• Adios to Alberto Fujimori, a Latino- Japanese Caudillo
• The Japanese in Latin America
• Argentine movie “ Goyo”
• United States is the obstacle for free and fair elections in Venezuela
• China’s Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Latin America
• Bitter fruit: The story of the American coup in Guatemala
• Chinese development finance and commercial loans to Latin America
• Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America - book by Ioan Grillo
• “El Narco, the bloody rise of Mexican drug cartels” – book by Ioan Grillo
• Mexico elects a woman scientist and leftist as president

             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 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. 
 
 

 
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.

 

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

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. 

 “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. 

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 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”.

 

 

India’s exports to Latin American countries are more than to neighboring countries and traditional trade partners 

                                                     

India’s exports of 266 million dollars in 2023-24 to the remote Honduras in Central America are more than the exports of 185 m to nearby Cambodia and 237 m to Kazakhstan. The population of Honduras is just 10 million as against 17 m of Cambodia and 20 m of Kazakhstan.

 

If you think this is incredible, here are some more:

 

India’s exports of 920 m to Peru are more than the 670 m to Myanmar.

Exports to Brazil (6022 million dollars) are higher than to the traditional trade partners such as Japan (5156 m), Indonesia (5988 m), Vietnam (5470 m) and Thailand (5038 m).

Exports to Mexico (5324 m) are more than the exports to Russia (4261 m), Canada (3845 m), Sri Lanka (4117 m) and Egypt (3520 m)

Three countries in the region are billion dollars plus destinations: Colombia of 1219 million, Chile 1183 million and Argentina 1086 m.

 

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.  

 

 

Car exports

Car exports to Latin America were 1757 million dollars. This was 26.5% of India’s global car exports of 6.63 bn dollars. 

 Major destinations: Mexico 874 m, Chile 266 m and Peru 191 m, Panama 77 m, Colombia 65 m, Ecuador 60 m, and Guatemala 46 m.

 

Motorcycles

Exports of motor cycles crossed a billion dollars reaching 1037 million dollarsfrom 921 m in 2022-23. This is 37.4% of India’s global exports of 2.77 bn.

 

Mexico has replaced Colombia as the #1 global destination of India’s motor cycle exports with 281 million dollars. Colombia was #2 with 224 m and Guatemala was # 4 with 134 m. The other main destinations were: Argentina 95 m, Honduras 56 m, Peru 46 m and Brazil 46 m.

. 

Pharmaceuticals

Pharma exports were 1.63 billion dollars.  

Major destination of India’s pharma exports:  Brazil 417 million dollars, Mexico 212 m, Chile 190 m, Venezuela 99 m, Colombia 129 m, Peru 102 m, Guatemala 73 m, Dominican Republic 60 m and Ecuador 53m.

 

Major exports

Vehicles     4.12 bn 

Chemicals  4.12 bn

Machinery  2.8 bn 

Petroleum Products  1.7 bn                   

Pharma      1.63 bn  

Iron and steel  1.12 bn

Textiles 1.01 bn

Aluminum products  558 m               

Plastics   438 m 

Cotton  438 m  

Rubber products 418 m            

                 

Imports 

Main import items: 

 

Crude oil  7.44 billion dollars

Raw gold.        6.21 bn  

Vegetable oil 2.95 bn 

Raw sugar 1.95 bn

Copper    1.76 bn 

Machinery and equipment 960 m

Iron and steel 606 m

Wood        495 m

Chemicals 476 m

Fruits& vegetables 195 m

Paper pulp 101 m

 

 

Crude oil imports which reached a peak of around 15 billion dollars in 2013-14 has come down drastically due to US sanctions on Venezuela which supplied 10 bn dollars of crude in 2013-14.

 

Main sources of crude oil imports: Colombia 2.13 bn, Mexico 1.87 billion dollars, Brazil 1.48 bn, Venezuela 932 m and Ecuador 332 million

  

Raw gold import sourcing: Peru 2837 m, Bolivia 1077 m, Brazil 213 m, Colombia 737 m, Dom Republic 488 m, Argentina 346 m, Mexico 143 m and Ecuador 338 m. 

 

Latin America is the main source of soy oil imports of India. Argentina, as usual, was the #1 global supplier of soy oil with 1.98 billion dollars, followed by Brazil 1.03 bn. 

 

Brazil is the source of imports of raw sugar which India refines and reexports to other countries.

 

Chile, the main supplier of copper and other mineral concentrates from the region supplied 847 m, followed by Peru 212 m, Brazil 147 m, Panama 135 m and Colombia 115 m.

 

Main suppliers of wood from the region: Uruguay 114 m, Brazil 102 m, Ecuador 88 m, Argentina 76 m, Panama 39 m, Costa Rica 20 m and Colombia 17 m

 

 

Trade 2023-24

Figures in millions of US Dollars 

 

Country	exports	imports	Total trade
Brazil	6022	6210	12232
Mexico	5324	3104	8428
Argentina	1086	2497	3583
Peru	920	3114	4034
Colombia	1219	3086	4305
Chile	1183	1514	2697
Venezuela	175	1000	1175
Bolivia	71	1087	1158
Ecuador	459	797	1256
Dom Republic	347	571	918
Panama	297	371	668
Guatemala	559	30	589
Uruguay	521	135	656
Honduras	266	31	297
Costa Rica	184	118	302
Paraguay	212	31	243
El Salvador	129	3	132
Nicaragua	132	48	180
Cuba	45	2	47
Total	19151	23749	42900

 

 

Trade from 2010-11 to 2023-24

 

 

Year	exports	imports	Total trade
2023-24	19.15	23.75	42.90
2022-23	22.41	25.59	48.00
2021-22	18.89	25.62	44.50
2020-21	12.74	14.92	27.66
2019-20	13.18	20.67	33.85
2018-19	13.16	25.7	38.89
2017-18	12.1	24.4	36.45
2016-17	10.4	19.6	30
2015-16	10	19.7	29.7
2014-15	13.7	29.3	43
2013-14	12.77	31.31	44.08
2012-13	12.48	31.38	43.86
2011-12	11.33	18.42	29.75
2010-11	10.04	14.01	24.05

 

The fall in trade in 2023-24 from 2022-23 is due to the  reduced import of crude oil and soy oil from the region and export of petroleum products. 

  

Latin America is a substantial market of 19 countries, population of 620 million and GDP of 6 trillion dollars with a per capita income close to 10,000 dollars. The Indian exporters are still in the early stage of discovery and exploration in the last two decades. 

 

Except for Venezuela and Argentina, the economies of the other 17 countries of the region are stable and growing and have single digit average inflation. Even Argentine and Venezuelan economies have passed their worst and are recovering now. Venezuela’s GDP growth in 2024 is projected at 4%.

