Showing posts by: E Curb Nottus
United Fruit, CIA, Do Business with Guatemala, Cold War Style: 2) Democracy to Coup D’état
With the go-ahead from incoming president Eisenhower in March 1953, Allen Dulles and the CIA continued the covert plot to undermine and destabilise the Árbenz government. The highly-orchestrated assault on the Árbenz regime took place on several fronts. Washington blocked a much needed loan from the World Bank to Guatemala and imposed an arms embargo on the country❈. The CIA forged an alliance of neighbouring states which were hostile or potentially hostile to Árbenz. The dictators running Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Dominican Republic and Venezuela didn’t require much persuading. Success by Árbenz in redistributing Guatemalan land could easily inspire the peasantries in their own countries to make similar demands, so the tiranos-caudillos were only too happy to get on-board with the CIA’s mission and pass on valuable intelligence about Guatemala to the US, and in the case of Nicaragua’s Somoza, Dominican Republic’s Trujillo and Venezuela’s Jiménez, help finance and arm the anti-Árbenz rebels.
⬆️ Dulles Bros Inc
Within the turbulent atmosphere of Guatemala CIA pursued a strategy of divide-and-rule. The US dangled the carrot of future armaments before the country’s military high command – the arms withheld from them would be made available on the proviso that they were prepared to break with their loyalty to Árbenz. [Bowen, Gordon L. “U.S. Foreign Policy toward Radical Change: Covert Operations in Guatemala, 1950-1954.” Latin American Perspectives 10, no. 1 (1983): 88-102. Accessed July 28, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/2633365].
Peurifoy and anti-communism in one country At the same time the US State Department also utilised diplomatic channels to lever pressure on the Guatemalan regime. The State Department purposefully chose John Peurifoy as the new ambassador to Nicaragua. Peurifoy came with the right credentials to ‘help’ in Guatemala. As US ambassador to Greece in 1950 he interfered in post-civil war Greece to consolidate an anti-communist climate in the country. As Washington’s man-on-the-ground in Guatemala Peurifoy played a key role in destabilising the Árbenz government. The ambassador approached the task of rooting out communists in Guatemalan politics very zealously, describing a meeting with Àrbenz thus, “I came away definitely convinced that if President is not a communist, he will certainly do until one comes along, and that normal approaches will not work in Guatemala” [‘The Ambassador in Guatemala (Peurifoy) to the Department of State, Office of the Historian, www.history.state.com/]⧆. The CIA’s anti-Árbenz propaganda campaign also secured the assistance of the Catholic Church in Guatemala, whose priests infused their sermons with censure of the government.
Washington parachutes ”anti-red troubleshooter” into Guatemala (New York Times) ⬇️
Self-appointed gatekeeper of the Western Hemisphere Historians have debated the reasons for Washington’s persistently determined pursuit of the Guatemalan democracy. In the early to mid-Fifties the mania of anti-communism was at its peak in America. Eisenhower had been elected in 1952 pledging to stop the spread of the “communist scourge” both at home and globally⌑. In such a charged climate the US Administration found itself very disposed towards seeing developments in Guatemala under Árbenz as evidence of a Soviet beachhead in the region, as a violation of the Monroe Doctrine◰, and therefore justification for Washington to intervene in Guatemala’s affairs [‘Upholding the Monroe Doctrine: American Foreign Policy in the 1954 Guatemalan Coup d’Etat’, (Nadjalisse C. Reynolds-Lallement), [Dr. Karen E. Hoppes HST 201: US History June 5, 2013], http://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/].
A symbiosis of political and economic interests? The consensus among historians is that Cold War politics was the prime mover for the US, and that the economic interests and profitability of United Fruit Company (UFCo) in Guatemala always was secondary in the scheming – although as Gordon has argued, there was a reciprocal relationship between the two at play, the US’ government’s “Cold War and anti-communist hysteria provided public cover for government action on behalf of UFCo, (the company’s) personnel facilitated the CIA’s Cold War task of subverting the Árbenz government” [Gordon, Max. “A Case History of U. S. Subversion: Guatemala, 1954.”Science & Society 35, no. 2 (1971): 129-55. Accessed July 27, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/40401561].
Notwithstanding the fact that local communists held some sway over the Guatemalan labour movement, their impact on decision-making within the Árbenz government was at best minimal. Árbenz’ objectives on taking control were not doctrinal but pragmatically liberal ones – political liberalisation, creation of a middle class, modernisation of the country, to free the Guatemalan economy from dependency on world coffee prices and from control by foreign corporations𝄪 (Gordon). Try as they may, US apologists arguing that the intervention was saving the country from communism have failed to make any plausible, even indirect, connexion between the Árbenz government and the Soviet Union✧. Immerman’s view is that the State Department confused communism and nationalism [cited in Bowen)❂.
⬆️ JF Dulles, Time’s “Man of the Year, 1954”
Isolating the Western Hemisphere’s outlier state With former UFCo lawyer John Foster Dulles guiding US foreign policy, the diplomatic isolation of Guatemala was complete when it cajoled the other members of the Organisation of American States (OAS) into accepting its anti-communist resolution in the region at the Caracas meeting early in 1954. The US, with assistance from the UK, also blocked Guatemala’s efforts to secure UN intervention against those seeking to destabilise its democracy.
