India’s trade with Latin America in 2020

India’s exports to Latin America decreased marginally by eight percent to 12.14 billion dollars in 2020 (January to December) from 13.2 billion dollars in 2019, according to the just-released trade figures of ITC Geneva. 
 
Venezuela has surprised with a spectacular increase. Exports to Venezuela have gone up from 241 million dollars in 2019 to 758 m in 2020. In fact, the annual exports were in double digits around 75 m in the years 2016 to 2018. The reason for the increase is diesel exports which accounted for 662 m.
 
Exports to Argentina have gone up from 634 m to 739 m in 2020.
 
Exports to three more countries have increased marginally: Guatemala from 290 to 299 m, Paraguay from 136 to 149 m and Nicaragua from 65 m to 73 m.
 
The top destination of India’s exports were as follows:
Brazil  3.68 billion dollars,  Mexico 3.05 bn, Colombia 830 million, Venezuela 758 m,  Argentina 739 m, Chile 738 m and Peru 701 m.

 

Major exports were: vehicles 2.54 bn, chemicals 2.32 bn, equipments and machinery 1.29 bn, pharmaceuticals 1.13 bn, diesel 1.1 bn, textiles 355 m and iron and steel products 546 m
 
Pharmaceutical exports crossed the billion dollar mark with 1.13 billion dollars in 2020 from 967 m in 2019. India is the fifth largest global supplier to the region. Main destination of pharma exports were: Brazil 321 m, Peru 125 m, Chile 111 m, Mexico 100 m, Colombia 68 m, Venezuela 55 m, Guatemala 45 m and Dominican Republic 46 m.
 
Imports have declined sharply to 16.7 bn dollars in 2020 from 21.4 bn in 2019. The fall in imports of crude oil and copper was the main reason for the decline in imports.
 
Principal sources of imports were: Brazil 3.19 bn, Mexico 3.06 bn, Argentina 2.62 bn, Venezuela 2.34 bn, Peru 1.38 bn, Colombia 1.16 bn, Bolivia 1.02 bn and Chile 853 m. 
 
For the first time, Bolivia has joined the billion dollar club of Latin American exporters to India.
 
Main item of imports: crude oil 6.92 billion dollars, gold 3.57 bn, vegetable oil 2.5 bn, copper 631 m, raw sugar 631 m, equipments and machinery 517 m, wood 293 m and chemicals 283 m
 
The crude oil suppliers were: Venezuela 2.3 bn, Mexico 2.2 bn, Brazil 1.18 bn, Colombia 694 m and Ecuador 239 m. 
 
The major sources of gold were: Peru 1.33 bn, Bolivia 1.01 bn, Colombia 378 m, Argentina 259 m, Brazil 247 m and Dominican Republic 154 m. 
 
As usual, Argentina was the most dominant supplier of vegetable oil with 2.23 bn. The other supplier was Paraguay with 271 m.
 
Chile was the main source of copper with 580 m. The copper imports of India have drastically declined by fifty percent from its peak.
 
India continues to import raw sugar from Brazil, refine and reexport it to other countries.
India was the 8th largest destination for Latin America's global exports in 2020. 

The region which had a historic GDP contraction of 7.7% in 2020 is forecast to rebound with a growth of 3.7% in 2021. 

The region's external trade declined by 8.6% in 2020. Latin America's imports were 904 billion dollars (down from 1006 bn in 2019) and exports 935 bn in 2020, declining from 1007 bn in 2019. 

India’s total trade with Latin America has come down by 17% to 28.8 billion dollars in 2020 from 35 bn in 2019.

The Latin America-US trade had also declined by 14% in 2020.

However, China's trade with the region held steady at 315 billion dollars, the same figure as that of 219. China's exports had gone down to 150 billion from 151 bn while the imports had gone up from 164 bn to 165 bn. 

Neoliberalism started in Chile and it is being buried now: Allende should be smiling.