 

Latin America contributes to India’s energy security with crude oil helping with India’s strategy to diversify import sources. The region could also contribute to India’s renewable energy projects with supply of Lithium and other critical minerals.  The Lithium Triangle of South America (Chile, Bolivia and Argentina) has more than half of the global reserves. 

 

South America contributes to India’s food security with vegetable oils, pulses, fruits and vegetables. 

 

The Latin Americans seek to reduce their overdependence on China with which there is a huge trade and trust deficit. As part of their diversification strategy, they attach importance to the benign, large and growing market of India. 

 

Export target of 50 billion dollars

 

India could set a target of 50 billion dollars in the next five years. This is achievable if the Indian exporters, export promotion councils, industry bodies and the government intensify their export promotion seriously and systematically with adequate investment. 

 

External Affairs Minister Jaishankar has emphasized the importance of trade and business during his visit to the region last year. He has visited more countries in Latin America than any of his predecessors.

 

India should open embassies in Ecuador, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Uruguay which accounted for 1.76 billion dollars of exports.  Opening of embassies in these seven countries can be done with a mere one percent of the total export earnings from these countries. 

 

The Commerce Ministry should reactivate its Focus LAC program which had given a critical boost to India's exports in the late nineties. 

 

India should start negotiations for FTA with Mexico and Colombia, the 2^nd  and 3rd largest destinations of exports to Latin America besides concluding soon the ongoing FTA talks with Peru. The PTA with Chile needs to be upgraded to a FTA. The India-Mercosur PTA should be expanded with more products and deeper cuts in tariffs.

 

India should join as member of the Inter-American Development Bank to enable Indian companies to participate in the projects of the Bank. 

In recent years, Indian companies have started making entry in projects in the region in sectors such as power transmission and renewable energy. For example, Kalpataru Power Transmission Ltd of Mumbai has got about a billion dollars of projects in the region including the single largest EPC contract of 431 million dollars In Chile. 

 

India should consider extending more lines of credit to the region. While China has given more than 150 billion dollars of credit to Latin America, India’s credit is not even one billion. The proposal of the Export Import bank of India to open an office in Sao Paulo within the year of 2024 is good news for Indian project and equipment exporters. 

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Latin America includes 10 countries in South America, 6 in Central America, 2 Spanish speaking Caribbean (Cuba and Dominican Republic) and Mexico

 
He has given a graphic and moving account of the violence in Central America based on his direct interaction with criminal gangs, assassins, security forces, prison authorities, judges, prosecutors, police detectives, informants, government functionaries, political leaders, priests and the victims. He has taken enormous personal risk in visiting the areas controlled by gangs in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. He himself has faced several death threats.
 
Martinez traces the roots of the violence to the civil wars in the eighties and the role of US. He says, “The violent gangs weren’t born in Guatemala or Honduras or El Salvador. They came from the United States, Southern California, to be precise. They began with migrants fleeing a US-sponsored civil wars in Central America. The US supported brutal dictatorships, trained security forces and armed right-wing militias and death squads. This had caused hundreds of thousands of Central Americans fleeing from the violence and seeking refuge in US. Some of the young refugees found themselves living in an ecosystem of gangs already established in California. And so they came together to defend themselves and survive by forming their own gangs called as Mara Salvatrucha (Maras) and Barrio 18.  The US government deported about 4,000 of these gang members back to Central America. Those 4,000 have expanded to about  70,000, just in El Salvador. 
 
Besides the two main gangs, there are numerous smaller gangs called as Mara Gauchos Locos 13, the Crazy Cowboys 13, Los Valerios, Mirada Lokotes 13, Los Meli 33, the Twins 33, Los Chancletas (the Sandals) and Los Uvas (the Grapes). These gangs terrorise neighborhoods, extort businessmen, traffic in drugs  and recruit teenagers and train them in crime. They corrupt the political leaders and security forces and issue death threats to judges, prosecutors and police. They control the prisons and continue their criminal operations from inside the jails. The gangs overrun the police stations and outgun the police with more deadly weapons. Martinez narrates a case in which the helpless police officer calls on the families threatened by gangs to join him in prayers, as a last resort.

‘Trust’ is not a simple story for passive pleasure of reading. It is a complex and unconventional novel provoking the readers to think, detect, imagine and question. Within the book, there are four different books written by different fictional authors in disparate genres and styles. There are multiple characters at different time periods. The author describes ‘Trust’  as a polyphonic novel. The first section is a novel written by a fictional writer Harold Vanner about New York financier Benjamin Rask and his wife Helen who patronizes arts and culture. Although Harold Vanner is one of the central characters in the book he never appears in it. Vanner opens the book and triggers everything that happens in it: several people in “the real world” react to Vanner’s book, setting the whole plot in motion.
 
The second part is a memoir of Andrew Bevel, a Wall Street tycoon who wants people to believe that his pursuit of profit was always aligned to the social good. His wife Mildred is a connoisseur of music and a lover of literature. They live together physically but live apart mentally. They find that the living together improves by the vast distance between their minds of which one is obsessed with money and the other arts. At times, Mildred dabbles in stocks and gives valuable advice to her husband which he uses to make more money. 
 
The third part is about Ida Partenza a writer who becomes secretary to the tycoon and ghost-writes his autobiography. Her father is an anarchist and an immigrant from Italy. She is caught between the anti-capitalist rants of her father and working with the wealthy financier who wants her to help with his autobiography spinning a positive image of his business and the cultural activities of his wife who becomes mentally ill. Diaz says in an interview, “ I enjoyed particularly writing the character of Ida. She is like my hero—she’s fearless, effective, crafty, and very bold. I made her all the things that I wish I were. She’s also a very different writer from me, so I had to learn to write like her”. 
 
The fourth part is the personal diary of Mildred, the tycoon’s wife “that is also a sort of a prose poem and a love letter to modernism”, in the words of the author. Midred writes about music, art, philosophy, her illness, the stock market and Swiss mountain slopes among which she convalesces in a clinic.
 
The connecting themes in all the four books are the Wall Street money-making and the world of art and literature. The author has juxtaposed the two themes with provocative pronouncements challenging the conventional American narratives and myths about money. He has chosen the boom years of the Wall Street in the twenties and the bust in 1929 followed by the years of depression for context. 
 
Diaz says he wanted to write about the labyrinth of capital, how it works and distorts the reality around itself in the American value system. He is fascinated by the ‘transcendental and mythical place of money in the American culture’. He explores how wealth  creates isolation for the wealthy while  giving the person extraordinary outreach to the world of art, culture and politics. According to Diaz “money is also a fiction. It is just that we have all agreed on the terms and conditions and agreed to play it as a game. There is nothing that ties money to real value other than a narrative. Or the trust that we invest in that narrative”. 
 
