Adios to Alberto Fujimori, a Latino- Japanese Caudillo

 

 

             Adios to Alberto Fujimori, a Latino- Japanese Caudillo

 

 

Alberto Fujimori, who made history in Latin American politics, as the first Japanese immigrant to become President of Peru in 1990, died on 11 September. He has two world history records. He was the first president who resigned from abroad by sending his resignation through fax to the home country. He was also the first to be convicted and jailed for human rights violations within his own country.

 

Fujimori was an outsider when he entered the presidential elections in 1990. He was not member of any political party nor did he had held any government position. He was a university professor. The poor and indigenous people voted for him frustrated by the periodic political and economic crisis caused by the traditional white political oligarchy. When he joined the race for presidential post, he was a dark horse. He had created a coalition including some leftists under the banner of “Cambio 90” (change). He had a surprise win against the famous writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who won Nobel prize later. Llosa was from the right with a neo-liberal agenda. Interestingly Fujimori become a neoliberal after becoming President.

 

As President, Fujimori  took off like a Meiji reformer and Samurai warrior by crushing the guerilla insurgency, taming  hyperinflation and transforming the economy. He became popular. But he succumbed to hubris and the Latino Caudillo (strong man) virus. He wanted more power and less constraints. In 1992, he did a self-coup by suspending constitution, shutting down the Congress and dissolving the judiciary. He drafted a new constitution which would allow presidential reelection. But despite the international condemnation, he got reelected in the 1995 elections and his party got majority in the Congress. 

 

In December 1996, the leftist guerillas invaded the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Lima during a party and held 72 guests as hostage for 126 days. The hostages included the chief of the anti-terrorist police, the future president Alejandro Toledo and the mother and younger brother of Fujimori.  Fujimori bought time by pretending to negotiate but was preparing for rescue. At the end, he sent in commandos killing all the guerillas and rescuing the hostages in a spectacular operation.

 

After this success, Fujimori became more popular but also more autocratic. He stood for a third term in the 2000 election, violating his own constitution which limited presidency to two terms. And he went on to win but his victory was contested by allegations of irregularities and vote-rigging. There were public protests against his election, abuse of power and corruption. The situation got worse in November after the eruption of a huge scandal of corruption and criminal activities of his chief of intelligence. Fujimori's support collapsed, and a few days later he announced in a nationwide address that he would shut down the intelligence agency and call new elections, in which he would not be a candidate. On 10 November, Fujimori won approval from Congress to hold elections on 8 April 2001. On 13 November, Fujimori left Peru for a visit to Brunei to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum. On 16 November, his government lost a vote of confidence in the Congress. On 17 November, Fujimori traveled from Brunei to Tokyo, where he submitted his presidential resignation via fax. But the Peruvian Congress refused to accept his resignation and removed him from office on the ground that he was "permanently morally disabled". The Japanese government gave asylum to Fujimori, issued a Japanese passport and refused the Peruvian request for extradition. 

 

Fujimori, with his Latino vibrancy, got bored in the staid Japanese society. He declared his intention to return to Peruvian politics. The Peruvian authorities warned him that he would be arrested and prosecuted if he came back.  So he went to Chile in 2005 with the intention to sneak into Peru. But the Chileans detained and extradited him to Peru. The Peruvian court sentenced him to 25 years in jail for crimes of human rights abuse among others. He was released in December 2023, after serving jail term of 18 years. 

 

On 14 July this year, he had announced his candidacy in the Presidential election to be held in 2026, when he would have been 88. On 9 August 2024, the Peruvian government issued a law against prosecution of crimes against humanity committed before 2002. Fujimori was the most important beneficiary of this since there were more pending cases against him. 

 

Fujimori’s daughter Keiko Fujimori has bright chances to become the next president of Peru. She lost the last three elections narrowly. She has founded her own political party which is the strongest in the country. She was close to the father and acted as hostess during his presidency. Fujimori’s son and ex-wife are also in politics but overshadowed by Keiko.

Fujimori was born in in Peru in1938 after his parents migrated from Japan in 1934. They were among the 240,000 Japanese who came to Latin America between 1899 and 1941. Of this 33,000 came to Peru.  They  worked as laborers in farms, mines, industries and building of roads and railways. They endured hardship, racial discrimination and abuses. During the Second World War, the Peruvian government persecuted them with internment, confiscation of assets and restrictions. They even deported about two thousand Japanese to the internment camps in US, which asked for it. But the Fujimori family was lucky and survived in Peru. While his parents were Buddhists, Alberto Fujimori was baptized and raised as catholic. He spoke Japanese besides Spanish. He studied agricultural engineering in a university in Lima and then became a lecturer in  mathematics. He switched to study physics in the University of Strasbourg in France after which he did a masters degree in Mathematics in the US. He married a fellow Japanese-Peruvian Susana Higuchi and had four children. He was Rector of the National Agrarian University of Peru. In 1988-89 he hosted a TV show  in the state television channel on national political and other issues. This experience inspired his interest in politics.

 

The Peruvian political history is colorful with many dramas, experiments, successes and tragedies. Peru was one of the earliest birthplaces of leftist ideology in Latin America. The Peruvian leftist political party APRA (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance) founded in 1924  is one of the longest survivor in Latin American political history. Its agenda included creation of a network of anti-imperialist social and political movements in the region. The party’s candidate Alan Garcia won the 1985 elections and was the predecessor to Fujimori. When Garcia was charged with corruption cases, he fled and took asylum in Colombia and later France. He came back and won the 2006 presidential election. In 2019, he committed suicide when police entered his house to arrest him on corruption charges. 

 

In the last eight years, Peru has had 6 presidents, with one of the presidents lasting for just 5 days. Pedro Castillo, a simple rural peasant leftist elected as president in 2021 was impeached and put in jail for trying a Fujimori-style self-coup in 2022. President Martin Vizcarra was impeached in 2020, two years after his election. Alejandro Toledo, who was President from 2001 to 2006, is in jail on corruption charges. Kuczynski, who was President from 2016 to 18 is under house arrest on corruption charges. 

 

But despite the political instability, the economy has remained stable. The inflation has been in single digit in the last 27 years, a record in Latin America. The macroeconomic fundamentals have been relatively strong and healthy.

 

Mario Vargas Llosa, the famous Peruvian writer of Magical Realism novels, won the Nobel Prize. But Fujimori won against him in the 1990 election with his Japanese twist to the Latino Magical Realism.

 

The Japanese in Latin America

                                     The Japanese in Latin America 
 
A Japanese monthly magazine Chou Koron (Public Discussion) wrote in 1917, ‘Brazil is an enormous country, 21 times bigger than Japan and can accommodate hundreds of millions more inhabitants than now. In South America, the Japanese are welcomed, the soil is rich, and many of the customs of the people resemble ours. There is plenty of room for millions of Japanese in this part of the world”. 
 
The Japanese took this report seriously. Today, there are over a million people of Japanese descent in Brazil, which has the largest number of Japanese outside Japan. Peru has the second largest, followed by Mexico and Argentina. There are an estimated 1.5 million Japanese descendants in Latin America. 
 
“The Japanese in Latin America (Asian American experience)”, a book published in March 2024, brings out interesting and comprehensive information on the Japanese immigration into Latin America, their experience in the new continent, their trauma during the Second World War and their impact on Latin America. The author Daniel M. Masterson is a professor of history in US. He has got collaboration from a US-Japanese scholar Sayaka Funada-Classen who has done research and interviews with the people of Japanese descent in Latin America.
 