Salvador Allende, the socialist President of Chile from 1970 to 1973 gave priority to fight against poverty and inequality. General Pinochet, in collusion with local oligarchs and the US government, overthrew Allende in a bloody coup. Besides  bombing the Presidential palace with airforce, Pinochet followed up with systematic killing and disappearance of thousands of leftists, student and trade union leaders and liberal intellectuals. In 1980, he imposed a neoliberal constitution which promoted and protected capitalism and privatized education, healthcare, water rights, utilities and pensions. This helped the private market to grow its profit freely while depriving poor and lower middle class access to education and healthcare. After the restoration of democracy in 1990, some amendments were made to the constitution. The socialist governments tried major amendments but they were blocked by the right wing coalition. The trade unions, students and the marginalised population took to the streets from time to time against social injustice. These were contained with the heavy hand of security forces. But when the conservative government of billionaire President Pinera increased the cost of metro tickets by 30 pesos in October 2019, it became the tipping point. The protestors escalated the violence and paralysed daily life. Driven to the wall, the Pinera government sat with the protest leaders and agreed to their demand for a new constitution, among other things. 

The result of elections held on 15-16 May for the 115 membership of the new constituent assembly is like a political earthquake. As someone put it aptly, “ the social uprising in Chile is "not about 30 pesos, it's about 30 years." The voters have punished the two coalitions, both rightist and leftist, which have ruled the country for the last 30 years. Independent candidates have secured 48 seats, the left 28, the centre-left 25, and the right-wing coalition 37. The independents are mostly those who lead the  protests. Many of them are left-wing community organizers and activists of traditional left-wing causes, including environmentalists, feminists, public housing advocates and community organizers. 

 

The remaining 17 seats go to the indigenous people of Chile, whose existence or rights were simply ignored by the Pinochet constitution, one of the only constitutions in Latin America that doesn’t acknowledge Indigenous people. The indigenous constitute 13% of the population. This is the first time ever the indigenous have been recognized and given guaranteed representation.

 

The new constitutional body is the first in the world to stipulate a roughly equal number of male and female delegates. A total of 699 women and 674 men stood in the elections.  The women have got 77 seats and the men 78. The gender parity idea was opposed by right wing parties but it was overruled by the Congress.  

The sound defeat of the right wing, reduced to just 37 seats mean that they cannot block the proposals passed by two third majority. The 20% of the vote got by  President Pinera’s ruling “Chile Vamos” coalition is its worst electoral performance since democracy was restored in 1990.

Along with this election, there were also simultaneous elections for 16 regional governors, 345 mayors and 2,240 municipal councilors for the period 2021-2025. Although the final results of these elections will not be known until the end of the week, the preliminary results indicate a similar blow to the governing coalition, which lost important mayors offices and regional governments. Meanwhile, the left-wing parties retained their municipalities and gained several others across the country, including in the capital Santiago. The communists doubled their mayoralties to six. The most significant victory was that of Irací Hassler in the symbolically significant commune of Santiago Centro, in the capital. She defeated the current right-wing mayor, Felipe Alessandri.

Both the leftist and rightist coalitions which have ruled Chile in the last three decades have acknowledged their defeat. President Pinera said, “the citizens have sent a clear and strong message to the government and also to all traditional political forces. We are not adequately tuning in with the demands and desires of the citizens. We are being challenged by new expressions and leadership. It is our duty to listen with humility and attention to the message of the people. It is a great opportunity for Chileans to build a more fair, inclusive, prosperous and sustainable country”.

The Chilean neoliberal experiment, protests and end of neoliberalism should be a lesson for Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and other countries in Latin America which have seen such protests against inequality. The Chileans have shown how the social disparity could be tackled democratically and relatively peacefully without too much bloodshed

 

The new constituent assembly will draft a constitution within twelve months. Because the convention will have a veto-proof left-wing majority, the new constitution will likely include many of the long lists of social rights that those candidates campaigned on, including the right to housing, education, health and, most importantly, a public pension system to replace the private saving accounts. Greg Grandin, a world-renowned historian of Latin America, tweeted, "Allende is smiling. Neoliberalism started in Chile. It will end in Chile”.