In another interview, Diaz says, “Reading is always an act of trust. Whenever we read anything, from a novel to the label on a prescription bottle, trust is involved. That trust is based on tacit contracts whose clauses I wanted to encourage the reader to reconsider. As you read Trust and move forward from one section to the next, it becomes clear that the book is asking you to question the assumptions with which you walk into a text. I would even say that Trust aims, to an enormous extent, to question the boundaries between history and fiction”.
 
Here are some vignettes from the novel:
  
-He became fascinated by the contortions of money—how it could be made to bend back upon itself to be force-fed its own body. The isolated, self-sufficient nature of speculation spoke to his character and was a source of wonder and an end in itself, regardless of what his earnings. He viewed capital as an antiseptically living thing. It moves, eats, grows, breeds, falls ill, and may die. But it is clean. This became clearer to him in time. The larger the operation, the further removed he was from its concrete details. There was no need for him to touch a single banknote or engage with the things and people his transaction affected. All he had to do was think, speak, and, perhaps, write. And the living creature would be set in motion, drawing beautiful patterns on its way into realms of increasing abstraction, sometimes following appetites of its own that he never could have anticipated—and this gave him some additional pleasure, the creature trying to exercise its free will. He admired and understood it, even when it disappointed him.
 
-The root of all evil, the cause of every war—god and country.
 
- History itself is just a fiction—a fiction with an army.
 
-Every life is organized around a small number of events that either propel us or bring us to a grinding halt. We spend the years between these episodes benefiting or suffering from their consequences until the arrival of the next forceful moment. A man’s worth is established by the number of these defining circumstances he is able to create for himself. He need not always be successful, for there can be great honor in defeat. But he ought to be the main actor in the decisive scenes in his existence, Whatever the past may have handed on to us, it is up to each one of us to chisel our present out of the shapeless block of the future.
 
-Every single one of our acts is ruled by the laws of economy. When we first wake up in the morning we trade rest for profit. When we go to bed at night we give up potentially profitable hours to renew our strength. And throughout our day we engage in countless transactions. Each time we find a way to minimize our effort and increase our gain we are making a business deal, even if it is with ourselves. These negotiations are so ingrained in our routine that they are barely noticeable. But the truth is our existence revolves around profit.
 
Hernan Diaz’s cerebral perspectives, intriguing plots and unconventional literary tools reminds me of Jorge Borges the famous Argentine writer. Diaz says, “Borges has shaped me not only as a reader and as a writer but also as a person. His playfulness with genre, his joyful disregard for taxonomies of any kind and his obsession with framed narratives are some of the aspects of his work that have influenced me”. Diaz has written a book “Borges, between history and eternity”.
 
Diaz believes that "fiction has palpable effects on reality. A lot of the power constraints that we feel in our everyday lives are based on fiction. Think of something that is as inherent and powerful to you as your nationality. That is, at the end of the day, a collection of ideological fictions. There's nothing in it. Nothing. Think about it for a second. There's nothing that makes you American or Belgian or anything aside from what you ascribe to that identity, and that is a series of narratives”.
 
Diaz is a voracious reader. In interviews, he quotes so many writers and points out parts of his novel  which have styles similar to some of the writers. After having read 29 books of P G Wodehouse he says, “ I love Wodehouse. Ever-surprising in his repetitiousness, never failing to delight, always making us safe in his breezy world. It is paradoxical that Wodehouse should give me so much comfort when he also makes me feel how mean and shabby my life is each time I emerge from one of his novels”.
 
Some authors write well but not impressive in speeches and conversations. Diaz is spectacular and mesmerizing both in writing and talking with his spontaneous thoughts and reflections. I have read some of his interviews which are as fascinating and inspiring as his book. He revels in abstract concepts and subversive thoughts. He calls writing as a monstrous act because it implies a metamorphosis. 
 

Diaz says, “I write with a fountain pen (received as gift twenty years back) in large format notebooks. I enjoy the feeling of flowing ink and the rumor of the pen on the paper. With a pen, you create your own geography, with its islets of thoughts and streams of associations”. 
 
‘Trust’ has won the 2023 Pulitzer prize for fiction. It is the second novel of Diaz. I cannot wait  to read his first novel “In the Distance”. 
 
Hernan Diaz is a potential candidate for Nobel Prize.
 

The novel brings out the life and situation in Costa Rica during the time of domination of American banana companies in the sixties. The companies exploit the workers and the country. Their use of chemicals to spray on the banana plants cause sterility among men. To hide this, the company's Gringo doctor falsifies medical records to show that the men were already sterile. He is foolish and arrogant enough to tell one of the worker Jose Maria that his two children might not be his own. The angry husband tries to kill his wife Teresa but murders his mother- in-law who fights back. Then he goes to the house of the Gringo doctor and sets it on fire. The doctor and the whole banana plantation as well as the arsonist are burnt and turned into ashes. 
 
Teresa runs away to US leaving her two kids Lyra and Carmen. The latter, who is traumatized after witnessing the murder of the grand mother and the burning of the plantation, commits suicide leaving her son as orphan. The boy is adopted by Lyra, the sister of Carmen. But she does not tell the kid about the tragedy till he becomes an adult. Lyra does not let her mother Teresa meet the grandson when she comes back from US. The boy comes to know just before Teresa dies of cancer.
 
The author has added many other fascinating typical Latino characters and sub plots in the novel. The three Marias, the spinster sisters who are involved in the life of Teresa family, are memorable with their quaint characteristics and playful dialogues. The author has added some magical realism which makes the novel more interesting and familiar for the fans of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Latin America’s GDP growth in 2024 is projected at 1.8%, down from 2.1% in 2023, according to the annual December report of ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and Caribbean). 

This lowering of growth is due to the general slow down of global growth and in particular the decline in Chinese growth and the fall in commodity prices exported by the region. The modest 4.2% of Chinese GDP growth in 2024 will impact particularly Chile, Panama, Peru, Brazil and Uruguay. China absorbs 39% of Chile’s goods exports, 32% of those of both Panama and Peru, and 27% of those of Brazil and Uruguay. Latin America’s exports of agro products and minerals and metals are projected to fetch less revenue in 2024 with the anticipated reduction in prices of these items by 4% and 2% respectively.

Brazil’s GDP is expected to grow by 1.6% (down from 3% in 2023), Mexico’s 2.5% (down from 3.6% in 2023), Colombia’s by 1.7% (up from 0.9% in 2023, Chile’s by 1.9% (up from 0.3% in 2023) and Peru’s by 2.4% (up from 0.1%). Central America’s GDP is expected to increase by 3.2%, down from 3.4% last year.