The Japanese had come to Latin America as contract laborers to work in agriculture, mines, infrastructure projects and industries. They suffered hardship and racial discrimination. During the Second World War, they were persecuted and some of them were deported to internment camps in the US. But the Japanese have survived and integrated into Latin American society. They have blended the Japanese qualities of stoicism, team work and seriousness with the light-hearted Latino and Samba and Salsa loving life. 
 
The Japanese people did not emigrate on their own. They were encouraged to do so by the strategic policy of the Japanese government which sought to populate other parts of the world with their people. The government of Japan had signed a series of commercial treaties with some Latin American nations in the 1880s which facilitated immigration to the region. The Japanese government supported emigration with subsidies for travel costs and credit for colonizing projects. There were over fifty private emigration companies sending out Japanese abroad in the 1900s. They recruited and transported contract immigrants, extended loans to the immigrants and and invested in colonization projects abroad in collaboration with the government. They operated training Centers  with courses in Portuguese and Spanish languages. 
  
Japanese immigrants went first to Mexico and Peru in the late 1890s. In 1897, the Japanese established an immigrant colony in Chiapas, Mexico. This was organized by the former Japanese Minister of Foreign Relations and ardent proponent of immigration, Takeaki Enomoto.  His enterprise purchased 160,550 acres of land for the project. But this experiment failed. In 1899, a group of 790 Japanese male laborers arrived to work in the coastal sugar plantations of Peru. A small group of 126 Japanese arrived in Chile in 1903, while Cuba and Argentina recorded their first few arrivals in 1907. 
 
In 1907, the US restricted Japanese immigration with the “Gentlemen’s Agreement” signed with the Japanese government. Canada followed suit. The US also put pressure on Mexico and Central America to restrict Japanese immigration since some of the immigrants started moving illegally to the US. After these, the Japanese targeted South America more seriously and systematically for emigration. 
 
In 1908, about 800 Japanese immigrants, mostly in family groups, arrived in Brazil to work in the coffee plantations in Sao Paulo State. In the next three decades, Japanese moved in large numbers to Brazil and in smaller groups to twelve Latin American nations. 
 
Two individuals namely Tanaka, an official of the Morioka Company and Augusto Leguía, a prominent sugar planter and future president of Peru were primarily responsible for initiating Japanese immigration to Peru under the contract labor system in 1899. Subsequent negotiations between the Japanese and Peruvian governments led to the issuance of a decree by President Nicolas Pierola that permitted Japanese contract labor under an initial four-year agreement. This decree stipulated that the recruits were to be primarily experienced male agricultural workers between twenty and forty-five years of age who would work ten hours a day in the cane fields or twelve hours in the sugar mill. 
 
Japanese immigration to Brazil differed from that to Spanish America in that it was heavily subsidized and accompanied by significant capital investment by the Japanese. An agreement for Japanese immigration to Brazil was signed in 1907 by Ryo Mizuno, president of the company Toyo Imin Gaisha with the Brazilian President Jorge Tibirica to bring 3,000 Japanese immigrants to Sao Paulo. These immigrants were to be “agriculturalists fit for farming” and were to consist of families of three to ten members each. They were to be paid on a piecework basis at a rate of 450 to 500 reis (25 to 50 US cents) for every fifty kilos of coffee beans picked.  
 
The Japanese established an administrative agency called as the Federation of Immigration Cooperative Societies under a law passed by the Diet in March 1927. They had created 44  societies in Japan’s 47 prefectures by the mid-1930s. The government extended about $800,000 in loans to the federation to acquire 541,112 acres of land in Sao Paulo and Parana states for colonization. They established another company Sociedade Colonizadora do Brasil Limitada (Brazilian Colonization Company) under Brazilian law to administer the Japanese colonies. This company was used to acquire real estate and construct the infrastructure of roads and common facilities. 
 
In 1926, the Japanese Overseas Development Company (KKKK) purchased 500 acres of land in the province of Cauca, near Cali in Colombia to set up a colony. The company paid for the colonists’ passage as well as their initial local expenses in Colombia. Later, they allowed the colonists to buy their own land.
 
According to the Japanese foreign ministry, a total of 243279 Japanese had migrated to Latin America from 1899 to 1941 with the following break-up: Brazil 187681, Peru 33067, Mexico 14566 and Argentina 5398.
 
The Japanese entry in the Second World War and their devastating defeat caused a trauma for the Japanese Latin Americans. The Latin American governments interned or removed the Japanese from their homes to more secure areas. They froze the bank accounts of the Japanese, confiscated their radios and phones, banned publications in Japanese, restricted their travel and prohibited gatherings of more than five.  They deported about 2000 Japanese to the United States for internment, as requested by the US government. The vast majority of these deportees were Japanese Peruvians. 
 
After the end of the War, the Japanese resumed emigration in 1952. About 50,000 went to Brazil and a few hundred to Bolivia and Paraguay. Many of these post-World War immigrants were from war-torn Okinawa, which was administratively separate from Japan and under direct U.S. military rule. The U.S. government strongly encouraged this immigration because of the economic difficulties of the Okinawan people and the need to acquire land for the military bases on the island. The US administration provided loans and subsidies to these emigrants.
 
Under an agreement between Japanese and Bolivian governments, the immigrants were to “dedicate themselves to professions in agriculture and animal husbandry and to demonstrate industry, honor, and aptitude for work.” The Bolivian government granted 87,198 acres of land with a share of 110 acres for each Japanese household.
 
The Paraguayan dictator Strossner actively encouraged Japanese immigration in his home region of Encarnacion in the border with Argentina. In 1956, he gave land for two colonies to be settled by Japanese. The Japanese government extended  to the colonists credit for tractors, vehicles and construction equipment.
 
Strossner’s example was followed by the Dominican Republic dictator Trujillo who had invited Japanese immigrants to settle near the border with Haiti in a clear effort to discourage further Haitian immigration in this sensitive area. After Trujillo’s assassination in May 1961, most of the Dominican Republic’s Japanese left. 
 
The first-generation Japanese immigrants worked as laborers in agriculture, rubber plantations, sugar mills, mines, road and railway projects, apart from taking up low level jobs as carpenters, barbers (there were more than sixty Japanese-owned barbershops in Cuba by the mid-1920s), waiters, taxi drivers, dry cleaners (The Japanese operated more than 500 drycleaners out of the total 800 dry cleaners in Buenos Aires city in the early 1950s) and even as domestic helpers. They suffered enormous hardship, racial discrimination and abuse in Latin America. The Peruvians called the Japanese as Chino macacos (Chinese monkeys) equating them with the Chinese who had come earlier as coolies. 
 
The first immigrants to Latin America were overwhelmingly male contract laborers who sought to better themselves financially and then return to Japan. Only a few returned to Japan. Later, during the periodic economic crises in Latin America and after the emergence of Japan as a prosperous country, the Japanese immigration has reversed. Some third generation Japanese have gone back to Japan temporariiy and a few permanently for better jobs and economic stability.
 