  

Frida Kahlo: pain and painting

Frida Kahlo took to painting to distract her mind from the acute pain she suffered after a terrible accident at the age of eighteen on September 17, 1925. The bus that took her home from school was rammed by a streetcar in Mexico City. She was literally impaled on a metal bar in the wreckage; her spine was fractured, collarbone broken, her pelvis crushed, her abdomen and uterus punctured, shoulders dislocated and leg crushed. Her scream was said to have been louder than the siren of the ambulance which took her to the hospital. Frida’s condition was so grave that the doctors did not think they could save her. They thought she would die on the operating table.

 
It was a miracle that she was saved after surgeries and treatment for two years. After the accident, she had to wear a special corset made of metal or plastic to keep her spine straight. She had to wear special shoes to adjust for the deformed leg. The wounds within her deteriorated from time to time causing infections and requiring further surgeries. In her life of forty seven years, Frida had undergone at least thirty-two surgical operations and amputation of toes and one of her legs. 
 
Her life from the day of the accident until her death, twenty-nine years later, was filled with constant pain and threat of illness. It was a grueling battle against slow decay and continuous feeling of fatigue. Pain killers became part of her daily diet. Towards the end of her life, she was drinking two litres of cognac a day to drown her pain, besides taking morphine. She wanted to be a mother but her attempts ended in miscarriages and abortions since her damaged body could not hold the baby.  
 
When she was bedridden after the accident, her father gave her brush and paint and a special easel which was attached to her bed. Since the plaster cast did not allow her to sit up, she had to paint while lying down. She wrote, “ I began to paint during convalescence from an automobile accident that forced me to stay in bed for almost a year. During all these years I have worked with the spontaneous impulse of my feeling. I have never followed any school or anyone’s influence, I have not expected to get from my work more than the satisfaction of the fact of painting itself and of saying what I could not say in any other way. Since my subjects have always been my sensations, my states of mind and the profound reactions that life has been producing in me, I have frequently objectified all this in figures of myself, which were the most sincere and real thing that I could do in order to express what I felt inside and outside of myself”.
 
“I was not permitted to fulfill the desires which the whole world considers normal, and nothing seemed more natural than to paint what had not been fulfilled. My paintings are the most frank expression of myself, without taking into consideration either judgments or prejudices of anyone”.
 
Three concerns impelled her to make art, she told a critic in 1944: her vivid memory of her own blood flowing during her childhood accident; her thoughts about birth, death, and the “conducting threads” of life; and her desire to be a mother.
 
Frida poured out her suffering and transmuted her pain in paintings which became her biography. “I paint myself because I am so often alone,” Frida said, “because I am the subject I know best.” Dramatization of pain became her central theme in paintings. She became her own model. She spent long hours scrutinizing her reflection in the mirror and reproducing that reflection.
 
Frida had made some two hundred paintings, mostly self- portraits. Exhibition of her paintings were held in New York and Paris besides Mexico City. Louvre had acquired one of her paintings. Her works have been declared as  part of  national cultural heritage by the Mexican government.
 
Frida had a remarkable mental strength with which she overcame her chronic suffering and tried to live a full life. She hid her grief with outward cheerfulness and loud laughter. She refused to be confined by the dictates of the bodily pains and handicaps. Even when she was very sick and when doctors had prohibited her moving out of the bed, she went in an ambulance to the gallery hosting exhibition of her paintings in Mexico city. She was carried on a stretcher from the ambulance to the special medical bed installed in the gallery. Lying down in a colourfully decorated bed, she interacted with guests and joined the party singing and celebrating. During another period of illness, she went in a wheel chair to participate in a political protest in Mexico city. 
  