Surprisingly, Venezuela will have the highest growth among the major economies of the region with 4% (up from 3% in 2023). The country which had gone through historic economic crisis due to mismanagement and US sanctions in the last several years has now recovered. The US has recently loosened some sanctions on export of oil and investment of American and other foreign companies in Venezuelan oil production.

Unsurprisingly, Argentina will have a negative growth of 1% (better than the 2.5% contraction in 2023). It is the only country in the region to suffer economic contraction. All the other 18 countries will show positive growth. Poverty in Argentina increased from 21.5% in 2016 to 30.1% in 2022.The new President Javier Milei who took office in December 2023 has already started some reforms such as cutting down expenditure and privatization of public sector companies. He has postponed implementation of his radical proposals such as closure of the Central Bank and dollarization of the economy. In the coming months, there will be more economic and financial difficulties for the government and sufferings for the people. The country could recover next year.

Milei will cause some minor disruptions in the process of deepening of integration of Mercosur with his anti-Lula rhetoric. However he will not have accomplices for destabilization of the region as a whole with his anti-Left policies since all the other major powers such as Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Venezuela are ruled by Leftist governments.

Latin America’s sovereign risk reached the level of 410 basis points in October 2023, as measured by the J. P. Morgan EMBI Global Diversified Index (EMBIGD) of emerging markets. This indicator measures the spread between interest rates on a country’s debt obligations and those of the United States, which are considered risk-free. The countries with the lowest sovereign risk index are Uruguay (about 90 basis points since the second half of the year), followed by Chile and Peru (both below 200 basis points). At the other extreme are countries with the highest credit risk namely Venezuela (15867), Argentina(2576) and Ecuador(1755) followed by Bolivia (1599)

Average inflation of the region was 5.2% in September 2023, down from 8.2% in September 2022. It has remained in single digit for the last two decades. Exceptions are Venezuela with inflation of 318% ( down from 138000 percent in 2018), Argentina 140% and Cuba 37%. The only other country with double digit inflation is Colombia 11%.

The region's ratio of gross external debt to GDP was 42% in September 2023. The region has relatively comfortable position of foreign exchange reserves with 860 billion dollars. But Argentina, Venezuela and Cuba have acute shortage of forex reserves.

Average lending rate (Q3 of 2023) was the highest in Argentina at 108%, followed by Venezuela at 48.6%, Brazil (42%) and Mexico at 32%.

In 2024 there will be presidential elections in Mexico, El Salvador, Panama, Dominican Republic, Uruguay and Venezuela. However, these will not bring out any dangers such as Bolsonaro or drastic changes and challenges.

In the Mexican elections in June, the current president Lopez Obrador’s protégé Claudia Sheinbaum is leading in the opinion polls and expected to win and continue the policies of the current government with more pragmatism but without the eccentricities of Obrador. In El Salvador, the Cool Dictator Nayib Bukele is expected to win in the June elections. He has consistently high popularity ratings with his successful containment of crimes and murders. The popular incumbent President Luis Abinader of Dominican Republic is poised to get a second term in the June elections. The elections in Panama and Uruguay are open but there is no polarizing radicals among the leading candidates. President Maduro will ensure his reelection by hook or crook in the last quarter of the year. He and his top political and military leadership have no other option. They cannot afford to let power pass to the hands of the opposition. The US government has announced (in 2020) a bounty of 15 million dollars on the head of president Maduro and several million dollars on other political leaders of Venezuela on trumped charges of drug trafficking and other crimes. So Maduro and other top leaders will certainly be killed or deported to US prisons immediately.  If Maduro is reelected, the US will make some pro forma noises about rigged elections but will get on with its resumption of business with Venezuela. The US will not repeat its regime change policy, after having failed miserably in the last several years.

Latin America will continue to be a large market for India’s trade and investment in 2024 and in the coming years and decades. India’s exports to the region were 22.5 billion dollars in the financial year April 2022-March 2023. Indian companies have invested around 12 billion dollars in the region. The region is contributing to India’s energy and food security with supply of crude oil, edible oil, pulses and fresh fruits. India is exploring opportunities in the region for mining and production of Lithium, needed for electrification of vehicles. India will continue to source copper, gold and other minerals from Latin America which has abundant reserves of them.

In 2024, India will deepen its engagement with Latin America and work closely with Brazil, the current president of G-20. Argentine President Milei has switched teams. He will play for Team USA while his predecessors played in BRICS and Global South teams. But this will not make any difference to India or BRICS since Argentina is completely mired in the economic crisis from which it will take time to get out. 

In a referendum held yesterday, 56 percent of the Chilean voters defeated a draft centre-right constitution.
 
Last year, the voters defeated a leftist constitution, which was drafted by the constitutional assembly which was dominated by social activists and idealists. 
 
The Chileans decided in a referendum held in 2019 to go in for a new constitution to replace the existing constitution imposed by the military dictatorship of Pinochet. Although this has been amended many times, still it perpetuates inequality and social injustice. The students and masses had risen in violent protests in 2019 seeking reforms in education, health care and pensions. It was because of these protests that it was decided to change the current constitution.
 
Both sides have now realized that they cannot impose their agenda on the other. So there is need for compromise and mutual give and take. 
 
The voters have also learnt that neither Left nor the Right has the exclusive solutions. So they have exercised smart choice in the presidential elections of the last two decades. They have voted the Left and the Right to power alternately in each of the last five elections since 2006. 
 
The current President Gabriel Boric, a Leftist, is the youngest to be elected at the age of 35. He was one of the student union leaders who lead the protests for equality and justice. He is trying his best to advance his leftist agenda but has only limited success due to the strong opposition of the conservative forces. He has also realized that he needs to be more pragmatic and realistic.
 

The Chilean constitutional experiment is a lesson for many other democracies of the world which are also struggling to balance the demands and interests of the haves and have-nots.
 

Panama’s economy doing fine without a Central Bank in the last hundred years.
 
Javier Milei, the President-elect of Argentina, has promised to close the central bank and dollarize the economy to get the country out of its crisis. Many people consider this as yet another crazy proposal of the Mad Milei. 
 
But there is a Latin American country whose economy is doing well without a Central Bank. It is Panama. It does not have a Central Bank since its independence in 1903. Panama is the only country in Latin America that has not experienced a financial collapse, high inflation or currency crisis in the last hundred years. On the other hand, the economy has experienced stable and resilient growth with low inflation and interest rates. This is even more amazing in view of the fact that the country has suffered with political crises and corruption cases. Panama’s unique economic management without a central bank is an intriguing case in global economics. 