But most of the descendants of Japanese immigrants have stayed and become full citizens of Latin America. They have steadily climbed up the social ladder into middle class with education and entrepreneurship. The Japanese Brazilians have even entered politics at the local, regional, and national levels becoming ministers, mayors and members of legislative bodies. Alberto Fujimori became the President of Peru in 1990 and continued for ten years till 2000. His daughter Keiko Fujimori is head of a political party which has got a number of seats in the Congress. She contested in the presidential elections three times but lost narrowly. She has chances of becoming President in the future.
 
 
President Alberto Fujimori had started off in 1990 like a Meiji reformer by ending the guerilla insurgency, taming  hyperinflation and transforming the economy. But in the end, he turned out like a typical Latino Caudillo (strong man) trampling democracy, abolishing the Congress and ruling as an autocrat. He got elected for a third time in 2001 by manipulating the constitution and rigging the elections. But he faced strong public protests. When the criminal and corruption scandals erupted in November 2001, he fled to Japan from where he sent in his resignation by fax, in a bizarre way.  The Japanese government gave asylum to him, issued a Japanese passport and refused the Peruvian request for extradition. But Fujimori did not want to fade into quiet retirement. He came to Chile with the intention of entering Peru but was arrested and extradited to Peru in 2005. He was sentenced to 25 years in jail for human rights abuse crimes. He was released in December 2023. On 14 July this year, he has announced his candidacy in the Presidential election to be held in 2026, when he would be 88 years old. On 9 August 2024, the Peruvian government issued a law against prosecution of crimes against humanity committed before 2002. Fujimori is the most important beneficiary of this. 
 
The Fujimori story is like one of the Magical Realism novels of Maria Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel prize winner for literature. Fujimori beat Llosa in the 1990 Presidential election. Since then, Llosa has become a permanent enemy and fierce critic of Fujimori. The juicy story of Fujimori is ideal material for a Llosa novel. It is surprising that Llosa has not ventured to write a novel based on the story of Fujimori. May be because Fujimori the Japanese macho, has outdone the typical Latino Caudillos, beyond the Latino imagination of Llosa. 
 
 

Argentine movie “ Goyo”

The film “Goyo” is one of the best Argentine movies I have seen in recent years. 

 
It is a romantic story of Goyo, an autistic young man, who falls in love  with an older married woman Eva who has moved away from her husband. Goyo is autistic but artistic. He paints and has a vast knowledge of art in which he has graduated. While he is good in his work as a museum guide, he is awkward and uncomfortable in dealing with people. He tries to understand people and situations through reading and theoretical analysis. One day, he sees Eva while she was struggling and angry with her broken umbrella in rain. Her image sets his heart on fire. He discovers that Eva works in the same museum as security guard. He tries to court her in his own absurd and comical way. He is encouraged by his brother  who coaches him on how to deal with women. Eva is overwhelmed by the innocent, sincere and talented Goyo and his painting of her portrait. 
 
Moment to stop….…and let you enjoy the rest of the story by watching the movie.

The Director Marcos Carnevale has handled autism with a sensitive and empathetic touch while making us laugh and smile with Goyo’s clumsy behavior and formal talk, which is humorous. He has made the simple and predictable story poignant through the complex Argentine characters.
 
The Uruguayan Actor Nicolas Furtado touches our heart as Goyo, the adorable young man with the Asperger's Syndrome. The Argentine actress Nancy Duplaa in her role of Eva and the other actors did not have to do any acting in the movie. They have simply talked and behaved in the same natural way as they do in every day life. The Latino 'magic' comes out from the Argentine 'realism'. The Argentines do not need stories or fantasies or imagination. Their reality is more fantastic than magic. Otherwise how can one explain a country which was one of the richest in the first three decades of the last century becoming now a country with fifty percent poverty rate and severe economic crisis. And this is not the first time of crisis..The crisis in 2001 was much more traumatic than the current one. The Argentines  create crisis for themselves periodically but regularly and predictably. Argentina is a rare country which has moved from the First World to the Third World.

Goyo brings out the typical and unique Argentine mindset and cultural traits. Watching the Argentines talk and argue in the movie and in every day life is an entertainment by itself. This was the best part of my five year stay in Buenos Aires. I used to enjoy listening to the colorful conversations of the Argentines in the cafes in Buenos Aires. The city is famous for its legendary cafes and book stores. The Argentines read a lot of books, analyze the contents and discuss them seriously in the cafes for hours together. The Argentine taxi drivers are one of the most well-read and articulate in the world. 

Even when the Argentines use the most abusive and angry words, they do it with creativity, style, sarcasm and humor. They have a rare flair for combining their notorious haughtiness with humorous naughtiness. There are lots of jokes about the Argentines in the rest of Latin America. Even the Argentines themselves (including Pope Francis) make fun of their compatriots and write books. My favorite books are “ Che Boludo” and El Pelotudo Argentino” which have amazing collection of jokes and stories.

The Argentines complicate even the simplest things by too much complex and critical analysis. Once when I explained how India is a complicated country due to people speaking different languages and unable to understand each other, an Argentine commented, " In Argentina we speak only one language but we still don't understand each other". For Argentines, every little thing is like the Aleph (a point in space that contains all other points and reveals everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously) in the famous story of Borges. 

 
The Argentine film makers come out with gems like “Goyo” from time to time despite their limited budget and other resource constraints.  The last Argentine film which impressed me was “Wild Tales”, released in 2014. It narrates the extreme reactions of the Argentines when they are emotional. The Argentine President Javier Milei with his haughty talk and extremist outbursts is like one of the characters in "Wild Tales". He is not exceptional or different. He is simply and naturally behaving as an authentic Argentine...ha..ha..

Besides its delightful entertainment as a drama, the film Goyo has a valuable educational contribution to the society. It makes people to understand and develop empathy for those who are disadvantaged in social skills.
 
Goyo, which has just been released in Netflix, deserves an Oscar award..
 

United States is the obstacle for free and fair elections in Venezuela

United States is the obstacle for restoration of democracy in Venezuela
 
Venezuela is holding elections on 28 July. But the outcome is predictable and inevitable. The ruling Chavista government of Maduro will not lose the elections and even if they lose, they will not allow the opposition to come to power. The ruling establishment cannot afford to let the opposition to come to power for a simple and fundamental reason.

The US has filed criminal charges in US courts against President Maduro and has announced a bounty of 15 million dollars on his head. Here is the US State Department notification:

"Maduro was charged in a March 2020 Southern District of New York federal indictment for narco-terrorism, conspiracy to import cocaine, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices in violation of Title 21 U.S.C. §§ 960a and 963, and 18 U.S.C. § 924. 

The U.S. Department of State is offering a REWARD OF UP TO $15 MILLION for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of Nicolás Maduro Moros.If you have information and are located outside of the United States, please contact the nearest U.S. Embassy or Consulate. If in the United States, please contact the local Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) office in your city".

Announcing bounty on the head of the serving president of a country is unusual and illegal. But the US does not care for international law. 

There is a total of 55 million dollars bounty on the heads of 14 Venezuelan government leaders. These include Vice President Cabello (10 million dollars bounty), ministers, military officials, judges and senior government officials. These are serious charges such as drug trafficking, narco-terrorism, money laundering and possession of weapons. The punishment for these would be imprisonment in US jails for long periods or for life.  