⬆️ Rebel troops attacking Guatemala City (Source: www.latinamericanstudies.org)
End-game: The putsch and its denouement By late 1953 Eisenhower had given the “green light” to the invasion plan that became Operation PBSUCCESS in 1954. The US propaganda campaign intensified a few months later with saturation airdrops of anti-Árbenz leaflets across the country. Concurrently, the US Embassy in Guatemala City employed blocking equipment to jam the government’s official wireless channels and replace it with misinformation discrediting the Árbenz regime (Bowen). The CIA chose a renegade, expat Guatemalan officer on the outer with Árbenz to lead the coup attempt. From Honduras, Colonel Castillo Armas, with a small force of Guatemalan exiles and mercenaries and financed largely by the CIA, invaded the country. At first repulsed by Árbenz’s troops, the rebels fortunes turned around after Peurifoy persuaded JF Dulles to provided them with air cover. US-piloted planes duly strafed Guatemala City and other towns. American intimidation and terror had a telling psychological effect on the population. Guatemalan army commanders, fearful of a full US military intervention, defected from Árbenz, and refused to allow the president to arm the peasant militia to resist the invaders, this prompted a demoralised Árbenz to resign his office in June 1954 and seek asylum in the Mexican Embassy. After some jockeying for power within the country’s military junta Castillo Armas emerged as the new (US recognised) national leader, hurling Guatemala once again into the void of a crippling military dictatorship [RABE, STEPHEN G. “The U.S. Intervention in Guatemala: The Documentary Record.” Diplomatic History 28, no. 5 (2004): 785-90. Accessed July 30, 2020.www.jstor.org/stable/24914824.]
⬇️ Mexican artist Diego Rivera’s graphic take on the Guatemalan putsch
♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾♾
❈ forcing it to seek arms from Czechoslovakia, allowing the US to fling further mud, characterising it as an evidence of Árbenz’s ongoing collusion with communism
⧆ revealingly, the New York Times at the time described Peurifoy as “a man of action rather than a diplomat”, The New York Times, 18-July-1954
⌑ as Moye has noted, the Guatemala crisis provided a convenient and fairly easy way for the Eisenhower administration to demonstrate its promised “victory over communism” [MOYE, LAURA. “The United States Intervention in Guatemala.” International Social Science Review 73, no. 1/2 (1998): 44-52. Accessed July 31, 2020. www.jstor.og/stable/23883544/].
◰ a foreign policy position of the US, first enunciated in 1823, warning off European powers from interfering with the governance of existing countries on the American continent
𝄪 at the time of Guatemala’s to transition to a democratic state, the US accounted for 77% of its exports of 65% of its imports. UFCo functioned in Guatemala (and elsewhere in the region) as a “state within a state”, controlling 42% of the Guatemalan land and benefitting from light tax and import duty burdens [‘Background on the Guatemalan Coup of 1954’, www.umbc.edu/].
✧ Marks offers a contrary view, that the Árbenz government did pose a genuine communist threat, had a tendency towards authoritarianism itself and that the president had lost the confidence of the majority of Guatemalans by 1954 [MARKS, FREDERICK W. “The CIA and Castillo Armas in Guatemala, 1954: New Clues to an Old Puzzle.” Diplomatic History 14, no. 1 (1990): 67-86. Accessed July 30, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/24912032]. Although Rabe et al have countered that Marks’ conclusions rely on early State Department documents that have been discredited
❂ Getchell contends that in fact the USSR were “unwilling to prop up what they considered a bourgeois-democratic revolution” [‘Revisiting the 1954 Coup in Guatemala: The Soviet Union, the United Nations, and “Hemispheric Solidarity”’, (Michelle Denise Getchell), Journal of Cold War Studies, 17(2):73-102. April 2015. DOI: 10.1162/JCWS a 00549]
United Fruit, CIA, Do Business with Guatemala, Cold War Style: 1) 1944 Revolution to FBFortune
From the late 19th century to the Second World War Guatemalan politics followed a familiar path to most states in Latin America at the time – dominance by caudillos – military strongmen who were favourably disposed towards foreign investment and economic exploitation, especially from the USA. Under General Jorge Ubico (president 1931-44), this practice intensified with massive concessions given to Guatemala’s biggest foreign investor, the US United Fruit Company (UFCo), and to the country’s wealthy landowning class.
⇑ Belize (to the west of Guatemala) was the colony of British Honduras till 1964
By 1944 the economy in Guatemala was effectively monopolised by a “Big Three” oligopoly of US corporations – UFCo, in commanding control of the banana industry, International Railways of Central America, with its stranglehold (together with UFCo) over the country’s rail and ports facilities, and Electric Bond and Share, which controlled over 80% of Guatemala’s electricity supply. Poverty among the bulk of the rural population was endemic, agricultural workers earned between five and 20 centavos a day. 72% of the country’s land was held by just 2% of the population and there was an over-reliance on food imports because of the under-utilisation of land. Ubico’s oppressive rule was iron-tight and likened by international visitors to a “police state” [Gordon, Max. “A Case History of U. S. Subversion: Guatemala, 1954.” Science & Society, 35, no. 2 (1971): 129-55. Accessed July 27, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/40402561].
Guatemala. Izabal. Banana plantation.(Source: AFAR)
The spring of democracy 1944-1954 In 1944 a coalition of middle class professionals, teachers and junior army officers❈, with the backing of trade unions, forced Ubico’s removal [Juan Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America, (2011)]. This “Guatemalan Revolution” paved the way for free elections and an overwhelming victory for liberal professor Juan José Arévalo. The Arévalo government followed a moderate reformist path, establishing civil rights, a social welfare apparatus and achieved considerable success in improving national literacy levels. Arévalo was succeeded in 1951 by another democratically elected government, this time led by former soldier and defence minister Jacobo Árbenz. The progressive Árbenz moved beyond his predecessor in introducing much-needed, comprehensive agrarian reforms, something Arévalo had carefully avoided for fear of antagonising Guatemala’s landed elite and being branded pro-communist [‘Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954, Guatemala’, Office of the Historian, www.history.state.gov/].
