US and Europe have lost out to China, Russia and India in vaccine diplomacy in Latin America

Latin America is the worst hit region in the world with the corona virus. The nineteen countries of the region have suffered over twenty million infections accounting for 18.5% of the global cases. The 631,000 deaths in the region are 25% of the total world fatalities. Brazil has the third largest number of infections with over ten million cases. Brazil ranks second in the world with 244,000 deaths followed in the third position by Mexico with 179,000. The region needs urgent supply of vaccines desperately. 

Latin America's need for the vaccine is met promptly and cooperatively by China, Russia and India. In contrast, there is total indifference from US and Europe. 

Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay and Venezuela have  authorized/implemented use of the Sputnik V vaccine. Others including Colombia are considering authorization of the Russian vaccine. Argentina has ordered about 25 million doses of the Russian vaccine.

 

Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Peru, among other countries, have acquired Chinese vaccines.

 

India has already supplied/committed to supply to Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Bolivia, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Dominican Republic. More countries might be added to this list. 

The most obvious missing names among vaccine suppliers are US and Europe.  They are concerned only with their own citizens. They are not only inward looking but even squabbling among themselves ( EU vs UK ) about share of vaccines. They have not shown any solidarity or intention to help Latin America. Moreover, the western countries have overbought the vaccines beyond their requirements thereby reducing availability of supplies to developing countries. 

 

Of course, the American Pfizer was one of the earliest to roll out its vaccine. But unsurprisingly, their vaccine is more expensive.  It costs19.50 dollars per dose as against around 10 dollars of Russian and Chinese vaccines while the Indian ones will be less than ten dollars. The Pfizer vaccine poses logistical challenges since it needs to be stored at ultra-freezing temperatures of 35 to 45 degree F.

 

Apart from price and logistics, the Latin American governments find negotiations with Pfizer more difficult than with Moscow, Beijing and New Delhi. Pfizer puts some difficult- to- accept liability conditions which even provoked even the pro-US Bolsonaro.

 

The Latin Americans will not forget those who helped them and those failed them at this historic crisis time. 

Colombian President Ivan Duque's party members had earlier joined the American chorus of condemnation of Putin on violations of democracy and human rights. But it did not stop the pro-US Colombian government from ordering Russian vaccines. 

The US trashes the Chinese economic presence in Latin America and warns about Russian designs in the region. But Washington DC has nothing to say about the Chinese and Russian vaccines which help the region.

The US keeps lecturing and forcing Latin America to divert its scarce resources to the so called war on drugs. But there is no word from US on the vaccine for Latin America. 

The Latin Americans are also upset by the silence from the Europeans who never miss any opportunity to criticize the region on the issues of environment and democracy.

The pro-US President Bolsonaro wrote a desperate letter to Prime Minister Modi for urgent supply of vaccines. He did not write to the US President. On receiving prompt supply, he thanked India profusely. No Latin American President wrote to the US President or any European head of government for vaccines.

The fact that an Indian company Bharath Biotech has developed an indigenous vaccine has enhanced the profile of India. Some Latin American countries including Brazil (300 million dollars) have placed orders for this. 

India is the fifth largest supplier of medicines to Latin America with 1.2 billion dollars. India’s pharmaceutical exports to Latin America have increased by an impressive 23% in the first eight months of 2020 from April to November, according to the statistics of Commerce Ministry of India. The 23% increase is even more significant in the context of the 13% fall in India’s total exports to the region, caused by the pandemic crisis.

The Latin American governments and people have already recognized India's valuable contribution to reduction of Latin American cost of health care with low cost generics. The vaccine supply will further strengthen the image of India as a reliable and valuable development and commercial partner in the long term.

The Indians who got diplomatic passports from Latin American governments.

Jayanti Dharma Teja, the founder of Jayanti Shipping Company in 1961 took loans from Indian banks to buy ships in the sixties. He was said to have used his closeness to Nehru to obtain the credit despite objections from the Ministry of shipping officials. The company went bankrupt and Teja was accused of fraud and declared as defaulter of loan repayment as well as tax compliance. He fled to New York. The government of India pursued extradition and at their request Teja was arrested but released on bail of 10,000 dollars. He jumped bail and flew down to San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica in September 1967. He applied for permanent residency and citizenship there. The Costa Rican government went out of its way with generosity and gave him a diplomatic passport. This was thanks to his acquaintance with President Jose Figueras, known as Don Pepe. Teja had reportedly obtained a commission to help the Costa Rican Government in developing power plants and building up its own fleet of banana ships. The Indian authorities did their best to hound him out of his haven by carrying the extradition proceedings right up to the Costa Rican Supreme Court. But Figueras arranged elaborate legal defence. Antonio Picado, former chief justice of the Supreme Court, defended him against a battery of counsels brought in by the Indian Government from the US. Teja finally won the case, and President Fernando Tregos, who had come into power in the wake of Figueras's electoral defeat, upheld the decision of the Costa Rican court. 

