will still probably win the largest number of votes in the October 27 midterms, notwithstanding its unpopularity.

But the once-high hopes that the FpV would consolidate its 2011 gains and win a two-thirds majority — enough to amend the Argentine constitution to allow Fernández de Kirchner to run for a third consecutive term — were long ago shattered. Continue reading Kirchner health problems complicate midterm elections campaign →

Argentina, Buenos Aires

Peronist party, Fernández de Kirchner face insurrection even as opposition remains divided

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cristina

After primary elections earlier this week, Argentina’s president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is in even more trouble than you might have thought, even though her peronista ruling party seems likely to win elections later this year.bsasargentina

That Argentina’s political opposition has been divided for over a decade is clear, but at a time when kirchnerismo is as unpopular as ever, there are no signs that the disparate forces opposed to the increasingly isolated Fernández de Kirchner administration are in a position to capitalize on the government’s unpopularity.  So while Tigre mayor Sergio Massa, a former Kirchner ally turned opposition peronista, made the largest headlines by defeating Kirchner’s candidate in Sunday’s high-profile primary in the province of Buenos Aires, home to 40% of Argentina’s population, there’s really no movement to unite his opposition movement with the more traditional center-right and other regional opposition fronts in advance of the October 27 midterms.  That’s still probably good news for Massa, though, who will have managed to distance himself from the Kirchners without abandoning the resilient peronista label, and winning a test run for the 2015 presidential race in the country’s dominant province.

The country will go to the polls on October 27 to determine one-half of the composition of the 257-member Cámara de Diputados (Chamber of Deputies) of the lower house of the Argentine National Congress and one-third of the composition of the 72-member Senado (Senate), the upper house.  The open primaries earlier this week, in essence, functioned as a massive poll indicating where the country might head in those elections — they are not primaries in the traditional U.S. sense whereby candidates from the same political party duel for their party’s nomination, but a gating mechanism to weed out smaller parties from the October midterms.

The good news for Fernández de Kirchner is that her base of support of around 30% of the vote nationwide should be enough to win those elections, especially considering that her party, the ruling Frente para la Victoria (FpV, the Front for Victory), is the only truly national political party in that it is fielding competitive candidates nationwide.  Ironically, the Front for Victory did better in the 2011 elections (when it won 78 seats), largely on the strength of Fernández de Kirchner’s reelection, than in the previous October 2009 midterm elections (when it won 38 seats), when the opposition actually outpolled the kirchneristas.  That means that, despite the party’s current unpopularity, the opposition will be defending nearly twice as many seats as the Front for Victory due to the staggered nature of Argentine congressional elections — remember that only one-half of the Chamber of Deputies are up for reelection in a given election cycle.

The bad news for Fernández de Kirchner is that former allies are now peeling away from the Front for Victory to run through separate peronista movements as a result of Argentina’s increasingly bizarre economic management and in anticipation of the October 2015 presidential election.  If the primary result is an indication of what will happen in 10 weeks’ time, Fernández de Kirchner will not win the two-thirds congressional majority that she would need to change the country’s constitution and allow her to run for a third consecutive term in 2015.  Kirchner’s party would have to hold onto every seat they currently have and pick up 55 more seats to command that kind of majority, a feat that would outperform the Front for Victory’s 2011 congressional performance.  The bottom line is that the 2013 midterms are an opportunity for potential candidates to break through in what could be the first opportunity in over a decade for an Argentine president not named Kirchner, despite a fiery speech Wednesday to relaunch her party’s campaign for October.

The really bad news is that the Front for Victory placed either second (or worse) not only in Buenos Aires province, but the next three-most populous provinces in Argentina, the federal district and 11 more provinces (in total, 14 out of 23 provinces), including the southern Santa Cruz province that had been her late husband Néstor Kirchner’s base.  See below an electoral map from Clarín: blue indicates victory for the Front for Victory; purple for opposition peronista fronts; and red for coalitions dominated by the Unión Cívica Radical (UCR, Radical Civil Union).

Screen Shot 2013-08-15 at 9.15.55 PM

That leaves Fernández de Kirchner as a lame-duck president who will preside over an economy that’s now stalled after years of growth — she risks  leaving office with few allies on the traditional left or the traditional right and the steward of a new potential Argentine economic crisis.  After her husband’s administration defaulted on Argentine debt from the previous decade’s peso crisis, thereby benefitting from nearly immediate economic growth, Fernández de Kirchner has struggled at times to find enough foreign exchange reserves with the country shut out of financial markets, and Argentina, according to at least financial adviser, has an 84.5% likelihood of defaulting in the next five years, and that doesn’t even count the legal embroligio between Argentina and U.S. hedge fund Elliott Associates, a holdout from the prior Argentine debt haircut, that may well go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court (Felix Salmon at Reuters has made a hilarious video explaining this case here).