President Árbenz Guzman ⇓ (www.wikia.org)
Decreto número 900 This put the Árbenz regime on a collision course with UFCo and the US government. The government’s Agrarian Reform Law (Decree 900) allowed for the expropriation of all Guatemalan land more than around 600 acres in size that was not under cultivation (which nonetheless only added up to less than 5% of all private land-holdings). UFCo’s reaction was to complain to Washington that Árbenz’s land reforms threatened its monopolistic position in Guatemala. The Company’s resolve to resist the Guatemalan move was hardened by the government’s offer of about $627,000, a figure derived from UFCo’s own estimate of the land value for tax purposes. The US State Department then demanded compensation from Guatemala of over $15,800,000 for UFCo’s properties in the country [‘Decree 900’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org/].
Árbenz’s ‘gift’ to the landless masses (Source: Life Mag.) ⇓
Upturning democracy: the build-up to the coup UFCo turned its energies to lobbying Washington to secure its assets and investments in the small Central American country. The US government however had its own (wider) agenda in mind. With America in the grip of the “Second Red Scare” of McCarthyism in the early 1950s, the US chose to see Árbenz’s anti-colonial land reforms (an attempt by the Third World agrarian country to extricate itself from a backward feudal mode of existence) as prefiguring an encroachment of communism onto the Guatemalan political landscape⍟. The US government, operating through the agency of the CIA⚄, initiated a smear campaign against the Árbenz regime, using misinformation and infiltration to try to undermine its legitimacy within the country and the region. By 1952 the decision had been made to intervene in Guatemala. President Truman authorised the CIA to launch Operation PBFORTUNE, with the complicit involvement of Nicaraguan dictator Somoza García (Snr), but when its cover was prematurely blown the operation was quickly aborted. Plans in Washington for the coup d’état were shelved – for the time being, and the CIA and its co-conspirators resumed the covert task of subverting and destabilising the increasingly isolated Guatemalan government.
⇑ Allen Dulles, CIA director
§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§
❈ drawing inspiration from FD Roosevelt’s American “New Deal” and from Mexico’s nationalising Cárdenas regime
⍟ Árbenz has the support of the small Guatemalan Communist Party and some communists filled minor offices in the administration but there were no communist members in the ruling cabinet
⚄ which had connexions with UFCo through those arch-cold warriors, the Dulles brothers, John Foster and Allen
1898, A Vintage Year for United States Empire Building
“God created war so that Americans would learn geography” ~ Mark Twain (attributed)✱
〥 〥 〥 〥 〥 〥 〥 〥 〥
The axiomatic nature of the above much-referenced quotation resounds most strongly in the year 1898. In that year the US expanded its offshore territorial acquisitions in different parts of the Pacific and in the Caribbean. It secured the islands of Cuba, the Philippines❂, Guam and Puerto Rico as a result of a short, opportunistic, one-sided war with a declining European power. At the same time Washington annexing the Hawaiian Islands, closed the door on four years of ‘independent’ republicanism which followed a successful coup by American businessmen against the indigenous Hawaiian monarchy.
🔺 Flag of the short-lived Hawaiian Republic
What triggered US involvement in a Cuban conflict against far-off Spain? The immediate pretext was the sinking of the American battleship Maine in Havana harbour. The explosion is generally believed to have been an accident but leading American newspapers (the Hearst press and to a lesser extent the Pulitzer publications) drove the charge of war jingoism within the country, declaring Spain culpable for the loss of life on the Maine. This and the ongoing reporting of the Cuban insurrection which deliberately exaggerated Spanish atrocities against the Cubans—examples of the “yellow journalism”◬ practiced especially by Hearst—helped to create a groundswell of popular support and agitation for war whilst boosting the newspapers’ sales.
🔺 “Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!” (source: www.pri.org)
Humanitarian concern for the Cuban people? In response to the charge that the US engineered the war as a grab for territory (á la Mexico 1846), apologists for the US intervention clothed the action in the garb of a humanitarian attempt to free the Cuban people from the colonial yoke of imperial Spain [Foner, Philip S. “Why the United States Went to War with Spain in 1898.” Science & Society, vol. 32, no. 1, 1968, pp. 39–65. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/404402321. Accessed 21 July 2020]. The McKinley Administration in Washington DC also justified it as an imperative to act given the political instability in Cuba, so close to US soil, and certainly Washington as the hegemonic regional power with a self-appointed role as regional ‘policeman’ had an interest in ridding the Western Hemisphere of the remnants of an old European colonial power [‘The Spanish-American War, 1898’, Office of The Historian, www.history.state.gov/].
Contemporary criticisms of aggressive US foreign policy Washington’s rapid trajectory towards war in 1898 drew a skeptical response internationally. Keir Hardie, British labour leader, stated that he “cannot believe in the purity of the American motive”, seeing rather the hand of “trusts and Wall Street financiers intent on extending American dominance over Cuba, Latin America, and the Far East”. The French government agreed that the professed humanitarian concerns were “merely a disguise for (US) commercial desires” to conquer the Caribbean and Latin America. Non-mainstream press in the US like the socialist The People and the New York Tribune argued that the US government ’s real aim was to ”divert attention from economic evils at home” and to protect the US’s extensive interests in Cuba [Foner, Philip S. “Why the United States Went to War with Spain in 1898.” Science & Society, vol. 32, no. 1, 1968, pp. 39–65. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/404402321. Accessed 21 July 2020].