The country does not print currency and has adopted US Dollar as de facto currency. The absence of a central bank has resulted in a completely market-driven money supply and interest rates. There are no capital controls despite the presence of a large number of foreign banks. There is no deposit insurance and no lender of last resort, so banks have to act responsibly at their own risk. No bail out or rescue by government. 
 
Of course, Panama is a small country of 5.5 million people with a special historical link to United States which built and controlled the Panama canal for a long time. Panama’s model may not work with large economies and it might be complicated for Argentina which has its own unique crisis with excessive external debt and severe shortage of foreign exchange.
 
More in the article… https://mises.org/library/panama-has-no-central-bank
 

Argentina is going through yet another cycle of crisis with three digit (138%) inflation, steep currency depreciation, increased poverty and unemployment, shortage of foreign exchange reserves and huge unbearable burden of external debt. Part of the blame lies with the leftist Peronist governments in power for most part of the last two decades.  So, the voters elected the centre-right Mauricio Macri as President in 2015. However, his government also failed to arrest the deterioration of the economy. Macri made it worse by sinking the country in a huge debt trap by taking a 43 billion dollars IMF loan towards the end of his term. These billions were not used for any productive or revenue generating projects. The money simply disappeared, leaving the country with a severe burden of debt. During the Peronist rule between 2003 and 2014 the country was virtually debt free since the Wall Street cartels and their Washington DC accomplices kept Argentina isolated from the international capital markets. They wanted to punish Argentina for its audacious debt structuring on its own in 2002 ignoring IMF, the US Treasury Department and the Wall Street. President Nestor Kirchner pulled off a financial coup by making the creditors (over 93%) agree to receive 30 cents to a dollar. This way he reduced the debt from 90 billion to 30 billion dollars. He and his wife Cristina Fernandez, who succeeded him as President, refused to be blackmailed by the American vulture funds who did not accept the debt restructuring formula and insisted on full payments. So the Wall Street mafia blockaded Argentina from the western financial capital markets. This was a blessing in disguise. Argentina remained free from external debt since there was no one to extend credit except for the Chinese who came to the rescue occasionally with some credit and financial swaps. Argentina struggled but remained free from the curse of external debt, which had caused many crises in the past. But this situation was changed by the pro-US Macri who made a deal with the vulture funds and took the disastrous step of taking in 43 billion loan from IMF. This was irresponsible and unpardonable. This IMF debt of 43 billion dollars has become an unbearable burden for the country which has severe shortage of foreign exchange reserves. This has aggravated the economic crisis of the country. This is the reason why the voters punished Macri and defeated him in the 2019 elections when he sought reelection. His candidate Bullrich was given the same punishment in the 2023 elections. The electors are not yet ready to forgive the grave sin of Macri.
 
Obviously, the country needs a change from the leftist Peronists who have failed in economic management and the rightists who worsened the crisis by adding the the debt burden. It was in this context that the situation was ripe for an outsider. Javier Milei, the Libertarian candidate, was the natural choice at this time of anti-incumbency. Milei, a professional economist, promised a shock treatment and radical free-market reforms. His angry attacks against the political caste which got the country into the mess, resonated with the public. He got the most votes in the primaries held in August this year. This boosted the confidence of Milei who went overboard with extremist statements, crazy outbursts and attacks against those whom he did not like. He derided Pope Francis as “a malignant presence on earth,” “filthy leftist”, “a donkey”, “a jackass” and “a leftist sob”. This has not gone well in the catholic country which is proud of the first Argentine who has become Pope. 
 
Milei proposes to close down the Central Bank, dollarize the economy, shut down 10 of the 18 ministries and cut social expenditure. He has taken disturbing and unrealistic foreign policy positions. He attacks President Lula and admires the disgraced ex-president Bolsonaro. He is critical of Mercosur, the regional economic bloc as well as China, the most important economic partners of Argentina. He considers global warming as a “socialist lie”.
 
The masses struggling with poverty and economic difficulties realized that Milei has no agenda for them. Their situation would only worsen with Milei’s proposal to cut social expenditure. So they have ditched Milei and voted for the leftist candidate Massa, a known devil. In any case, Massa is a pragmatic and moderate leftist unlike the Kirchners who were extremists and confrontational.
 
Milei has got the message of the voters now and is toning down his rhetoric. He has realized the need for support of the moderate centre-right voters. 
 
I believe that Argentina needs a change from the traditional left and right.  An unconventional shock treatment by an outsider would be good at this time. So  Milei is a natural choice. But he needs to moderate himself and become more realistic and pragmatic. Only then he has a chance in the second round of elections on 19 November. 
 
In any case, even Milei gets elected as president he cannot impose his crazy proposals and become a monster like Bolsonaro or Trump.. His party does not have the legislative majority. In the Congressional elections held simultaneously  with the Presidential elections on 21 October, the leftist Peronist coalition has won the maximum seats. They got 34 seats in the House of deputies and 12 in the Senate. Milei’s party got 8 deputies and 8 senators while the centre-right coalition got 24 deputies and 2 senators. With these results, the new (Lower) House of Deputies will have 108 leftists, 38 Libertarians and 93 rightists out of a total of 257. In the Senate of 72 members, the leftists will number 34 while Libertarians will be 8 and rightists 24. So, Milei will need the support of the moderate rightists to pass his legislative reforms. He will have tough time in contending with the Leftist coalition which has the largest number of Deputies and Senators.
 
Milei would also have to live with another reality. The leftist incumbent candidate Axis Kicillof has been reelected as governor of Buenos Aires, the largest province with 17 million people out of the total country’s population of 45 million. There are also several other provinces with leftist governors. 
 
If Milei gets elected as president, the country would get a much-needed shock therapy. At the same time, he would not be allowed to become disastrous like Trump or Bolsonaro since the voters have built firewalls of opposition with their smart voting. It would not be bad either if the leftist Massa wins.  He is mature, balanced, pragmatic and has the much needed political experience of crisis management in recent times. 
 
 

Ecuador elected Daniel Noboa as President in the elections held on Sunday. 

At 35, he is the youngest to become the President of the country.  His wife Lavinia Valbonesi, age 25, will be the youngest First Lady. She is a Social Media Influencer with interests and investment in health food, fitness and fashion. The dashing young, athletic-looking, entrepreneurial and successful couple have attracted the votes of the youth.

Noboa has an MBA from Kellogg School, Masters in Public Administration from Harvard and another Masters in Political Communication and Strategic Governance from George Washington University. He started his own company at the age of 18, before joining his family business later. 

Noboa is born into one of the wealthiest families. His grandfather became a millionaire exporting bananas and other products. His father expanded the business and built a large group with dozens of companies in various areas including in exports, logistics, fertilisers, fishing and real estate.