That has forced her government to seek out cash in creative ways.  Although Fernández de Kirchner backed down from a plan to raise taxes on agricultural products in summer 2008 after massive farmer protests, she instead nationalized around $30 billion worth of Argentina’s private pensions later that year.  More recently, she nationalized Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF), Argentina’s largest energy company previously owned by a Spanish firm, in May 2012.  GDP growth slumped to just 2.6% in 2012 and Argentine economists still forecast 4% growth this year, but the country has long struggled with double-digit inflation that many argue is even higher than the government reports.  Continue reading Peronist party, Fernández de Kirchner face insurrection even as opposition remains divided →

Argentina, Falkland Islands, United Kingdom

Does Argentina have a case in its fight for the Falklands/Malvinas?

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(18) 'Malvinas Argentinas' -- Torres de los Ingleses

On Sunday and Monday, 1,517 eligible voters in the Falkland Islands (or, if you like, las Islas Malvinas) turned out to vote in the referendum on its status as an overseas territory of the United Kingdom.falklands flagUnited Kingdom Flag Iconargentina

Fully 1,513 voters supported the current status, and three voters disagreed.

That should be an open-and-shut-case, right?  Certainly under any principles of self-determination, a 99.74% victory for remaining under the aegis of the United Kingdom should be respected — the residents of the small islands that the United Kingdom (and the residents themselves) call the Falklands Islands and that Argentina call the Islas Malvinas, which lie just 310 miles off the coat of Argentine Patagonia (and over 8,000 miles from London).

Not so fast.

The dispute goes back to 1833 — and really, even further:

  • To the 1520s, when Argentines claims that Ferdinand Magellan discovered them on behalf of Spain.
  • To 1690, when the British say that captain John Strong first landed on the islands, naming them for Viscount Falkand.
  • To 1764, when both sides agree that France settled Port Louis, though the Argentine and British stories vary as to what happened next — a British expedition certainly arrived in 1765 but had left, however, by 1774.

By 1833, the British were back — it’s essentially pretty clear that UK settlers took control of the islands in that year, and that those settlers and their descendants have remained there continuously ever since.  But Argentina argues that it inherited the Spanish claim to the islands when it won independence.  It’s unclear whether Argentina’s then-ruler, Juan Manuel de Rosas, in 1850, as part of the negotiations for the Arana-Southern Treaty between the United Kingdom and Argentina, conceded the claim to the British. Maybe he did. Maybe not. It’s not formally a part of the treaty.

Of course, settlers in North America rebelled against UK colonial rule to great effect — and independence — in 1776.  But the claim here is different — and messier.

The UK-Argentine tussle only became more of an international tussle on Wednesday with the election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires as the new Catholic pope, Francis, who has asserted the Argentine claim to the islands. (For his part, monsignor Michael McMarcam the head of the Catholic Church on the islands, says the new pontiff is welcome in the Falklands/Malvinas).

Think of it this way: in a parallel world, imagine that the indigenous and Spanish settlers of Florida managed to withstand American invasion in the 1820s and form their own country.  Within a decade, the United States (or, if you’d like, the United Kingdom) took control of the Florida Keys and, despite their proximity to Florida (remember, it’s not a U.S. state but rather a sovereign nation in our parallel universe), formed settlements.  For generations, the US/UK and their Keys settlers and descendants held sufficient power to develop and deepen those settlements.  Is it necessarily an easy case, even 180 years later?  (Would your opinion change if you were Indian? Irish? Residents of Diego Garcia, the emptied British naval base in the Indian Ocean?)

The Argentine government argues that principles of self-determination don’t apply in the case of the Falklands/Malvinas, because the original generation of occupiers usurped the islands from Argentina, which was still in the growing pains of asserting its own independence.  But that was 180 years ago, and generations of Falkands settlers have called the islands their home ever since.  Is there a statute of limitations on such post-colonial claims?

For their part, Falklands settlers aren’t convinced:

I would like to know under what legislation the Argentine government calls it illegal. We approved it under our own laws here at the Falklands (Malvinas) and I was told that there is a meeting in the Argentine Congress on Wednesday to discuss its rejection. For a referendum that is illegal and for voters that don’t exist, they appear to be paying it a lot of attention.