 

During his trip to UK in July1970 Teja was arrested at Heathrow airport  by Scotland Yard acting on behalf of India’s red alert notice through Interpol. Teja claimed diplomatic immunity from arrest on the ground that he was on a diplomatic mission for the government of Costa Rica. The Costa Rican ambassador in London tried his best to release Teja. But this was rejected by the court in UK and he was extradited to India in 1971. He was convicted and jailed. After the release, he went back to live in Geneva.

 

The other Indian who got a diplomatic passport from a Latin American country was MN Roy. He spent two years in Mexico from 1917 to 1919. He was very active in the Mexican leftist politics besides writing articles and books. He was a founder of the Communist Party of Mexico. Later when he came back to India he founded the Communist party of India. The Mexican government had given him a diplomat passport with the false name of Roberto Vila Garcia to avoid the British and American harassment due to his communist activities. He had used this passport to visit Moscow for one of the Comintern conferences. Roy called Mexico as 'the land of his rebirth'. Today, the house where he stayed in Mexico city has been converted into a vibrant bar/night club with the name MN Roy

 

Hades, Argentina – novel

 "Hades, Argentina”, the just published (January 2021) novel by Daniel Loedel is about the killing, torture and ‘disappearance’ of thousands of leftists during the brutal Argentine military dictatorship in the seventies.

 

Tomas Orilla, the main character in the novel, is a medical student who moves from his home town La Plata to Buenos Aires in 1976 to be closer to his teenage sweet heart Isabel. He discovers that she has become a member of the Montonero leftist guerilla movement. She seeks his help to infiltrate the government agencies involved in detention of opponents of the military regime. With the help of Colonel Felipe Gorlero, his guardian in the city and a senior official in the Military Intelligence, he gets a part time job in a secret and illegal military detention centre. Tomas’s job includes drugging the detainees to induce confession, revive them when they pass out after tortures and provide minimum medical help to keep the prisoners alive until  information is extracted from them. Thereafter they are transferred for disposal by killing. Tomas is traumatised seeing the macabre methods of torture, screaming of the victims and their suffering. The torturers carry out their gruesome work coolly and casually while listening to football match commentaries, joking about colleagues and making cruel comments on the victims. Eventually he is caught for espionage and his help to some detainees to escape.  He becomes a detainee himself and put in a hood for interrogation and tortures. But the colonel comes to his rescue and helps him to escape to Rome. In exchange for the Colonel’s help, Tomas had to give out information on the hide-out location of Isabel. From Rome, Tomas moves to New York where he marries an American. But the marriage breaks down since Tomas is unable to settle down, haunted by his nightmares. 

 

In 1986, he travels to Buenos Aires to see the mother of Isabel in the hospital with terminal illness. During his stay in the city, he is haunted by the ghosts of the Colonel and Isabel. He returns to the sites containing his darkest memories and most profound regrets. He wanders in the Recoleta cemetery and in the streets of the city lost in the labyrinth of memory, guilt and loss.  He realizes how hard it must be for those Argentines who hadn’t left the country, having to go about their daily lives with the possibility of bumping into their torturers at train stations and random intersections or having to wonder, because they’d been blindfolded back then, if the man giving them a funny look on the bus had raped them.

 

There are Dantesque dialogues between the Colonel and Tomas on death, sin, hell, purgatory and redemption. The two carry on their long conversations, alternating between real life and the after-life, during their wanderings through the Recoleta cemetery and long hours of sitting in cafes.

  

Loedel’s novel is based on the real life story of his own half-sister Isabel Loedel Maiztegui, a Montonero activist,  who was murdered and disappeared by the military dictatorship  in January 1978, when she was just 22. 

Loedel is born and lives in New York, where his father had moved from Argentina after the coup. Loedel travelled to Argentina in 2018 for DNA confirmation of the identity of Isabel from the bone and skull remains in the forensic lab. He buried her remains formally in a ceremony in 2019 in La Plata next to the others who were also killed during the Dirty War of the dictatorship.