She married the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera in 1929. She was 22 and Rivera was 43, twice married and divorced.  She was petite (5’3”), light (44 kilos in weight) and pretty while he was a huge man over six feet in height, 130 kilos in weight and was somewhat ugly and monstrous in appearance. She used to do paintings in small canvasses while he used to paint large murals on walls standing on scaffolds. It was like a classic case of beauty and beast. It was she who took the first step of reaching out and seducing him. She went to the site where he was doing mural work and asked him for his assessment of her painting. She told him openly that she knew his reputation as a womanizer and asked for an objective view. He was taken aback but liked her instantly for her courage, boldness and artistic talent.  But after the marriage, Rivera continued many affairs despite Frida’s fierce fights. He had affairs even with her own sister. Frida hit back and took revenge on Rivera by paying him back in his own coin. She started having a number of lovers including his friends both men and women. Her famous affair was with Trotsky, the Russian communist leader who took asylum in Mexico city to escape Stalin’s persecution. Frida and Rivera ended their marriage with divorce in 1939. But they remarried in 1940. Despite his irrepressible infidelity, Rivera loved and cared for Frida. He admired her independent spirit and courage. Her candor disarmed him. Her odd mixture of freshness and unmasked sexuality tempted him. Her spunk and mischief appealed to his own boyish prankishness. On her part, Frida had loved him and taken care of Rivera in a motherly way forgiving his sins. 


Frida wore colourful costumes and jewelry drawing inspiration from the native Mexican cultures. She dressed in flamboyant clothes and accessories causing a sensation wherever she went. With her Mexican dress, she stood out from her compatriots who were copying European fashion. The extravagant dress was also a clever way to hide and distract attention away from her scars and her handicaps. Ribbons, flowers, jewels, and sashes became more and more colorful and elaborate as her health declined.
 
Frida’s vocabulary was equally colourful both in speaking and writing. She used the choicest abusive words and liked to shock the cultured and refined elite. She loved to use foul language—words like pendejo (which, politely translated, means idiotic person) and hijo de su chingada madre (son of a bitch). She enjoyed the effect on her audience, an effect enhanced by the fact that the gutter vocabulary issued from such a feminine-looking creature, one who held her head high on her long neck as nobly as a queen. In her letters she calls Paris as Pinchissimo (most vile) Paris. She says, “ I rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas, than to have any thing to do with those “artistic” bitches of Paris. They sit for hours on the “cafes” warming their precious behinds, and talk without stopping about “culture” “art” “revolution” and so on and so forth, thinking themselves the gods of the world, dreaming the most fantastic nonsenses, and poisoning the air with theories and theories that never come true. Next morning—they don’t have any thing to eat in their houses because none of them work and they live as parasites of the bunch of rich bitches who admire their “genius” of “artists.” shit and only shit is what they are”.
  
Frida died at the age of forty seven in 1954. Her legend lives on as an admirable icon of extraordinary strength, courage and resilience. Frida’s life story has inspired books, movies, plays and ballets.
 
The art and life of Frida have been portrayed elaborately and sensitively by Hayden Herrera in the book “ Frida: A biography of Frida Kahlo” published in 2018. Herrera, an American art historian and biographer has brought out ‘the extraordinary qualities that marked Kahlo as a person and as a painter: her gallantry and indomitable alegría (joy) in the face of physical suffering; her insistence on surprise and specificity; her peculiar love of spectacle as a mask to preserve privacy and personal dignity’.
 
The colourful Frida wore Indian saree too, one day in the summer of 1947. Nayantara Sahgal and Rita Dar, the two daughters of Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit (who was later ambassador to Mexico in 1950-51), visited Frida in her house called as La Casa Azul (Blue House) during their vacation in Mexico City. They dressed her up in a saree and she loved it. She gifted them her autographed photos. 

 
Some Indians describe Amrita Sher-Gil as the “Frida of India”, based on some similarities between their works. But this comparison does not do justice to either of the artists since the contrasts and differences in their lives are enormous as against a few common themes in their paintings. 
 