The US has been intervening in Venezuela ever since the leftist president Hugo Chavez came to power in 1998. The US had supported a coup against him April 2002. Chavez was arrested and put in jail. But the coup organizers messed up the capture of power by their greed and incompetence. This opened the opportunity for Chavez to come back to power after 48 hours. Since then, the US has imposed brutal economic sanctions on Venezuela ruining its economy and particularly oil production and exports. During the Trump administration, there were a number of open attempts for regime change. 

The US refused to recognize the legitimacy of the reelection of President Maduro in 2018 and instigated a legislative leader Juan Guaido to declare himself as president in January 2019. They recognized Guaido as the President and forced over 50 countries including Latin American countries and members of EU to do the same. The US let  Guaido and his cronies and American lawyers to appropriate the  Venezuelan government funds frozen in American banks. But the Guaido circus collapsed in corruption scandals. Then the US dropped Guaido and re-recognised Maduro government and loosened the sanctions in order to deal with the oil shortage caused by the Ukraine crisis. Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world which are more than even those of Saudi Arabia.

If the opposition comes to power after the 28 July elections, the US will ask them for extradition of Maduro and dozens of government leaders to US. The opposition leaders would be too happy to oblige. Many of the current government, military and judicial members will end up in jail in the US. 
This is what has just happened to the ex-President of Honduras Juan Hernandez. He was in power for two terms from 2014 to 2022. As soon as he finished his term, he was extradited to US where he has been convicted to life imprisonment on drug trafficking charges. His brother is also in US jail on the same charges.

In 1989, the US invaded Panama, captured President Manuel Noriega and took him to US where he was put in jail for 17 years on drug trafficking charges. Noriega was a CIA asset and was helping the Americans to destabilize the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the eighties besides doing other dirty work for the Americans.
So why would the Venezuelan leadership commit mass suicide by letting the opposition come to power? The Chavistas might change Maduro for another one of their own. But they cannot afford to give up power to the pro-American opposition.

The people of Venezuela are the victims in the game between the US and the government of Venezuela. Democracy is fractured and the economy is in ruins for over a decade. Inflation is running high. There is shortage of food and essential items since the government does not have enough foreign exchange for imports. Oil exports and production have been severely crippled by the American sanctions. Poverty and insecurity have forced over five million Venezuelans to flee and take refuge in to other Latin American countries and the US. The country is crying out for relief. 

As long as the US holds the sword over the heads of the leftist government leaders of Venezuela, there is no possibility for free and fair elections and change of government. 
 

China’s Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Latin America

 China’s Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Latin America 
 
Chinese FDI totaled $187.5 billion in Latin America in the period 2003 – 2022. 
China’s average annual FDI was $14.2 billion between 2010 and 2019 but fell to $7.7 billion from 2020 to 2021, and then $6.4 billion in 2022.
 
Brazil is the largest recipient of Chinese FDI at 78.6 billion dollars, followed by Peru– 32 bn, Mexico-24 bn, Argentina-18 bn, Chile-16, Ecuador-4, Bolivia-3, Venezuela-2 and Colombia-1
 
FDI in electricity generation and transmission is an impressive $16.9 billion. Chinese companies own fully or partially 304 power plants in Brazil, which total 16,736 MW, or 10 percent of the national generation capacity. China Southern Power Grid’s ongoing acquisition of Italian Enel’s equity stakes in Lima’s electricity distribution will put 100 percent of Lima’s electricity in the hands of the Chinese company
 
Chinese President will inaugurate the Chancay port in Peru in November 2024. China has invested $3.6 billion in this deep-water mega-port. China’s state-owned COSCO will have exclusive operating rights of the port.  The port will boost trade by reducing shipping time between Peru and China by ten days.  

Besides large-scale infrastructure projects,  the Chinese moving into areas of innovation such as information and communication technology (data centers, cloud computing, 5G network), renewable energy, electric vehicles and agri-science
 
Source:
 
https://www.thedialogue.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Emerging-Trends-in-Chinese-Foreign-Direct-Investment-in-LAC.pdf
 
 
 
 

Bitter fruit: The story of the American coup in Guatemala

Banana, a sweet and common fruit, became a bitter fruit for Guatemala.
 
United Fruit Corporation (UFCO), an American company, was the monopoly producer and exporter of bananas from Guatemala in the first half of the twentieth century. The company became more than a banana monopoly.  It functioned as a state within a state. It was the largest land owner in the country with about 550,000 acres.
 
The company controlled the main port Puerto Barrios and the town around it. Any business seeking to export or import goods through the port was at the mercy of the company for charges, terms and conditions. 
 
UFCO owned the IRCA rail line, the only means of moving products to and from Puerto Barrios. IRCA was charging the highest freight rate in the world.  
 
UFCO was running the telegraph and telephone service of the country. 
 
UFCO was the largest employer in the country.
 
In essence, the company had nearly complete control over the nation’s international commerce and domestic economy.
 
The company had used its clout to get the best deal from the country’s corrupt ruling establishment who had granted the company exemption from taxation, duty-free importation of goods and a guarantee of low wages and restrictions on trade unions. 
 
But the company faced challenges from the leftist President Jacobo Arbenz who assumed the presidency in March 1951. He was a nationalist with ideals of helping the poor and reducing the exploitation of the country by UFCO and the local oligarchs. He initiated policies for poverty alleviation, protection of labor and better educational system. He started land reforms by expropriating uncultivated land from the rich (after compensating the owners with government bonds). During the first eighteen months of the program, his government distributed 1.5 million acres to some 100,000 peasants. The properties expropriated included 1,700 acres owned by President Arbenz himself and another 1,200 acres owned by his friend and later Foreign Minister Guillermo Toriello. 
 
In 1953, the Arbenz government seized 209,842 acres of the UFCO’s uncultivated land. The government offered $627,572 of compensation in bonds, based on UFCO’s declared tax value of the land. But UFCO had undervalued its property in official declarations in order to reduce its already insignificant tax liability. But now that the declared value was being used to determine compensation, the company howled in protest. On April 20, 1954, a formal complaint was delivered to Guatemalan authorities, not by the company but by the U. S. State Department. The note demanded $16 million in compensation basing its claim on international law, which, it contended, required fair compensation for lands seized from foreigners despite domestic laws. The amount offered by Guatemala averaged about $2.99 per acre, while the State Department wanted over $75 per acre; the company had paid $1.48 per acre when it bought the land nearly twenty years earlier. In the negotiations, the United States ambassador took the lead on the side of the company. Guatemalan Foreign Minister Guillermo Toriello refused to accept the State Department note, branding it “another attempt to meddle in the internal affairs of Guatemala”. 
 
Many influential members of the American establishment had personal interest or stake in UF. These included Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and John Moors Cabot, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, whose family owned stock in the company. His brother Thomas had served as president of the corporation in 1948. American ambassador to UN Henry Cabot Lodge was a stockholder. He had been a vigorous public defender of UFCO while he was senator from Massachusetts. The wife of Edmund Whitman, UFCO’s public relations director, was Eisenhower’s personal secretary, Anne Whitman. Undersecretary of State Bedell Smith was seeking an executive job with UFCO while helping to plan the coup against Guatemala (he later was named to its board of directors). Robert Hill, ambassador to Costa Rica during the coup, was close to the UFCO hierarchy, having worked for Grace Shipping Lines, which had interests in Guatemala. In 1960, he became a director of UFCO. 
 