An economics-driven war In fact economics was the principal driver of America’s intervention in Spanish Cuba. First, the US was massively invested in the island in the 1890s, importing sugar (predominantly), plus tobacco and minerals from Cuba…the US’s Cuban business ventures were valued at about $50 million in 1895 [‘American Business in Cuba 1898-1959: A Brief Overview’, (Lisa Reynolds Wolfe), Havana Project, 17-Aug-2011, www.havanaproject.com]. The Maine was in Havana harbour to protect these same American interests when it met with disaster. So, rather than a humanitarian motive to aid the beleaguered Cubans, the intervention can be seen as pure economic self-interest: “halting a nationalistic revolution or social movement that threatened American interests” and the subsequent withholding of sovereignty to Cubans (and to Filipinos) [Paterson, Thomas G. “United States Intervention in Cuba, 1898: Interpretations of the Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino War.” The History Teacher, vol. 29, no. 3, 1996, pp. 341–361. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4944551 . Accessed 21 July 2020].
🔺 President McKinley
The contemporary state of the American economy was a factor in America’s timing to act. Economic depression and unemployment was plaguing the country. New markets needed to be found for US goods, this meant not only Cuba and the American ’backyard’, but even extending to the Philippines and the lucrative Chinese market (Paterson). Tom Fiddick argues that the real reason President McKinley backed by the American capitalist class opted for war—having seen Spain‘s failure to pacify the Cuban rebels—was to make certain that the insurectos did not succeed in liberating the island and thereby pose a threat to US business interests in Cuba [Fiddick, Tom. “Some Comments on Philip S. Foner’s “Why the United States Went to War with Spain”.” Science & Society 32, no. 3 (1968): 323-27. Accessed July 22, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/40401358].
🔺 Battle of Guantánamo Bay (Cuba)
US strategy thinking around imperialist objectives was evident prior to the move to war in 1898 – plans were already afoot for the establishment of naval bases in the strategically important Caribbean and in Hawaii, a precondition to expanding economically further into Latin America and into Asian markets. This “game plan” also envisioned US control of the Isthmus of Panama, an objective secured a few years after the victory over Spain (Foner).
Underpinning ideology for upping territorial expansion The hawkish US foreign policy in 1898 accords with the prevailing 19th century belief of “Manifest Destiny”, a view that settlers in the US were destined to expand inexorably across the continent of North America◙. Correspondence between key players (T Roosevelt and HC Lodge) disclose that the McKinley Administration was committed—before the outbreak of hostilities—to “intervention in Cuba as a stepping stone for expansion in the Far East through the acquisition of Spain’s Pacific possessions”. Foner notes that Cuba comprised the ‘fulcrum’ providing the opportunity for US occupancy of the Philippines as “a base at the doorway to China’s markets” for US capitalists. Also shaping this was the influence of Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis—the idea that American democracy was defined by a moving frontier line—if America’s frontier at home was closing off as was thought by some, then the most viable course may be to seek new frontiers abroad. The increasingly dominant current in international thought, social Darwinism, was also informing American thinking…the national assertiveness shown in 1898 can be seen as a quantum leap in the “deliberate, calculated pursuit of United States’ greatness” (Paterson).
🔻 Battle of Manila Bay (Phil.)
Hawaii, a foothold on the “American Lake” The groundwork for the US’s absorption of the Hawaiian islands as part of the Manifesto Destiny credo was laid five years earlier when a group of American sugar planters under Sanford B Dole✦ overthrew Queen Liliuokalani, replacing the monarchy with a provisional government with Dole as president. The coup was tacitly recognised by the US government (with US marines despatched to Hawaii to protect US citizens), although President Cleveland tried unsuccessfully to reinstate the monarchy. His successor William McKinley, recognising the strategic importance of Pearl Harbour as a naval base in the war with Spain, “rubber-stamped” the formal annexation of the islands by the US in August 1898 [‘Americans overthrow Hawaiian monarchy, History, www.history.com/].
🔺 US sailors and marines in Honolulu c.1894
Footnote: A “Spanish-American War” Thomas G Patterson notes the exclusionist nature of the name given to the 1898 conflict – the omission of reference to Cuba and Philippines in the title—in effect “air-brushing” the native populations out of the conflict—was (Paterson suggests) an attempt by the victors to obscure uncomfortable truths, the denial of full-fledged independence to Cubans and Filipinos once freed from Spanish control, and to try to avoid America’s role in the affair being labelled as ‘imperialist’ (Paterson).
🔻 1900 map (Source: Pinterest)
PostScript: The Filipino insurgency After the Spanish defeat Filipino nationalists under Emilio Aguinaldo asserted the Philippines’ independence (proclaiming the First Philippine Republic) in 1899. This action was opposed by the US and a conventional-cum-guerrilla war ensued until 1902 when US forces finally subdued Aguinaldo’s army and the Philippines were made an unincorporated territory of the US (although a number of splinter groups of local insurrectos continued to fight the US military occupation for several years) [‘The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902’, Office of The Historian, www.history.state.gov/].
🔻 Flag of the República Filipino
◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢
✱ this famous but elusive quote has also been attributed, in slightly modified form, to Ambrose Bierce
❂ the US government paid Spain $20 million, compensation for the loss of infrastructure in the Philippines
◬ characterised by sensationalism (eg, eye-catching headlines) typically with scant regard for accuracy
◙ US business giant Standard Oil for instance talked about its ”Manifest Destiny being in Asia” (Foner)
✦ calling themselves the “Committee of Safety”
The Americas, Pandemic on the Back of Poverty: Mexico and Venezuela
While Brazil has sown up the unenviable title of the worst coronavirus hotspot in Latin America, Mexico has steered a similar course to disaster in the face of the pandemic. As Brazil’s coronavirus count climbs to well over 1.1 million confirmed cases and closing in on 53 thousand fatalities, the galloping toll in Mexico—60% the size of Brazil population-wise—now registers 191,410 cases and 23,377 deaths (as at 24-June-2020).