 

Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar

" Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar" is a book by Virginia Vallejo, a Colombian journalist and TV anchor who had a romantic relationship with Pablo Escobar, the notorious narco lord of Medellin.

She fell in love with him while attending a party in his ranch Hacienda Napoles in 1982. Later in 1983 she interviewed him to showcase Escobar’s project to provide houses to the poor as part of his plan to become popular and enter politics. She was the first journalist to interview him on TV. He got elected to the Congress but was hounded and expelled on the charge that he had made his money in narcotrafficking and his involvement in several murder cases. 
 
Virginia continued her romance with Escobar for five years till 1987. She was thrilled to be picked up by Escobar’s private Pegasus jet from Bogota to Medellin. They used to meet in hotels and sometimes even in her apartment in Bogota. Later when he was on the run, he met her in secret locations. He showered her with gifts and financed her shopping trips to New York, Paris, Miami and Milan. She and he pretended to be like Bonnie and Clyde and sometimes as Libertador ( Simon Bolivar) and Libertadora del Libertador (Manuelita Saenz). She proclaimed to him repeatedly that she loved him as she had never loved another. She has reproduced many of her conversations with Escobar. Some of these are personal and romantic while many are about Colombian politics, corruption, drug trafficking, guerrillas and inside story of famous events such as the bombing of the Supreme Court and assassination of Luis Galan, a presidential candidate. She had supported Escobar’s campaign against extradition of Colombian drug traffickers to US. She had recited Neruda’s love poems to Escobar and shared her knowledge and wisdom with him. He tried to impress her with stories of his exploits, adventures and power. It was a mutual win-win for the partners who made use of each other.

 
He shared some of his trade secrets including how he and his fellow drug traffickers financed politicians. For him, the beautiful, educated and intelligent socialite TV personality was a trophy and free publicity. Virginia used her Escobar connection to advance her own career with the knowledge and contacts she had gathered through Escobar. She carried messages and sometimes money from Escobar. She even tried to mediate in the dangerous rivalry between the Cali and Medellin Cartels. 
 
Virginia was already married and divorced twice before she met Escobar. She had affairs with many rich men, about which she boasts openly, “ I had met my first version of “the richest man in Colombia” in 1972 at the presidential palace; I was twenty-two, and he was forty-eight and divorced. Days earlier, my first lover had told me he was the second-richest man in Colombia. For the next twelve years of my life, my boyfriend or secret lover would always be whoever occupied the throne of Colombia’s richest man”.

 
When the Colombian and US governments as well the Cali Cartel went after Escobar, he retaliated with bomb attacks and assassinations. During this time Virginia started courting other men including a German Count. She even flirted with Escobar’s mortal enemy and rival from the Cali cartel. Escobar became jealous and started troubling Virginia. She was scared of Escobar and his henchmen who tapped her phones and monitored her movements. That’s when she started hating him. He was killed by the security forces in December 1993. In 2006, she turned an informant for US FBI which took her to Miami for deposition in some drug and criminal cases. The US government gave her political asylum in 2010 and she is settled in Miami since then. 
 
Virginia Vallejo’s book “ Amando a Pablo, Odiando a Escobar” ( Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar", published in 2006, became a best seller. A film “ Loving Pablo ” with Penelope Cruz acting as Vallejo was made in 2017. There are also a number of other movies and soap operas based on the romantic relationship between Vallejo and Escobar.  
 
Vallejo’s book gives an insight into Colombian politics, drug trafficking, guerrillas and corruption from the view point of a smart, beautiful and ambitious woman who took advantage and tried to get the best out of all that she has exposed. She had no scruples or conscience in making use of men and their money for her own ends with her belief, "when women’s bodies pass through men’s hands, it is the men’s heads that pass through women’s hands". She was prepared for all the surprises of the underworld of drugs and crime, singing Rubén Blade’s Salsa, “la vida te da sorpresas y sorpresas te da la vida” (Life gives you surprises, and surprises give you life).