The US State department, CIA and UFCO started a coordinated malicious propaganda campaign against President Arbenz calling him as a communist and falsely accusing that Guatemala was becoming a beach head for Soviets. UFCO appointed a PR firm which lobbied with the American Congress and the media feeding them fake news and lies. The firm produced a 94-page study, called “Report on Central America 1954” according to which Guatemala was ruled by a Communist regime bent on conquering Central America and seizing the Panama Canal. The US media such as New York Times carried such propaganda and amplified it through their own reporters sent to Guatemala as guests of UFCO. 
 
The United States Information Agency cranked up a more sophisticated crusade. Its propagandists wrote more than 200 articles, made twenty-seven thousand copies of anti-Communist cartoons and posters and distributed them to US and Latin American newspapers. The agency shipped more than 100,000 copies of a pamphlet called “Chronology of Communism in Guatemala” throughout Latin America. It produced special movies and radio commentaries and distributed them across the hemisphere. 
 
Even the American Catholic establishment collaborated with the CIA.  Cardinal Spellman of New York arranged clandestine contacts between Guatemalan Archbishop Mariano Rossell Arellano and a CIA agent. The Guatemalan priests read a pastoral letter in all the churches calling the attention of citizens to the presence of Communism in the country and demanding that the people should rise against this enemy of God and country. The CIA air-dropped thousands of leaflets of the pastoral message all over Guatemala.
 
The Americans started preparing a ‘regime change’ operation and initiated talks with Guatemalan army officers to overthrow President Arbenz. They chose Colonel Castillo Armas as their man for the job. He was in exile in Honduras after he lost out in a coup attempt earlier. The American ambassador and the CIA officials sorted out the rivalries among the rival presidential contenders from the army and forced everyone to line up behind their man. They used the right wing dictatorship regimes of Honduras, El Salvador and Dominican Republic to establish bases there for supplies to the rebel army. The CIA arranged arms and aircrafts. American planes flew over Guatemala throwing bombs and leaflets causing panic among the public. UFCO provided logistics support through its port, ships and railway lines. The American ambassador bullied the Guatemalan president and openly instigated the army officers to rebel against the government. Finally, the Americans succeeded in overthrowing President Arbenz in June 1954 and sending him out on exile. They made their man Col Armas as President. The American president Eisenhower celebrated the American victory and felicitated CIA and State Department officials involved in the Guatemalan coup. UF rewarded some of the CIA and State Department officials with plum posts.
 
This Bitter Fruit story of Guatemala is not a Magical Realism fiction by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The book “Bitter fruit: The story of the American coup in Guatemala” is the work of two American authors namely Stephen Schlesinger (Director of the World Policy Institute, a foreign policy think-tank at the New school in New York) and Stephen Kinzer (a journalist who has written extensively on Latin America in media such as New York Times and became Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University) They have done a thorough research of the unclassified US government and CIA documents and interviewed some of those involved in the story from both sides. They have used the research materials themselves to narrate the events, like in a novel. They published this book in 1982 and updated it in 2005.
 

Guatemala was the first case of “regime change” operation by the US. It was a guinea pig and test laboratory for CIA. It was this success in Guatemala which encouraged the Americans to try regime changes in other countries of Latin America and the rest of the world. The US followed the same formula to overthrow the leftist President Allende in Chile in 1973. 
 
The US installed military dictator Castillo Armas was succeeded by other military regimes in the next three decades. These regimes in collaboration with the local oligarchy had ruined the country with their oppressive policies and atrocities. Naturally, people rose in revolt and leftist guerilla groups sprang up. The US came to the help of the dictators to counter the insurgencies. They trained Guatemalan military and police in counter insurgency operations and supplied arms. The US posted their own military officers in Guatemala to direct and advise the local security forces. The US planes, based in Panama, dropped napalm bombs on areas suspected of being guerrilla haunts. 
 
Guatemala suffered more than two hundred thousand killings during the civil war. The Guatemalan military was responsible for ninety-three percent of the murders. The indigenous people of Guatemala, who constitute the majority of the population but have been historically excluded and marginalized, suffered the worst. The death and destruction of  the civil war made people to migrate to the US. The end of the civil war and restoration of democracy in the late nineties had not given any relief to the people. The civil war has been replaced by gang wars which have made Guatemala as one of the countries with the highest murder rates in the world. 
 
El Salvador and Honduras neighboring Guatemala have also suffered the same fate. The American supported military dictatorships of these countries destroyed their countries with oppression and unleashing civil wars.  The Americans used all the three countries as bases for their “Contra Wars” to destabilize the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the eighties. More destruction and death followed. The civil wars were followed by gang wars especially in the Northern Triangle of Violence  which includes Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. The continuing violence has made hundreds of thousands of people to flee and migrate to the US. The guns used for crimes and violence by the gangs are mostly American guns trafficked illegally through the thousands of gun shops in the border with Mexico.
 
The problem of immigration of Central Americans into the US is, therefore, an inevitable and logical consequence of the destruction of these countries by the US. It is a ‘No Brainer’ as the American would say.  
 

Chinese development finance and commercial loans to Latin America

 Chinese development finance and commercial loans to Latin America
 
Latin America has received a total of 116 billion dollars of sovereign credit from China in the last two decades. 
 
Recipients as follows:
 
Venezuela  59. 2 billion dollars
Brazil            32.4 bn
Ecuador.    11.8
Argentina  7.7
Bolivia       3.2
Mexico.      1.0
Costa Rica 533 million
Cuba            369 m
Peru             50 m
 
These loans were given through China Development Bank (CDB) and Export-Import Bank of China (Ex-Im Bank). The recipients were Latin American governments and state-owned enterprises.
 
The annual sovereign lending reached a peak of 25 billion dollars in  2010. In 2023 it has come down to just 1.3 billion. In fact, the average annual loan given in the last five years from 2019 was 1.3 billion.
 
Energy sector is the major recipient of the sovereign credit at 94 billion dollars, followed by infrastructure at 12 billion, mining 2 billion and others 12 billion.
 
China is receiving repayment in the form of crude oil from Venezuela and Ecuador.
 
In addition to the above, China's “big five” commercial banks—the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), Bank of China (BOC), China Construction Bank (CCB), Bank of Communications (BoCom), and Agricultural Bank of China (ABC) have extended 61 loans to 9 Latin American countries. These are: Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Honduras. But the amount of these loans is not known. Some of the loans have been given as part of a consortium of lenders. Of the total loans, 35 have gone into energy sector, 17 into infrastructure, 7 into mining and 2 into other areas.
 
Argentina has received the maximum number (36) of these commercial loans. ICBC has acquired a controlling stake in the Standard Bank in Argentina.
 
Beyond the sovereign lending and commercial loans, China provides finance to Latin American governments and companies through regional and multilateral banks and other sources. For example, China has become member of Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). With this Bank, China cofinances projects in the region. The Americans have been complaining that China has got a large proportion of the projects awarded by the IDB although US is the largest shareholder.

The Chinese credit has played a critical role in boosting their exports to 242 billion dollars in 2023 and investment of over 100 billion dollars in Latin America. The Chinese imports from the region were 242 billion.
 
India’s lines of credit to Latin America is less than half a billion dollars. Obviously India is not in a position to match the Chinese credit. However, the government of India could  consider substantially increasing credit to Latin America. During the Prime Minister’s visit to Brazil for the G-20 meeting, India could consider announcing a line of credit of at least half a billion dollars to Latin America. In this context, it is a welcome news that EximBank of India is going to open an office in Sao Paulo, Brazil in the second half of the year.
 