The islands were the site of an infamous 1982 war between the United Kingdom (then under the leadership of prime minister Margaret Thatcher) and Argentina (then in the final years of Argentina’s last military junta that took power in 1976 and prosecuted the ‘Dirty War,’ in 1982 under the leadership of Leopoldo Galtieri).  Galtieri ordered an invasion of the islands in April 1982 (the joke is after one bottle of whiskey too many), hoping that his newly confirmed cold warrior bona fides from U.S. president Ronald Reagan would forestall a military response from the United Kingdom.

Galtieri was wrong. Continue reading Does Argentina have a case in its fight for the Falklands/Malvinas? →

Argentina, Vatican City

What the election of the first Latin American pope means for world politics

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Bergoglio1

So it’s Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, who will take on the name Francis (or Francesco, in Italian — or Francisco in Spanish) as the Catholic Church’s first Latin American pope — an election that recognizes the centrality of Latin America in the Catholic Church but which also shines a spotlight on the Church’s role in Latin America during the Cold War and the liberation theology that developed in Latin America, which melds church teachings with the concepts of economic and social justice.

argentinavatican flag

I noted a few days ago on Twitter that, given the reticence to appoint an Italian pope, the closest thing that the conclave could have done is appoint an Argentine pope, given that Argentines have so much Italian ancestry anyway.  That turned out to be more prescient than I realized.

The conclave, consisting of  115 cardinals — 67 of whom were appointed by the retiring pope, Benedict XVI, and 48 of whom were elected by his predecessor, the late John Paul II — elected Bergoglio after just four ballots.  That’s the same number of ballots featured in the 2005 conclave that elected then-cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — Bergoglio, age 76, is rumored to have been the runner-up to Ratzinger in the previous conclave.  He’s been a cardinal since 2001 and the archbishop of Buenos Aires since 1998.

Bergoglio is also the first Jesuit pope — as Rocco Palmo of the invaluable Whispers in the Loggia blog writes, he’s certainly more moderate than either Benedict XVI or John Paul II:

This ain’t Francis I so much as John Paul I.

Although as the Bishop of Rome, Francis is the head of state of Vatican City, the world’s smallest sovereign country, he’s now the leader of the Catholic Church to which 1.2 billion people belong — one out of every six people worldwide.  Church teachings, for Catholics and non-Catholics alike, shape policy decisions throughout the world, with implications for civil rights (notably with respect to gender and sexual orientation), family planning and reproductive rights, and public health across the globe.

Latin America is home to 41% of the world’s Catholics — more than even Europe at this point — and in some ways, Bergoglio’s election can be seen as the arrival of Latin America’s centrality to global Catholicism.  It’s too much to say that geography was the main rationale for selecting the next pope, of course, but it has symbolic value and certainly the cardinals in the Sistine Chapel today and yesterday knew that.  With the Mormon church and protestant Christianity making inroads into Latin America, Bergoglio’s selection could both energize Latin American Catholicism and shine a light on some of the shortcomings of the Church in Latin America in previous decades.

So there’s no denying that the election of Francis I will have profound consequences on world politics — notably in Argentina and Latin America, but also in Europe and throughout the rest of the developing world.

Bergoglio is a long-time resident of Buenos Aires, and he’s been intimately involved in Argentine public life.  The selection will certainly shine a spotlight on Argentina, which under the rule of president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, faces a potential debt default in 2013 amid ever-tough economic times.

But it will also bring to light tough questions for Bergoglio, who’s received criticism, along with the entire Church in Argentina, for not doing enough in the light of the military junta that took control of Argentina from 1976 to 1983 that initiated what’s known as the guerra sucia (‘dirty war’) that resulted in between 10,000 and 30,000 ‘disappearances’ of various political activists:

The Argentine church has acknowledged its failure to challenge the military’s anti-leftist repression, which according to human-rights groups left 30,000 people dead or “disappeared,” including dozens of Catholic clergy and lay activists.

To the harshest critics, church leaders were not merely indifferent to the violence but complicit in it. They say that includes Bergoglio, 68, who led Argentina’s Jesuits at the time. Such charges were revived after the death of Pope John Paul II, when Bergoglio was being mentioned as a possible successor.

An Argentine tribunal in January 2013 found that the Catholic Church was complicit in those crimes:

En lo que los corresponsales calificaron como un fallo histórico, la corte dijo que la jerarquía de la Iglesia Católica cerró los ojos y a veces incluso actuaron en connivencia, ante los asesinatos de sacerdotes progresistas.  Los jueces dijeron que aún hoy en día la iglesia sigue renuente a investigar crímenes cometidos durante el régimen militar.  [In what correspondents described as a landmark ruling, the court said that the Catholic Church hierarchy closed its eyes, and sometimes colluded, with the murders of progressive priests.  The judges said that even today the church is reluctant to investigate crimes committed during the military regime.]