In fact, his father Alvaro Noboa was a presidential candidate five times in the past but unsuccessfully. Even in this election he put up his candidature but withdrew it in favour of his son. 

Predictably, Daniel Noboa is pro-business, but not at the expense of inclusive development. He wants to increase social spending on poverty alleviation, employment, healthcare and education. His wife is in favour of allowances for single mothers. While his conservative father used to call his leftist opponent Rafael Correa as “communist devil”, the son avoided harsh words, confrontation and hate speech. His calm and responsible comportment and pragmatic approach during the TV debates endeared him to the voters. 

Noboa’s opponent, the leftist Luisa Gonzalez got more votes than him in the first round with 34% as against his 23%. But in the second round she got 48% while he had secured 52%. She took the defeat gracefully and issued the following statement, “To those who did not vote for us, also our congratulations, because the candidate they chose has won and as Ecuadoreans we also embrace them. And of course to the candidate, now President-elect Daniel Noboa, our deepest congratulations because it is democracy. We have never called to set fire to a city nor have we ever gone out shouting fraud. Enough of hatred, enough of polarization, Ecuador needs to heal. And count on us for a common agreement for our country,”.  

What a graceful gesture in comparison to the ugly and undemocratic shenanigans of the defeated candidates of Brazil and US in their recent elections. Even during the campaign and election debates, the two candidates did not indulge in hate speeches, indecent comments or or lies like those of Trump/Bolsonaro. The discourses of the two candidates were civilized and proper.  

This kind of democratic maturity should be a lesson for the rest of Latin America and the US. 

Noboa will assume office in November 2023 and govern until May 2025, completing the shortened term of President Guillermo Lasso who resigned as President in a confrontation with the National Assembly which proposed to impeach him on corruption charges. He dissolved the Assembly and his presidency as provided in the constitution. 

Noboa’s top priority is to tackle the unprecedented high level of violence and crime unleashed by the drug cartels which use Ecuador as a hub to ship drugs to Europe and US. Two weeks before the first round of elections in August, the gangs  assassinated  a presidential candidate Fernando Villavicenio who promised tough action against them. They went on to murder five more politicians. Later they killed all the seven who were in jail accused of involvement in  Vicenzio’s murder. Noboa was wearing bullet-proof vest during his campaign.

His second priority is to revive the economy which has not yet recovered from the pandemic hit. The main income of the country is oil exports but part of the oil shipment goes to service the Chinese debt. Ecuador is a dollarized economy since 2000. After the severe economic crisis of 2000, the country abandoned its national currency 'Sucre' to deal with hyper inflation, fall in exchange rate and capital outflow. Even the extreme leftist anti-US Correa did not try to change the system of using US dollars as the national currency. This means that Ecuador does not print its own bank notes. Panama and El Salvador are the other two Latin American countries which are also dollarised. 

Noboa’s main challenge would be lack of legislative support. His party has only 11 members in the 137 strong unicameral National Assembly. The leftist party of Gonzalez, Revolución Ciudadana (RC), is the largest with 42 members. The party is controlled by ex-President Rafael Correa who ruled from 2007 to 2017. He is in exile in Belgium with his Belgian wife. He has been convicted to prison on corruption charges. He calls the charges as politically motivated and wants a Presidential pardon to get back to the country. It was he who was responsible for the downfall of the centre-right President Guillermo Lasso. He will continue to cause instability until  he is rehabilitated. This will be the biggest challenge for the young President Noboa who has political experience of just two years as member of the Assembly in 2021-22. Rafael Correa turned around the country during his ten-year rule with his successful Inclusive development policies and programmes. But he was a polarizing figure within and outside the country. 

Noboa would be the toast of Washington DC which is desperately looking for centre-right leaders in Latin America which is dominated at present by leftist Presidents. In 2009, President Rafael Correa kicked out the Americans from the Ecuadorian military base in Manta, in the Pacific Coast. The Americans used the base for drug interdiction and surveillance of the region. But Correa’s successor signed an Agreement with US for resumption of American airforce activities in Ecuador. The US started cultivating Ecuadorian armed forces with supply of equipments and training. The US will push Noboa to open more doors. 

Although Ecuador is a relatively small market of 17 million people, India’s bilateral trade was substantial at 1.4 billion dollars in 2022-23. Crude oil is the main item of imports out of a total of 1016 million from Ecuador. India’s exports were 400 million dollars and there is good potential to increase the exports. Given the high level of trade, there is a need for India to open an embassy in Quito. Ecuador has one in New Delhi. 

 
Galvez is an engineer and entrepreneur. She has a degree in computer engineering and founded two tech firms. She is a senator and was head of the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples during the administration of Vicente Fox (2000–2006). Ideologically she is a free-spirited independent with a mix of conservative and progressive policies.

 
She is an indigenous Mexican from a poor family. She used to sell tamales in the streets as a kid.  Her father was an Indigenous Otomi schoolteacher. She learned to speak her native ñähñu language as a child. She rides E-bikes in Mexican streets wearing the loose embroidered indigenous blouse known as a huipil. She has a sense of humour and enjoys engaging with the public.

 
Firstly, this clear and decisive election of an anti-establishment outsider is a victory for democracy. The current ruling establishment of President Giammattei had tried a lot of dirty tricks and prevented some candidates from contesting in the elections. They even went after the Movimiento Semilla (Seed Movement) party of Arevalo with accusations of irregularities. Sandra Torres, the rival of Arevalo was favoured by the incumbent administration. This situation lead to fears that the elections might be derailed or Arevalo himself might be prevented from contesting in the second round. These concerns went beyond the borders of the country to regional and international levels. The Organization of American States and the US State Department as well as the Congress members had  issued statements. It is against this backdrop that Arevalo’s election with a convincing margin of 16% (against 37% of Sandra Torres) has given a clear message that democracy in Guatemala is safe, healthy and resilient. The elections were held peacefully without any major incidents. President Giammattei has already congratulated the winner and has invited him for talks for a smooth transition. 

 
The author has given a graphic account of the ongoing political, economic and social crisis in Venezuela. She has narrated the struggle of ordinary people amidst the shortage of food, medicines and other necessities. The Chavista gangs do a roaring business of selling goods in the black-market. The militias control the streets and unleash violence at will. The author calls the gangs as " Sons of the Revolution". The security forces and intelligence services harass, detain and torture the opponents of the regime. 
 