Increase in credit will help the Indian exporters and investors in the region. India’s exports to Latin America were 19.15 billion dollars and imports 23.75 billion with a total of 42.9 bn in 2023-24 (financial year April-March), according to the Commerce Ministry of India.  Major export items are: vehicles, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, textiles, equipment and machinery, There is scope to increase India’s exports to 50 billion dollars in the coming years.

Indian companies have invested over ten billion dollars in Latin America in sectors such as energy, agrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, IT and autoparts. Indian IT companies employ around 40,000 Latin Americans to service their clients in North America and Europe besides local ones. The largest Indian agrochemical firm UPL does more business in Latin America ( close to 2 billion dollars) than in India where their turnover is around a billion dollars.

Latin America is contributing to India's energy and food security through supply of crude oil, edible oil, pulses and fruits. The region has substantial quantity of reserves of lithium, copper and other critical minerals which would be needed by India for its renewable energy agenda.
 
Indian companies are not allowed to bid for IDB projects since India is not a member. Indian project contractors have started getting projects in the region in recent years. For example, Kalpataru Projects International Ltd has got almost a billion dollars of power transmission lines contract in the region. These include a single contract of 430 million dollars in Chile. There is definite scope for more such contracts through IDB, if India becomes a member of the Bank.
 
Source of data on Chinese credit to Latin America: 

https://www.thedialogue.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Chinese-Development-Finance-in-Latin-America-and-the-Caribbean-2023-Update-Final.pdf
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America - book by Ioan Grillo

Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America - book by Ioan Grillo
 

Ioan Grillo, the well-known expert on Latin American drug trafficking, gangs and violence starts off the book saying, “This book is about the move from the Cold War to a chain of crime wars soaking Latin America and the Caribbean in blood. But it starts in the United States. Latin American journalists complain that the US side of the equation is never examined. Where is the American narco?” The American politicians, media and Hollywood trash the image of Latin Americans with deceitful narratives. Drug is a demand and consumer driven business. The US consumers are happy to pay top dollars for suppliers from any country or domestic opioid manufacturing pharmaceutical companies. The US has not done anything meaningful to reduce consumption and demand. Instead, they had resorted to a war on drugs outside the US. This was started by President Nixon to divert attention away from the Vietnam war. The military-industrial complex and the spooks of US embraced the war on drugs enthusiastically to destabilize other countries, infiltrate the foreign security forces and sell arms. 

Thousands of Latin Americans are killed every year with the guns trafficked illegally from the US to the Latin American countries. But when it comes to guns, the Americans use a wrong logic. They say "guns do not kill. It is the people who kill”. This same  logic should apply to the drugs too. Drugs do not kill. It is the consumers who harm themselves by voluntarily, enthusiastically and happily consuming.
 
But unfortunately, Grillo does not go into the details of the US consumer market and elaborate how the drugs are delivered to consumers and money is collected. Instead he joins the American chorus of highlighting the crime and violence of drug lords and other criminal gangs in Latin America. He has covered the gangs of Brazil, Central America, Jamaica and Mexico. He brings out details of how the Brazilian and Central American gangs direct their criminal operations from prisons. In El Salvador, the government had arranged a cease fire between the rival gangs by bringing together their leaders in prison.

Grillo traces the origin of the Brazilian gangs such as Red Command and First Command to the time when the petty criminals were put in the same jails where the political prisoners were kept. The political prisoners had brainwashed the criminals who felt right in fighting against the social injustice in the country. While the rich people were getting richer, the poor and especially the blacks were condemned to struggle in the Favelas (slums) on the margins of the cities. 
 
Grillo has brought out the fact that the criminal gangs in Central America were the consequence of the civil war in which the leftist guerillas fought against the US-supported right wing military dictators and their paramilitary death squads. The civil war had caused the migration of young people to the US. These young central Americans joined gangs and formed their own to survive in the gang-infested Los Angeles area. Later, the US deported these gangsters to Central America where they have been flourishing as groups such as Maras. The violence unleashed by the gangs make more Central Americans to flee to the US. It is a vicious circle in which the US plays the central part.
 
The US had distributed arms to the Contras who were formed by the CIA in Central America to fight against the democratically elected Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Afterwards, the ex-contras and the paramilitary death squads supported by the US got into the gang business  of violence and crime.
 
Since Grillo is based in Mexico, he has given more information on the Mexican gangs who have taken control of certain parts of Mexico and bought off the local police and politicians. He has highlighted the cartel known as Knight Templars, who were lead by Nazario Moreno, known as El Más Loco—the Maddest One. He wrote a kind of holy book called as “Pensamientos” (Thoughts) which give Biblical parables, thoughts and advice. The narco Templars (Santos Nazarios ) worshipped the statuettes in the shrines built by their leader. The prayers went like this, “Give me holy protection, through Saint Nazario, Protector of the poorest, Knights of the people, Saint Nazario, Give us life”. Nazario also self-published his autobiography and distributed it to his followers. The 101 pages are fittingly titled "They Call Me The Maddest One.” Nazario portrays himself as a social bandit, subtitling his memoir “Diary of an Idealist.”
 
Grillo has concluded that the US war on drugs is a failure. This conclusion is now widely shared across the Americas, except by the vested interests like DEA, CIA and the military-industrial complex which profits from the war on drugs.
 
Grillo offers solutions to the drug and violence issues. He says the US and Latin American countries should legalize soft drugs. This has been done by Uruguay and 24 states of US as well as some European countries who have already legalized recreational drugs. Many Latin American countries are also planning to do so.
 
Secondly, Grillo has called for transformation of ghettos which breed gangs and violence. The city of Medellin has achieved commendable success in the outreach to the slums with metro transport, libraries and playgrounds. The slum dwellers have been made to feel as part of the mainstream. Gang violence has dramatically come down. Other Latin American cities can learn from this success story.
 

“El Narco, the bloody rise of Mexican drug cartels” – book by Ioan Grillo

 “El Narco, the bloody rise of Mexican drug cartels” – book by Ioan Grillo

In Mexico, drug traffickers are described collectively by the Spanish word El Narco. In this book “El Narco” Ioan Grillo has traced the origin of the Mexican drug trafficking, evolution of cartels and their violent criminal activities in great detail. He has met  and talked to cartel leaders, their foot soldiers, informers, assassins, prisoners, security forces, politicians and US DEA agents. He has taken the risk of visiting cartel strongholds and crime scenes. 

Ioan Grillo, a British journalist, based in Mexico since 2001, has written extensively on drug traffickers and criminal gangs of Latin America for the last two decades. I have read his book “Blood, Gun and Money: How America arms gangs and cartels” . My blog https://latinamericanaffairs.blogspot.com/2021/03/blood-gun-money-how-america-arms-gangs.html

 

According to Grillo, Sinaloa is the cradle of Mexican drug business and the birthplace ( like Sicily) of the nation’s oldest and most powerful network of traffickers, known as the Sinaloa Cartel. This had inspired the formation of the others such as Tijuana cartel, Guadalajara Cartel, Gulf Cartel, Juarez Cartel and Los Zetas. Sinaloa cartel itself has split into factions. Even after the arrest of the top leaders, the cartels continue with new leaders and new cartels are formed.