(Source: www.lonelyplanet.com) False security? Among some Mexicans there seem to be a sense that the country’s demographics which are skewed toward the young—around 85% of the population is under 55—may act as a barrier against coronavirus. This confidence may be misplaced due to several factors: pre-existing health conditions in Mexico which affect younger cohorts as well—make the population more vulnerable to the ravages of coronavirus, as the table below indicates [‘Many young Mexican at risk from Covid-19’, (James Blears), Vatican News, 31-March-2020, www.vaticannews.va]. the death-rate from COVID-19 among maquiladora workers in the border region of Baja California was found to be 25 times higher for the age bracket 40-49 than in the corresponding San Diego County, [‘COVID-19 killing young maquiladora workers, study shows’, (Salvador Rivera), Border Report, 11-Jun-2020, www.borderreport.com].
A league of populist leader ‘bedfellows’?
The way Mexico under its president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has approached the pandemic has disturbing parallels with that of Brazil’s leader Bolsonaro, and with the US under Trump. Despite a difference of ideological orientation—Obrador (who’s commonly known within Mexico as AMLO) is a Left-populist whereas Bolsonaro and Trump are Right-populists—the Mexican leader has pursued much the same course with similar outcomes. AMLO’s government was slow to engage in the fight against COVID-19 in the critical early period. The virus apparently entered Mexico via overseas returnees, primarily wealthier Mexicans returning from business trips to Italy and skiing holidays in Colorado, and then spread to low-income groups [‘Mexico’s Central de Abasto: How coronavirus tore through Latin America’s largest market’, (Mary Beth Sheridan), Washington Post, 21-Jun-2020, www.washingtonpost.com].
🔺 AMLO, pressing the flesh (Photo: Mexico’s Presidency Handouts/Reuters)
How not to contain a pandemic Like his US and Brazilian counterparts, AMLO justified his inaction by being dismissive of the disease, continually downplaying its risk to people, and he was negligent by example. After the outbreak Obrador toured the country, holding rallies sans face masks, nonchalantly meeting and greeting supporters, freely shaking hands, embracing people and even kissing them✱. The president’s advice to the Venezuelan people was simply to continue to “live life as usual”…until late March he was encouraging people to go out, attend fiestas, dine in restaurants and go shopping, airports remained open◘ – a clear indicator that Obrador’s priority was the health of the economy rather than the health of the public [‘Poverty and Populism put Latin America at the centre of the pandemic’, (Michael Stott & Andres Schipano), Financial Times, 14-Jun-2020, www.amp.ft.com; ‘AMLO’s feeble response to COVID-19 in Mexico’, (Vanda Felbab-Brown), Brookings, 30-Mar-2020, www.brookings.edu].
Abject lack of medical preparedness. Obrador’s dangerous indifference to the crisis extended to a half-hearted medical intervention. Testing for COVID-19 has remained woefully low, no program of widespread testing or of contact tracing – these vital measures dismissed as being impractical for a population of 128 million (Sheridan; Stott & Schipano). The reluctance to test extensively is no doubt also related to Mexico’s health care incapacity. Despite having gone through the experience of the 2009 H1N1 influenza outbreak, subsequent Mexican administrations have permitted the country’s health sector to run down, funding to hospitals and medical centres have been cut by millions. Mexico has only 1.4 hospital beds for every 1,000 persons and just over 2,000 ventilators all up. The shortfall extends to physicians, medical equipment including PPE and coronavirus test kits [‘Mexico’s coronavirus-sceptical president is setting up his own country for a health crisis’, (Alex Ward), Vox, 28-Mar-2020, www.vox.com].
Shooting the messenger Inevitably AMLO has copped a lot of internal criticism for his irresponsible response to the crisis. Rather than taking positive measures to try to undo the disaster of his own creation, Obrador has gone on the attack against the Mexican independent media. Again invoking the Trump playbook, he has railed against the “fake news” and “Twitter bots” who have opposed his government’s handling of the situation. Independent investigations in fact have brought to light the clandestine activities of Notimex (the state-owned news agency) which has created a network of bots and fake accounts to discredit prominent journalists and label them as ‘criminal’ [‘Mexican President López Obrador frets about the spreading virus of fake news, but not COVID-19’, (José Miguel Vivanco), Dallas News,16-Jun-2020, www.dallasnews.com].
AMLO has taken to giving regular video ‘sermons’ to the masses (he calls them “Decalogues to emerge from coronavirus and face the new reality”)…these are not as you might surmise updates on how the government is attempting to counter the pandemic, but an uninspiring mish-mash of banalities about staying positive, eating corn and getting sun and fresh air. With the unchecked escalating death toll from the disease, many believe Obrador has given up any pretence to even trying to combat the virus [‘Mexico’s president has given up in the fight against the coronavirus’, (León Krauze), Washington Post, 19-Jun-2020, www.washingtonpost.com]. In this most unpropitious context AMLO is now taking an imprudent gamble by lifting restrictions – despite the curve of Mexican infections continuing to shoot upwards.
🔻 Mega-mercado, Mexico City
Footnote: Mexico City epicentre
Mexico City accounts for about one quarter of all COVID-19 deaths in Mexico. The offical counts however are only starting points to explain the catastrophe. A Mexico City study by Nexos magazine found that there was an “excess mortality” of more than 20% unaccounted for by the official figures [‘8,000 ‘excess deaths’ in Mexico City as coronavirus rages: study’, Ajazeera, 26-May-2020, www.aljazeera.com]. One of the capital’s biggest clusters is the wholesale mega-market, the Central de Abasto. The enormous mercado providing 80% of the city’s food is a petri-dish for the virus which has cut a scythe through its 90,000-strong workforce, infecting its tomateros, chilli vendors and other workers whose need to keep working is often greater than their fear of the pandemicφ. The vendors and carters have another reason for continuing working even when they become ill – working class Mexicans are accustomed to poor quality health care and often harbour a distrust of hospitals (Sheridan).