                                                 photo of real life Isabel

 

Loedel reflects on his identity crisis as a US citizen of Argentine origin. His father refused to let him visit Argentina because of the bitterness of loss of his daughter. It was only at the age of 22 he visited Argentina for the first time. He connected to the extended family and friends of Isabel and collected information for the novel. His father translated the novel into Spanish, adding authenticity to the spirit and language. 

 

On the character of Argentines, the author comments aptly, “we Argentines are so particular, no one else would put up with us. The Porteños (residents of Buenos Aires city), who fancy themselves so European, turn up their noses at anyone from the rest of the continent. The country is one of the vainest in the world. So many of our problems stem from that. Have to be better than the Brazilians, have to be pretty, have to be European”. These are comments I have often heard from my Argentine friends themselves who would express the same more colorfully, with the choicest abusive words.

 

On the capital city of the country, the author comments, “Buenos Aires never showed its scars, never let its surface be ruffled; it was a city made for forgetting as much as for nostalgia”.

 

The author has an interesting definition, “Peronism is like poetry—it can’t be explained, only recognized.”  He says, “Peronism was the ideal vehicle for those like Isabel who wanted change but didn’t necessarily possess a full-fledged ideology or agenda. After Peron himself was booted from the country in 1955 and his party proscribed, their right-wing aspects were widely forgotten and the label evolved into a catchall for populism of every stripe, a handy banner for anyone who wanted to step on the battlefield. (Indeed, the Montonero guerrillas originally took up arms to bring Perón back from exile, before growing into a broader insurrection against state oppression.) The word almost had spiritual connotations now; for some, it was a moral lifestyle as much as a fight against injustice”. Peronism continues to divide the nation vertically even now. There is a constant and strong Peronist voter base which is seduced and cultivated by the politicians. On the other side, there is a significant part of the population who hate Peronism and blame it for all the problems of the country.

 

The military has gone back to the barracks irreversibly since 1983. But the civilian governments since then have mismanaged the economy periodically causing tragedies of hyper inflation, debt default, foreign exchange shortage and misery for the common people. Argentina, which was one of the top ten richest countries in the beginning of the twentieth century, has regressed and is in the middle of yet another cycle of financial crisis at present. 

"Hades, Argentina" reminds me of another Argentine novel "Purgatory" by Tomas Eloy Martinez. This is a similar story in which Emilia, the protagonist, is haunted by the memory of her husband who was 'disappeared' by the dictatorship.

Argentina seems to be still struggling to come out of the shades of Hades and purification in Purgatory

Impressive increase in India’s pharmaceutical exports to Latin America

India’s pharmaceutical exports to Latin America have increased by an impressive 23% reaching 790 million dollars in the first eight months of 2020 from April to November, according to the statistics of Commerce Ministry of India. The 23% increase is even more significant in the context of the 13% fall in India’s total exports to the region

 

The increase was over 100% in the case of Peru with 99 million dollars in the eight months of 2020 as against the previous whole year’s ( 12 months from April 2019 to March 2020) figure of 69 million dollars. Peru has overtaken Chile as the second largest destination of Indian pharma, after Brazil.

 

The second highest increase was to Mexico with 83 million dollars as against 63 m in the previous whole year.

 

Here are the export figures for other markets for  April-Nov 20 with  Apr 2019-March 2020 figures in brackets in millions of dollars

 

Brazil   200 (298)

Chile    74  (93)

Colombia 44 (65)

Venezuela 42 (39)

Dom Republic 34 (39)

Guatemala 31 (43)

Ecuador 18 (30)

Bolivia 14 (24)

Argentina 14 (22)

Honduras 17 (23)

El Salvador 14 (15)

Nicaragua 12 (18)

Panama 13 (11)

 

India is supplying covid vaccines to Brazil and other countries in the region. This Vaccine Diplomacy has enhanced India’s image as the ‘pharmacy of the world’. 

 

Latin America is projected to have a GDP growth of 3.7% in 2021 after the estimated contraction of 7.7% in 2020

 

Given this recovery of growth and enhanced image, India’s pharma exports should increase in the coming years.

 

India’s global pharma exports have gone up by 16% in the first eight months of 2020 reaching 12.6 billion dollars, despite the 16% decline in India’s total exports to the world.

 

India’s pharma exports to US (the #1 market of India) have increased by 14% in the period April-Nov 2020, reaching 4.8 billion dollars. For the first time, pharmaceuticals rank as the #1 export of India to US, overtaking diamonds, gem and jewellery exports.