The protagonist Adelaida Falcon has no other option but to go to the black market to buy medicines at exorbitant prices for her mother undergoing cancer treatment in a clinic. Since the Clinic has perpetual shortage of essential items, she has to buy from the black market everything from syringes and saline bags to gases and cotton buds. Her apartment is taken over by a Chavista female gang, who throw  her out brutally. They beat her up and threaten to kill her if she returns to her apartment. Her friend’s brother is kidnapped during an anti-government protest march, detained, tortured and eventually killed by the Intelligence Services.
 
After losing her apartment, Adelco moves into another apartment which becomes vacant after its owner dies unexpectedly. She takes over the Spanish identity of  the owner and escapes from Venezuela to Spain. 
 
The author brings out an important part of the Venezuelan character which attaches too much importance to appearances. She says, “Nobody wants to grow old or appear poor. It is important to conceal, to make over. Those are the national pastimes: keeping up appearances. It does not matter if there is no money, or if the country is falling to pieces: the important thing is to be beautiful, to aspire to a crown, to be the queen of something … of Carnaval, of the town, of the country. To be the tallest, the prettiest”
 
Venezuela, which has the potential to be one of the richest countries in the world, is in a deep political and economic crisis in the last two decades. The crisis has got aggravated by the US sanctions and attempts for regime change. More than four million Venezuelans have gone out of the countries as refugees. Although the economy seems to be turning a corner, it will take some time for the country to return to democracy and normality. Till then, there will be a boom in the novels of Venezuelan exiles like Karina Sainz.
 
 
 
 

Rivera’s art and personality were influenced by the Mexican Revolution (1910-20) and the Russian Revolution (1917-23). Mexico, which was going through a crisis of identity after the Revolution, started recognizing and becoming proud of its indigenous culture. The country wanted to strike out an image of its own, free from the European inheritance and North American shadow. Secondly, Communism was becoming a fashion among artists and intellectuals of the country. Rivera became a believer and activist. Besides these external influences, Rivera’s own personality as an adventurer had guided his destiny. His life was filled with many women and scandals. But there was one woman who had the most decisive impact on him. It was Frida Kahlo who matched his adventures and recklessness with her own. She married him, divorced and remarried him.
 
Like other artists of his time, Rivera went for art studies and tours in Spain, France, Italy and Netherlands where he saw European art and interacted with his counterparts. He came across famous contemporaries such as Picasso and imbibed various styles and schools of thought. Rivera visited Picasso’s studio in 1914 and was awestruck by the quantity of Picasso’s paintings scattered around the walls. They had long conversations over lunch and dinner. Later, Picasso came to see Diego’s work, approved of what he saw and made Rivera part of his circle  Rivera lived the typical austere and struggling life of an artist in the Left Bank in Paris. After this, he came back to Mexico which offered him opportunities to try out mural and fresco work in public buildings. His success in Mexico had opened the doors for commissions in US in cities such as San Francisco, Detroit and New York. 
 
Besides having an extraordinary artistic talent, Rivera put in long hours of hard work in his projects. The scaffolding in front of the panels became his home where he worked, ate and often slept. Once he fell asleep, rolling off the scaffold and plummeting to the concrete below. The plastering crew found him unconscious with head injuries. 
 
Rivera was fascinated by Communism and let it influence his paintings and murals. He was a life-long believer in the ideal of Communism and mostly in denial concerning its ruthless reality. He joined the Communist party and their activities and meetings. He visited USSR where he was initially celebrated as a communist artist and was promised a mural work to be done in Moscow. However, the hosts turned hostile to him because of ideological and power struggles within the party. Later, Rivera was expelled from the Mexican Communist party accused of betraying the proletarian ideals. His membership was eventually restored. Rivera hosted Trotsky when he took refuge in Mexico and put him up in his own house for two years.
 
Rivera considered himself as a “people’s artist”. He was critical of the easel paintings which ended up in rich people’s homes. He believed that murals were the true People’s Art, painted where the public could see them. But he realized that he needed to make paintings for living. So he made lot of paintings and sold to rich people and took commissions of work from American capitalists. But his work with Rockefeller ended up as a failure. He was commissioned to make a mural work in the iconic Rockefeller building in Manhattan, New York. Rivera’s inclusion of Lenin in the murals incensed Rockefeller who got the half-finished mural demolished, although he paid Rivera the full amount as contracted. 
 
In his personal life, Rivera lead a colourful and adventurous life. He spent six months in the Mexican civil war fighting at the side of Emiliano Zapata and his southern army. Diego’s specialty was blowing trains off their tracks with explosives. For many years, he used to carry a large-calibre Colt revolver ostensibly to fight off attempts on his life. 
 
Many women had passed through his life including Russian, Mexican and American. He had numerous affairs with his models and even with the sisters of two of his wives. But one woman matched and impacted him the most. It was Frida Kahlo. In her first meeting with him she told him, “I haven’t come here to flirt, even though you are a notorious ladies’ man. Some of your good friends have advised me not to put too much stock in what you say. They say that if it’s a girl who asks your opinion and she’s not an absolute horror, you are ready to gush all over her. I just want to show you my pictures and seek your comments and advice”.  Frida was eighteen and Diego forty-three when they got married in 1929.  Frida had many affairs with both women and men including Trotsky. She used the house of her sister to meet Trotsky while the sister had an affair with her husband. 
 
Diego Rivera is part of the three greatest "los tres grandes"  Mexican muralists along with José Clemente Orozco and David Siqueiros. 
 
Satish Gujral, the famous Indian painter, received a Mexican government scholarship to study for two years (1952-54) at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico city, where he was apprenticed to Diego Rivera. Gujral worked with Rivera in the mural painting of “ Teatro de los Insurgents” in 1952-53. Later Gujral joined the studio of Siqueiros and collaborated with him in his mural works. After his return to India, Gujral had arranged an Indian government invitation to Siqueiros to visit India in 1956. The Mexican influence is evident in many of Gujral’s murals and paintings. 
 
Gujral was one of the earliest beneficiaries of the Mexican Cultural Exchange Programme started by their embassy in New Delhi established in August 1951 with ex-president Emilio Portes Gil as the first ambassador. The interview board of the embassy which interviewed various Indian artists including Ram Kumar and Satish Gujral had included the famous poet and writer Octavio Paz, who was the cultural attache in the embassy.

 

Anita’s family has a precarious and dangerous life in a slum in El Salvador where rival criminal gangs fight and cause misery to the residents. Anita’s mother is harassed by a security guard involved in human trafficking. She escapes taking  Anita with her. She tries to enter US through the Mexican border. The US authorities catch her and separate the mother and daughter. They put the daughter in a detention centre and deport the mother to Mexico. The mother is eventually killed by the security guard. Anita suffers abuse and ill-treatment by the guards and the private contractors who run the detention centres. She is rescued by Selena, a volunteer working with such separated kids. Anita gets asylum to stay in US.
 