⏦⏦⏦ ☤☤☤ ⏦⏦⏦
(Image source: www.studentnewsdaily.com)
Venezuela: Showcase numbers but a lack of transparency Although the available statistics relating to Venezuela don’t reflect the dramatic numbers in Mexico, the situation in the South American country is peer bit as parlous. Venezuela has fessed up to 4,186 cases and 35 deaths (24-Jun-2020), but these figures have little credibility with independent observers. Venezuela has done very limited testing for the disease with the testing data guarded very carefully by the government [‘Hunger, Infection, and Repression: Venezuela’s Coronavirus Calamity’, (Stephanie Taladrid), The New Yorker, 29-May-2020, www.newyorker.com]. Doubters outside the country have noted that Venezuela’s health system was already in a state of collapse before COVID-19 arrived, citing as evidence: the country‘s functioning intensive care beds are estimated to number between 80 and 163; nil or intermittent supply to water to two-thirds of hospitals; power cuts off at regular intervals; shortages of gloves and face masks in 60% of hospitals; 76% of hospitals shortage of soap and 90% were short of sanitising gel [‘Venezuela’s Covid-19 death toll claims ‘not credible’, human rights group says’, (Tom Phillips), The Guardian, 27-May-2020, www.theguardian.com].
🔺 Maduro: “People, we are identity”
President Maduro—already embroiled in a political and socio-economic crisis acerbated by long-term US trade sanctions on Venezuela—imposed a national lockdown in March. A side benefit to the lockdown (now extended to July) is that it allows the regime more scope to crack down on its critics…the obvious targets being opposition politicians and increasingly journalists, doctors and nurses who report adversely on Maduro’s handling of the pandemic (especially if they query the reported official numbers). [‘Venezuela’s Zulia State emerges as coronavirus hot spot’, Reuters, 24-Jun-2020, www.news.yahoo.com].
Footnote: Rich and poor, a widening of the divide
At the point of corona impact, the contrast between Venezuela’s masses and the elite have sharpened even more. The brunt of the economic crisis has fallen squarely on the poor and middle-class citizens – skyrocketing prices, scarcity of necessities, a greatly devalued Venezuelan bolivar, the oil price plunge (oil accounts for 98% of Venezuela’s export revenues), and over-reliance on the informal economy by the lower socio-economic classes [‘Why coronavirus could be catastrophic for Venezuela’, (Katy Watson & Vanessa Silva), BBC News, 12-Apr-2020, www.bbc.com]. With corruption, cronyism and nepotism ingrained in Venezuela, the Maduro regime and its acolytes—the heirs of Chavismoism—continue to benefit lavishly from black-market and other illicit financial activities◊ [‘Freedom in the World 2020: Venezuela’, Freedom House, www.freedomhouse.org].
⇚⇛⇚⇛⇚⇛⇚⇛⇚⇛⇚⇛⇚⇛⇚⇛⇚⇛⇚⇛⇚⇛⇚⇛ ⇚⇛⇚⇛⇚⇛⇚⇛⇚⇛⇚⇛⇚⇛⇚⇛
✱ AMLO preferring to travel and mingle accompanied only by his personal amulets for ‘protection’
◘ only in the last week of March did the government retreat a bit and start to urge the public to stay-at-home
φ the CDMX-run market only acted, bringing in health workers, ramping up testing and contact tracing, after workers starting dropping in significant numbers (Sheridan)…as with the rest of Mexico, too little, too late
◊ beneficiaries of this state largesse and privilege include the bolichicos, the wealthy children of the regime’s top leaders
The Americas, Pandemic on the Back of Poverty: Peru and Ecuador; and a Southern Cone Contrarian
As Europe starts to pull itself out of the worst of the coronavirus outbreak, the Americas for the most part are still firmly mired in the devastating crisis of the pandemic…more worryingly, COVID-19 cases continue to rise and even accelerate in some countries as Latin America seems to be turning into “pandemic central”, the ‘new’ Europe❅. This is occurring despite the continent comprising only eight percent of the world’s population and having had the advantage of time to prepare for the virus which reached its shores some six weeks after ravaging Europe.
(Source: www.maps-of-the-world.net)
Smallness helps
The picture of Central and South America is not uniformly bleak. Some of the smaller countries, such as Uruguay, Paraguay and El Salvador, have managed to restrict their nation’s outbreaks to low levels of infection and casualties. This last mentioned country was surveyed in an earlier blog entitled Courting Controversy in Coronavirus Country: Belgium and El Salvador – June 2020). Among the Southern Cone countries, Argentina and Uruguay stand in contrast to their neighbours Chile and Brazil. Argentina (population of >45 million)—its commendable performance vs the virus slightly tarnished by a recent upsurge following an easing of the lockdown—has a total of 39,557 COVID-19 cases and only 979 deaths, compared with Brazil (whose leader Jai Bolsonaro has taken a recklessly dismissive attitude towards the pandemic). Even on a per capita basis Argentina‘s figures are still a fraction of the human disaster befalling Brazil which has racked up 1,038,568 cases and 49,090 deaths (population: 212 million). The Argentine Republic’s results are also way better than Chile’s record of 231,393 cases and 4,093 deaths (from just 19 million) [‘Argentina’s president enters voluntary isolation amid coronavirus surge’, (Uni Goñi) The Guardian, 18-Jun-2018, www.theguardian.com].