 

 During the one-party dictatorship of PRI for seventy years till 2000, the Mexican governments let the cartels do business quietly and some politicians took money from them. They did not see any reason to fight seriously against the traffickers, since the American consumers were paying top dollars happily and eagerly. But the Mexican traffickers earned in millions and not billions as the Colombian drug lords such as Pablo Escobar. After the crack down on Colombian cartels and the killing of Pablo Escobar in 1993, the Mexican cartels gained more power and took control and domination of the drug supply to the US. There was another driver for the Mexican supplies. The Colombians had used the sea route to Florida for drug supply. When the US administration tightened the controls in Florida, the Colombians took the help of Mexicans for supply through the land border. 

 

When they saw the direct opportunities for the multibillion dollar business, more Mexican gangs got into the business. The cartels became bigger and there were more turf wars. President Calderon (2006-12) unleashed  the army to attack the cartels but it had only added fuel to the fire. The security forces themselves  became part of the problem. In the first decade until 2010, around a hundred thousand members of the military and police had deserted from their jobs  to join the cartels. After getting the training and insider knowledge, they have made career moves to the other side to make real money. The most-feared Zetas were formed by the former members of the special forces of the army. They have brought into play their toughness, tactics and use of sophisticated weapons in the fight against their former colleagues as well as rival gangs. Some of the municipal and state police forces work for the cartels and undermine the work of the army and federal police. Even the military and federal police officers take sides and make arrests or bust gangs on behalf of the Cartels who pay them. 

 

The cartels have diversified from drug trafficking into robbery of cargo, stealing of petrol from pipelines, kidnappings, extortion, human trafficking and assassinations. They do not even hide their gruesome murders.  They seek publicity openly as a way of showing off their capabilities and to send message to the rivals and frighten the public.

 

There is a whole new narco culture which has evolved around the drug lords, some of whom have become folk heroes in their communities. Narcos are revered as rebels who have the balls to beat the system. On the streets of Sinaloa, people traditionally refer to gangsters as “los Valientes”-  the brave ones. There is a new genre of music, “narcocorridos” (drug ballads).  Composers sing in praise of the drug lords and bands play in public as well as private parties of the gangs. There are even religious sects founded by cartel leaders who have built churches and used their new interpretations of Bible to indoctrinate their foot soldiers as faithful and loyal. There are thousands of Narco movies and serials with drug lords as heroes and Americans as villains.  The drug barons even pay for the production of songs and movies.

 

Some Mexicans see the illegal migration to US as a historical revenge. The US had taken over nine hundred thousand square miles of  Mexican territory after the war in 1846-48.  These include the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming. Mexico annually commemorates a squad of young cadets shot dead by American troops (los ninos héroes) during the war. So the Mexicans call their migration to the United States as “la Reconquista”—the reconquest. 

 

Of course, the primary responsibility for the drug issue lies with the American consumers who have created the demand themselves. Drug is a demand driven business originating from the American consumers who wants to get high and pays for it happily. The killing of Escobar or the jailing of Guzman have not caused any dent in the consumption of drugs in the US. As long as this continues, there will always be suppliers both internal and external. The Colombians, Mexicans, Chinese and American opioid manufacturers took turns to supply the  consumers. While the American companies got away with paying fines, the Colombians and the Mexicans were on the receiving end of the “war on drugs” started by the American politicians and the military-industrial complex. Drug war was good politics for Nixon to divert attention away from the Vietnam war. With no communists to hunt after the Cold War, American spooks, soldiers and the arms makers were looking for new opportunities. The American politicians obliged them with the War on Drugs. The American, Colombian and Mexican administrations also used the “war on drugs” as a cover to fight the leftist guerilla groups. DEA, created in 1973 has become another empire like CIA with multibillion dollar budget. DEA’s way of cultivating informers had opened new avenues for corruption on both sides. CIA itself got into the drug business to raise money for financing the Contra war against Nicaragua during the Reagan era. The American manufacturers of helicopters, planes and guns made money from supplies to Latin Americans for the war on drugs. The Mexican and Colombian security forces enjoyed the new American toys such as helicopters, aircrafts and guns as well as the training opportunities in USA. Even the drug cartels are happy by getting their guns from the illegal trafficking from USA. While the Mexican supplied cocaine is consumed by the Americans, the American-trafficked guns into Mexico stay and kill more and more people.

 

Now the American right wing  politicians call for invasion of Mexico to fight the drug traffickers. After the serial wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and the proxy war in Ukraine, the next show might be in Mexico. 

 

 

 

 

Mexico elects a woman scientist and leftist as president

                   Mexico elects a woman scientist and leftist as president 

 

 Mexico has elected a woman, Claudia Sheinbaum, as the new President, in a new milestone for gender parity in the country.

Her main opponent Xochitl Galvez was also another woman candidate of the center right coalition.

Gender parity

The election of the first female president is a climax of the gender  parity  movement in Mexican politics in the last two decades.

In 2003, Mexico started with introduction of a  30 percent quota for women political party nominees. In 2014, the Congress passed a law for gender parity in federal and state legislative elections. In 2019, the Congress enacted another law which made gender parity in all the three sectors of power: Legislative, Executive and Judiciary. Half of Mexico’s legislature since 2021 is female. The presidents of both the chambers of legislature are women. The cabinet has 9 women in a total of 18 ministers. A woman is chief justice of the Supreme Court. Sheinbaum has promised to advance the feminist agenda further.

 

Since January 2020, Mexico has a Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP) too. It focuses on the creation of gender parity in its foreign and national policy mechanisms. Mexico has become the largest nation to achieve gender parity and the first country from the global south to have a FFP.

 

Scientist

 

The president-elect Claudia Sheinbaum is a scientist and both her parents and her brother are also scientists. She has a Ph.D in energy engineering from California. She was part of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which won the Nobel Peace Prize for the work on climate change. 

 

Leftist

 

She is a member of the leftist Morena party of the outgoing president Lopez Obrador. He was the first leftist to be elected as president of Mexico in 2018. With his pro-poor policies, he has lifted millions of Mexicans out of poverty, increased wages and invested in infrastructure projects. With his very high popularity ratings he could have easily got reelected. But the Mexican constitution allows only a single term of six years for presidents. So he had chosen Sheinbaum as his successor and had groomed her since 2000 when he was elected as Mayor of Mexico city. He was looking for an expert to deal with the high level of pollution and found her profile as a climate scientist as the perfect fit. He made her as the environment secretary. Since then she has been a loyal follower and colleague of Obrador, despite his eccentricities. She was elected as Mayor of Mexico city in 2018 and served till June 2023. Before that, she was Mayor of a part of Mexico city called as Tlalpan from 2015 to 2017.

 

Sheinbaum is a data-driven technocrat and goal-oriented pragmatic and sober political leader. She does not have a personal charisma or a strong political base of her own. The credit for her successful political career goes to Obrador. He was comfortable with her low profile without any ambition so far to outshine him. On the other hand, she also realized that she had a winning path by following Obrador and did not mind being known as his protégé.  Obrador is a populist who communicates directly with people through his daily week day press conferences at 7 in the mornings (mañanera) and through social media. He used these to trumpet his achievements, attack his opponents and share his feelings in general. He has set a new standard as a corruption-free president in Mexico. He lives an austere life foregoing the presidential aircraft. He travels in economy class in the regular flights. He has reduced the presidential salary by 60% and also many of the perks.