As archbishop of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio has been viewed as a modernizer in pulling believers back to the Church, in the 1970s and early 1980s one of Latin America’s most conservative, following the fraught years of the guerra sucia.

In other ways, Bergoglio’s election brings to light the broader — and more uncomfortable — topic of the Catholic Church’s role in Latin America during the Cold War.  Latin American Catholics developed the concept of ‘liberation theology’ — the idea that church teaching is consistent with the struggle for economic and social equality.  As you can imagine, that concept was incredibly controversial during the Cold War under a pope, John Paul II, who grew up in Poland and became one the world’s most avowed foes of communism and the Soviet Union.  Church conservatives at the time argued that Latin American proponents of liberation theology were hijacking church teaching in the service of third-world Marxism. Continue reading What the election of the first Latin American pope means for world politics →

Venezuela

World leaders descend upon Chávez funeral: one photo, but mil palabras

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whoswho

What’s always been so interesting about chavismo is the way that the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez managed to build alliances both with just about every leader in Latin America, no matter how radical or moderate, while also building close alliances with a ‘who’s who’ of world rogue leaders on poor terms with the United States of America.Venezuela Flag Icon

It makes for an interesting set of photos from Chávez’s funeral — the photo above comes from the Facebook feed of Enrique Peña Nieto, the president of México, a country that’s had relatively little use for Venezuela over the past 14 years — former president Felipe Calderón used Chávez as a boogeyman in the 2006 Mexican presidential election to warn voters against the one-time leftist frontrunner, former Mexican City mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and that may have made the difference in that election.

Chávez died Tuesday in Caracas after a long fight with cancer, suddenly bringing to life Venezuelan politics that had largely been frozen in waiting on Chávez’s health since his 11-point reelection in October 2012.

Peña Nieto was expected to move Mexican relations closer to Venezuela than under the more right-wing Calderón, but Peña Nieto and Chávez were hardly best friends.  That relationship was part and parcel of the diverse set of relationships that Chávez had with the rest of Latin America — sometimes ally, sometimes foil, sometimes donor and often, all three simultaneously.  Those relationships, all of which are on display this week in Caracas, give us a rough sense of whether chavismo — and the broader form of the populist, socialist left that has been on the rise in Latin America (though not necessarily in its largest, most economically successful, countries like México and Brazil) — will live beyond Chávez.

Peña Nieto is in the fourth row, standing between businessman Ricardo Martinelli, Panama’s conservative president to his left and Peruvian president Ollanta Humala to his right.  Humala, who won a very close election in 2011 in Perú, was feared as a potential chavista radical leftist, anathema to Peru’s business elite, despite renouncing a chavista-style government in Perú.  In fact, Humala has turned out to govern as a business-friendly moderate, garnering relatively more criticism from environmentalists and social activists on the left since his election.

There in the front row, you can see Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Cuba’s president Raúl Castro (who has the distinction of belonging to both the ‘rogue state’ and ‘Latin American’ groups), the new ‘acting’ first lady of Venezuela Cilia Flores, and her husband, acting president Nicolás Maduro. Continue reading World leaders descend upon Chávez funeral: one photo, but mil palabras →

Germany

Merkel tops Forbes list of top 100 powerful women

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German chancellor Angela Merkel is the most powerful woman in the world in 2012, according to Forbes magazine.

It’s a bit whimsical, but that’s probably the right call, considering that no one person has more power, probably, to determine whether the eurozone sticks together or falls apart.

Also on the list are several women of important to world politics:

  • U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton (#2),
  • Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff (#3),
  • Indian National Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi (#6),
  • International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde (#8),
  • Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (#16),
  • Burmese National League for Democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi (#19),
  • Australian prime minister Julia Gillard (#27),
  • Malawi president Joyce Banda (#71),
  • Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (#80),
  • Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (#81), and
  • UAE minister of foreign trade Shiekha Lubna Al Qasimi (#92)

Predictions, questions and thoughts:

  • Where is Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt? Robbed!
  • And where is Icelandic prime minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, the world’s first openly lesbian head of government? Also robbed!
  • Josefina never had a chance.
  • Too soon for Pussy Riot, I suppose.
  • Might Parti québécois leader Pauline Marois make it on next year’s list if she wins the Sept. 4 election in Québec and schedules a referendum on Québec’s independence?
  • Next year, Park Geun-hye could well be South Korea’s new president, which would make her automatically top 20, I presume.
  • Also next year, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Hannelore Kraft become Merkel’s chief opposition.
  • If Silvio Berlusconi makes a comeback in Italy, why not his favorite MP Michaela Biancofiore and the rest of Silvio’s angels?