Brazil: COVID-19 mural message (Source: Getty Images)
Uruguay: Stellar success of an outlier
Uruguay has fared as well as anyone in Central/South America in avoiding a pandemic catastrophe on the scale of some of its neighbours. A tiny population (3.5 million) helps immeasurably but the sheer lowness of its corona numbers stands by themselves – just 1,040 confirmed cases and 24 deaths. This has been achieved despite a demographic profile that should have made it highly vulnerable to the disease: the largest regional proportion of elderly citizens and a population which is 96% urban. And an outcome secured not by lockdowns and quarantines (allowing Uruguay to preserve its national economic health cf. the stricken economies of its large neighbours Brazil and Argentina), but by eliciting the voluntary compliance of its citizenry – and through the luxury of having a near-universal, viable health care system✺ [‘Why Is Uruguay Beating Latin America’s Coronavirus Curse?’, (Mac Margolis), Bloomberg, 30-May-2020, www.bloomberg.com].
Uruguay (Photo: Daniel Rodrigues/adhoc/AFP via Getty Images)
Peru:
Aside from Brazil the country in the region most in strife due to the pandemic at the moment is probably Peru. Peru’s statistics are stark – over 247,925 confirmed cases and 7,660 deaths in a population of 32 million. What is particularly troubling about Peru is that, unlike Brazil, at onset it seemed to be pulling all the right reins, implementing one of Latin America’s earliest and strictest lockdowns. Months of enforced lockdown have however failed to flatten the curve of infections. Peru finds itself in a demoralising “double whammy”, the public health catastrophe continues unabated❈ while the recourse to a tough national lockdown has further crippled the economy [‘Poverty and Populism put Latin America at the centre of the pandemic’, (Michael Stott & Andres Schipano), Financial Times (UK), 14-Jun-2020, www.amp.ft.com; ‘Peru’s coronavirus response was ‘right on time’ – so why isn’t it working?’, (Dan Collyns), The Guardian, 21-May-2020, www.theguardian.com]✪.
⇑ Andean pabluchas patrol Cuzco streets to enforce social distancing and mandatory mask measures (Photo: Jose Carlos Angulo/AFP/Getty Images)
Indicators of the poverty trap
The economic predicament Peru finds itself stems from the country’s high reliance on an informal economy (reaching some 70%). What Peru has in common with Brazil—and has been exacerbated by the pandemic—is very high social inequality. The poorest Peruvians cannot afford to stay home, to isolate as they should. Many are without bank accounts and under the informal economy have to travel to collect their wages, those without home refrigerators also need to shop frequently – all of which makes them more vulnerable to be exposed to the virus [‘Latin America reels as coronavirus gains pace’, (Natalia Alcoba), Aljazeera, 15-Jun-2020, www.aljazeera.com]. Disease and impoverishment have converged in Peru to make the predicament more acute for those of the poor who need life-saving oxygen of which there is now a scandalous critical shortage – the situation being exploited by profiteering hit men (the sicarios) controlling the black market oxygen supplies [‘In Peru, coronavirus patients who need oxygen resort to black market and its 1,000 percent markups’, (Simeon Tegel), Washington Post, 18-Jun-2020, www.washingtonpost.com].
Ecuador and Guayaquil ⇓
Ecuador:
In Ecuador the pandemic epicentre is the western city of Guayaquil, the country’s largest city. This is thought to be due to a couple of factors, the city’s sprawling slums where “many residents live hand-to-mouth and routinely violate the government lockdown…in order to work”, and because many Guayaquil exchange students and migrant workers came back to the city from Spain and Italy in March [‘COVID-19 Numbers Are Bad In Ecuador. The President Says The Real Story Is Even Worse’, (John Otis), NPR, 20-Apr-2020, www.npr.org]. The unpreparedness and inability of the authorities to cope with the crisis has affected the woeful degree of testing done, the lack of hospital facilities for patients and even the capacity to bury the dead as the bodies of coronavirus victims were left piling up on the city’s streets. In the wake of the disaster the Guayaquil Council entered into a slinging match with Quito (the national government), asserting that the government has under-represented the city’s death toll by as much as four-fifths, that it failed to provide it with the health care backup demanded of the disaster, as well as calling out the corruption of public utilities which has accentuated the crisis (Alcoba). Ecuador currently has 49,731 confirmed cases and 4,156 fatalities in a population of 17 million.
⋕ ⋕ ⋕ ⋕ ⋕ ⋕
End-note: The hypothesis of virus protection at high altitude
Among the multitude of worldwide research projects triggered by the pandemic, a multi-country study looking at Bolivia, Ecuador and Tibet has advanced the theory that populations that live at a height of above 3,000 metres have significantly lower levels of susceptibility to coronavirus than their lowland counterparts. The study attributes the capacity of high altitude to nullify the disease down to the fact that living at high altitude allows people to cope with hypoxia (low levels of oxygen in the blood), and that the altitude provides a favourable natural environment—dry mountain air, high UV radiation and a resulting lowering of barometric pressure—reduces the virus’ ability to linger in the air. The COVID-19 experience of Cuzco in Peru seems to corroborate this hypothesis, being lightly affected compared to the rampage elsewhere in the country – the high Andean city has had only 899 confirmed cases and three deaths. Similarly, La Paz, Bolivia, the world’s highest legislative capital, has recorded only 38 coronavirus-related deaths to date⊠ [‘From the Andes to Tibet, the coronavirus seems to be sparing populations at high altitudes’, (Simeon Tegel), Washington Post, 01-Jun-2020, www.washingtonpost.com].
<Þ> all country coronavirus counts quoted above are as at 20-June-2020
……………………………………………………………………………………………………
❅ for week ending 20th June 2020, confirmed cases for Latin America represented half of all new coronavirus cases (Source: WHO)
✺ a like-for-like comparison to Uruguay might be Paraguay – also a small population (6.9 million), only 1,336 cases and 13 deaths but at the cost of a draconian lockdown with an economy-crippling end-game.