 

Obrador’s Morena party has swept the polls for the Congress as well as other positions for which simultaneous elections were held on Sunday.  The coalition of Morena party has got very close to clinching a supermajority in Congress, obtaining two-thirds of the seats in the lower house and nearly two-thirds in the senate.  Even in gubernatorial races that were expected to be competitive, Morena and its allies have emerged victorious with clear margins. Obrador is likely to use this majority to try constitutional changes to advance his progressive agenda, although some of them are controversial. 

 

As a committed leftist and disciple of Obrador, Sheinbaum has criticized the neoliberal economic policies of Washington Consensus followed by the past presidents of Mexico, arguing that they had contributed to inequality in the country. She has promised to expand welfare and intends to continue the programs started by Obrador.

 

Foreign policy

 

While Obrador would continue to influence Sheinbaum in some domestic policies, she will get a free hand in foreign policy for which Obrador has complete disdain. He has ignored foreign policy and has zero ambition to raise his or Mexico’s profile in the region or globally. He said “the best foreign policy is a good domestic one” He considers foreign travel as a waste and avoids summit meetings. His travels have been limited only to a few trips to US and Latin America.

 

But Obrador  was proactive in extending support to leftist presidents in trouble and attacking the right wing presidents in Latin America. He had given asylum to leftist presidents overthrown in coups and criticized right wing regimes bluntly and publicly. These have lead to diplomatic disruptions in some cases. He has downplayed the non-democratic leftist regimes of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. At the same time, he has not sought to be a regional leader of the left, unlike Chavez and Lula. 

 

Sheinbaum will be more sober and pragmatic in foreign policy and avoid the anti-right and pro-left rhetoric of her predecessor.

 

Relations with the US 

 

López Obrador pledged at the beginning of his administration in 2018 that there would be no tension with the U.S. and he has largely kept that promise by working quietly with the US on issues of serious concern such as illegal migration. Obrador managed both President Trump and Biden without major controversies. In fact, he had shown support at times to Trump despite the latter’s ugly anti-Mexican attacks. But he refused to give in to the American pressure to give priority to deal with drug cartels and militarize the issue. He took the stand that “ hugs not bullets” is needed in Mexico to deal with the fundamental socioeconomic issues. 

 

Obrador has called for the removal of the US sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. In 2022, he had refused to attend the Summit of Americas in Los Angeles because those three countries were not invited. 

 

Sheinbaum has said Mexico would have “good relations” with either Mr. Trump or Mr. Biden as president, and that Mexico would continue to work to contain flows of illegal migrants.

 

Mexico is the largest trading partner and the #1 source of imports of US. Mexico has overtaken China as the largest exporter to US in 2023, thanks to the USMCA Free Trade Agreement with the US and Canada. As part of the new trend of friend-shoring, many American firms and global MNCs are shifting manufacturing to Mexico from China. 

 

Sheinbaum is the first Mexican president of Jewish heritage. In a newspaper Op-ed in 2009, she wrote, “No reason justifies the murder of Palestinian civilians” and called for Palestinian liberation and reflected on her own family’s history of escaping Nazi persecution. 

 

President Obrador has has refused to join the US sanctions on Russia and has condemned supply of arms by the west to Ukraine.

 

India- Mexico

 

Mexico is the second largest destination for India’s exports to Latin America. The 2023-24 exports of India to Mexico (5324 m) are more than the exports to Thailand (5038 m), Russia (4261 m), Canada (3845 m), Sri Lanka (4117 m) and Egypt (3520 m).

 

Mexico is the largest destination for India’s global exports of motor cycles with 281 million dollars. Car exports to Mexico are 874 m in 2023-24.

 

India  can increase its exports significantly if it signs a FTA with Mexico which has FTA with 50 countries. Mexico’s total imports were over 600 billion dollars in 2023.

 

India’s imports from Mexico were 3.1 billion dollars. Crude oil accounted for 1.8 billion dollars, followed by electrical equipment worth 442 m.

 

A number of Indian IT, pharma and autoparts companies have invested in Mexico. Samvardhana Motherson Group from Noida has 19 plants in Mexico which supply auto parts to OEMs. JK Tyres has three tyre plants. 

 

Mexican company Grupo Bimbo is the largest bread maker in India. It had acquired the famous Modern Bread company of India in 2021. Cinepolis of Mexico is the third largest owner of multiplexes in India with over 440 screens. Kidzania, a Mexican edutainment chain has theme parks in Mumbai and Delhi in a joint venture with Shah Rukh Khan, the actor. There are also some Mexican autoparts makers operating in India.

 

The last Mexican president to take interest in India was Felipe Calderon (2006-12) who visited India in 2007 and pitched for India’s investment. President Obrador had no interest in India unlike the other leftist presidents of Latin America who have sought economic and development partnership. The new president Sheinbaum might show interest. Muktesh Pardesi, Secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs and former ambassador to Mexico recalls his meeting with Sheinbaum in 2018 when she was mayor of Mexico city. She had shown interest in cooperation with India in climate change mitigation, electric mobility and culture.

 

Mexican lessons for US

 

The American politicians, the Hollywood and the media have always given a negative narrative of Mexico through their obsession with the issues of drug trafficking and illegal immigration. They have been lecturing the Mexicans about democracy.  Now it is time for the Gringos to learn from the democratic maturity and best practices of Mexicans. Firstly, the two Mexican presidential candidates, who lost, had conceded and congratulated the winner even on the basis of the preliminary results before the final counting. The Congressional building of Mexico is safe and free from any attacks as it happened in Washington DC. Secondly the two leading candidates are highly qualified, cultured and respected: the winner is a scientist and the runner is techpreneur. Mexico would have done well even if the runner was elected. This is in contrast to Trump who has been indicted on criminal cases and who has crossed the lines of decency in public discourse. Thirdly. The Mexican women have been empowered politically, while the American women have to suffer with Trump who makes obscene remarks about women and brags about grabbing them by their genitals. Fourthly, the Mexican campaign discourse was free from the preposterous lies and fake news in the US.

 

The American charges of  Mexican drug trafficking and illegal immigration need to be seen in a non-American neutral perspective. 

 

Drug is a consumer-driven and demand-driven big billion dollar business in USA. Eighty percent of each dollar involved in the drug business stays in US itself. Despite the long War on Drugs, the American drug consumption has not come down.  American pharmaceutical companies such  as Purdue Pharma are equally responsible for opioid addiction and deaths in US. These companies have got away after paying fines. 

 

While the Americans demand end to illegal trafficking of drugs from Mexico, they do nothing to stop the illegal trafficking of American guns into Mexico which has a strong gun control regime. In the whole of Mexico, there is only one gun shop. It is located in Mexico city and controlled by the military. So almost all the guns used in the massacres and crime in Mexico are American guns. There are several thousands of American gun shops in the border with Mexico making illegal sales and facilitating open trafficking. Every year, more Mexicans are killed by American guns than the number of American deaths caused by Mexican drugs.

 

Mexican illegal emigration needs to be seen in the light of this popular Mexican story. A Mexican was caught by the US border patrol agent who said, “ Mister, you have crossed the border into US.”. The Mexican responded, “ Senor, I did not cross the border. The border has crossed me”. This is the truth. The Americans had grabbed (Trump style) 55 percent of Mexican territory in 1848. These include the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming. So the Mexican immigration into US is as they say “ the chickens are coming home to roost”.