❈ even prior to COVID-19 striking, the Peruvian public health system was struggling due to “decades of chronic underinvestment” (eg, spending <$700 a day on health care) (Tegel, ‘In Peru’)
✪ the strict lockdown has been less rigorous when removed from the urban centres…in outlying areas, in the northern coast and the Amazonas region (particularly bad in the Amazonian city of Iquitos) it was less “honoured in the breach than the observance” leading to the formation of new virus clusters (Collyns)
⊠ other experts discount the study’s findings noting that most coronavirus infections occur indoors, negating the relevance of UV levels (Tegel, ‘From the Andes’)
The UPU: Unobtrusively Beavering Away, Working for Cooperation and Democracy in the World of International Postage
In the age of virtual communication and instant electronic transactions, many people see the traditional mail service as less and less relevant in our daily lives, it is fashionable these days to scornfully dismiss it as “snail mail”. It may seem passé to many but the international postal system is still an active and vital service that bridges the gaps between vast distances, and it is one that is governed by a UN world body with a continuous history back to the last quarter of the 19th century.
The Universal Postal Union (UPU), (French: Union Postale Universelle), originally the “General Postal Union”, was established in 1874 with the task of laying down regulations and bringing uniformity to the setting of tariffs (including the transit costs) for mail exchanges between countries. Prior to it’s inception, a complicated, loose bilateral system prevailed where an individual country would have to establish postal treaties separately with each other country it wished to correspond with. Sometimes this involved calculating postage for each leg of the journey and finding mail forwarders in a third country if there was no direct delivery to the country of destination [‘Universal Postal Union’, www.parcelsapp.com/].
The initial mid-19th century impetus to create such a global entity came from American frustrations at postal communication with Europe, especially with France, but the decisive thrust came from Heinrich von Stephan, a senior Prussian postal official from the North German Confederation (and later the Reichspost), whose advocacy prompted the Swiss government to host the inaugural international postal conference leading to the formation of the UPU.
According to it’s own mission statement, the UPU is “the primary forum for co-operation between postal sector players…(helping) to ensure a truly universal network of up-to-date products and services” (www.upu.int). It is also tasked with responsibility for the coordination of member nations in promoting efficient postal services including the monitoring of postal security, stamp design, etc.
UPU’s role also includes the resolving of any polemical issues that may arise between member nations. The great explosion in E-commerce trade has tended to exacerbate cost anomalies in postage tariffs. In 2018 US companies were paying twice as much to mail an item to a US customer than it cost China (and other subsidised Asian countries) to send items to the same US customer (www.parcelsapp.com/). US president, Donald Trump, threatened to pull the US out of the international body if it failed to make reforms to the system (this provocative move has been part of the outlier American president’s global trade war campaign against China). The US exit was averted in 2019 with the brokering of a deal allowing it to start setting its own postal rates from July 2020, with other high-volume mail member-countries to follow suit from 2021 [‘U.S. Avoids Postal ‘Brexit’ as Universal Postal Union Reaches a Deal’, (Abigail Abrams), Time, (26-Sep-2019), www.time.com].
This issue aside, the habitually low-profile UPU has been largely free of controversy✶, but one other minor discordant note occurred in 1964 when the Fifteenth Congress of UPU voted by a large majority to expel South Africa from membership. This was controversial because several country delegates raised the objection that the action was unconstitutional, arguing that a member could only be expelled for violating UPU’s regulations. The South African delegate initially refused to budge but did so after other African delegates demanded his expulsion [“Universal Postal Union.” International Organization, vol. 20, no. 4, 1966, pp. 834–842. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2705750. Accessed 21 May 2020].
The UPU has gone from a largely Eurocentric organisation in 1874 to a truly universal one today with about 192 countries of the world (plus territories) signed up۞. A number of other non-member states and territories get their mail routed through a third (member) country including Andorra (through France and Spain), Taiwan (through Japan and US), Kosovo (through Serbia), Northern Cyprus (through Turkey), Micronesia (through the US) and Somaliland (through Ethiopia) [‘List of members of the Universal Postal Union’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
Berne HQ (Source: www.jurist.org/)
Footnote: UPU is said to be the world’s second-oldest intergovernmental organisation, after the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), founded 1865, which, like the UPU, is a specialised agency of the UN.
⚘ᵜ⚘ᵜ⚘ᵜ⚘ᵜ⚘ᵜ⚘ᵜ
PostScript: Addressing the problem of the unaddressed The Postal Union engages in a number of ongoing projects, one of which is the “An Address for Everyone” global initiative – Deirdre Mask has made note of the surprising fact (at least to those in the relatively affluent First World) that even today, the majority of people in the world do not possess a street address!◙ UPU involves itself in making a contribution to remedying this situation, because of the spin-off benefits that such a simple thing as having a prescribed address brings…providing the recipients with “a legal identity, allowing them to participate in the political process, be part of the formal economy” including e-commerce, access credit, receive personal services and engage with the “information and communication age” [Deirdre Mask, The Address Book, (2020); www.upu.int/].
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
✶ it’s not surprising if a lot of folk have never heard of the Universal Postal Union, the UPU has traditionally followed the low-profile path of the quiet achiever. As Richard John has noted, it’s preference has been to negotiate policies well out of the limelight, gaining it something of “a reputation as a secretive Postal Illuminati“…by keeping out of politics, John contends, this allows the UPU to be so effective (‘Here’s why Trump threatened to pull out of a 144-year-old postal treaty’, Original World News, 19-Oct-2019, www.originalworldnews.com) ۞ Palestine has special observer status; post-apartheid South Africa was readmitted in 1994 ◙ and not just confined exclusively to the slum and shantytown dwellers of the Third World, Mask points to the phenomena existing in parts of rural America such as West Virginia