Anita is sent to her aunt Leticia, working as house keeper in a large mansion in San Francisco. Leticia was born in a remote Salvadorian village called as El Mozote.  When she falls sick in the village, her father takes her to the hospital in the city. When he returns, his family and the other villagers have been massacred brutally by the military which wanted to teach a lesson to the indigenous people for their alleged sympathies  to the leftist guerilla fighters. He then decides to leave the country and tries to enter US illegally carrying his daughter on his back. He is caught and deported to Mexico while Leticia is lucky to get asylum. She finds work as a house keeper in the San Francisco mansion.
 
Samuel’s parents in Austria are sent to their death in concentration camps by the Nazis. However, they let the boy go to England, arranged by a charity organization along with other kids separated from their parents. The boy goes through series of foster homes and ultimately ends up with a caring family. He studies music and goes to US to join the San Francisco orchestra. The hippie daughter of a rich family marries him but later she divorces and dies leaving a large house for Samuel. His house keeper Leticia is the aunt of Anita. Samuel who has suffered as an orphan is moved by the story of Anita, lets her stay in his house and teaches her music.
 
Isabel Allende, the author has fictionalized the real life tragedies suffered by Jews under Nazis and the sufferings of the indigenous people in El Salvador during the civil war in the eighties during the Reagan era. El Mozote massacre happened actually in December 1981. Allende rightly blames the US which supported the military dictatorship in El Salvador and trained their security forces to fight ruthlessly against leftists. 
 
The US is responsible, to a large extent, for the civil wars in Central America. To protect and promote the commercial interests of the American corporations in the region, the US administration had converted the Central American countries as ‘banana republics’ by undermining democracies and encouraging and installing right wing military dictatorships. In 1954, CIA overthrew the democratically elected leftist government of Arbenz in Guatemala and installed pro-US military dictatorship. The immediate reason for the coup was the Guatemalan government’s land reforms which affected the interests of United Fruit Company, the single largest land owner in Guatemala and which had over three million acres of land in Central America. Incidentally, Che Guavara got his anti-imperialistic revolutionary inspiration after seeing personally the destruction of the Guatemalan democracy by the US. Using the pretext of anticommunism, the US had forced the governments and security agencies of Central America to persecute leftist parties and liberals. When Sandinistas came to power in 1979 after defeating the US-supported Somoza dictatorship, the Reagan administration turned its guns against Nicaragua and involved the other Central American countries too in the dirty and illegal “ Contra War” against the Sandinista government. The US sent arms, trained local militias and paramilitary death squads and waged an all-out war to hurt Nicaragua and tried to bring about regime change.  These atrocities of US destabilized Central America causing deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
 
During the civil war, over a million people had fled to US to escape the violence. Many of them went to Los Angeles. Unable to fit in the social milieu, the poor and marginalised illegal immigrant youth joined the criminal gangs in LA. The Reagan administration denied refugee status to these Central American immigrants, who were forced into clandestine lives. In the nineties, the US authorities cracked down on the gangs and deported thousands of the gang members to Central America. But many of the deported, who were born or brought up in US, found it difficult to adjust in Central America and continued with their LA gang culture. They regrouped themselves locally with guns smuggled from US and scaled up their crimes, taking advantage of the weak law enforcement and justice system of these countries.
 
El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala in Central America have the highest homicide rates in the world caused by gangs such as Maras and Barrio-18, who originated from Los Angeles. The rivalry between these two became so violent at one stage in 2012, the government of El Salvador intervened and brokered a ceasefire between the rival gangs. In order to bring the two sides to the negotiating table, the government relaxed conditions in the prisons in which the members of the two gangs were held. Following this peace deal, the murder rate had dropped immediately. But this truce broke down in 2014 and crime has gone up again.  Earlier this month about 50 women prisoners were killed in the fight between female gangsters in a prison in Honduras. 
 
The Central American  gangsters and Mexican cartels use guns illegally trafficked from the US. But the US, which complains about trafficking of drugs from Latin America, does not do anything to stop the trafficking of weapons to Mexico and Central America. There are about 7000 gun shops in the US side of the 2000 mile border with Mexico. These are the sources of guns which kill hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans every year.
 
The flood of illegal immigrants from El Salvador as well as Guatemala and Honduras is the harvest US is reaping for sowing the seeds of destabilization and violence.   

             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 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. 
 
 

 
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.

 

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

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. 

 “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. 

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 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”.

 

 

India’s exports to Latin American countries are more than to neighboring countries and traditional trade partners 

                                                     

India’s exports of 266 million dollars in 2023-24 to the remote Honduras in Central America are more than the exports of 185 m to nearby Cambodia and 237 m to Kazakhstan. The population of Honduras is just 10 million as against 17 m of Cambodia and 20 m of Kazakhstan.

 

If you think this is incredible, here are some more:

 

India’s exports of 920 m to Peru are more than the 670 m to Myanmar.

Exports to Brazil (6022 million dollars) are higher than to the traditional trade partners such as Japan (5156 m), Indonesia (5988 m), Vietnam (5470 m) and Thailand (5038 m).

Exports to Mexico (5324 m) are more than the exports to Russia (4261 m), Canada (3845 m), Sri Lanka (4117 m) and Egypt (3520 m)

Three countries in the region are billion dollars plus destinations: Colombia of 1219 million, Chile 1183 million and Argentina 1086 m.

 

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.  

 

 

Car exports

Car exports to Latin America were 1757 million dollars. This was 26.5% of India’s global car exports of 6.63 bn dollars. 

 Major destinations: Mexico 874 m, Chile 266 m and Peru 191 m, Panama 77 m, Colombia 65 m, Ecuador 60 m, and Guatemala 46 m.

 

Motorcycles

Exports of motor cycles crossed a billion dollars reaching 1037 million dollarsfrom 921 m in 2022-23. This is 37.4% of India’s global exports of 2.77 bn.

 

Mexico has replaced Colombia as the #1 global destination of India’s motor cycle exports with 281 million dollars. Colombia was #2 with 224 m and Guatemala was # 4 with 134 m. The other main destinations were: Argentina 95 m, Honduras 56 m, Peru 46 m and Brazil 46 m.

. 

Pharmaceuticals

Pharma exports were 1.63 billion dollars.  

Major destination of India’s pharma exports:  Brazil 417 million dollars, Mexico 212 m, Chile 190 m, Venezuela 99 m, Colombia 129 m, Peru 102 m, Guatemala 73 m, Dominican Republic 60 m and Ecuador 53m.

 

Major exports

Vehicles     4.12 bn 

Chemicals  4.12 bn

Machinery  2.8 bn 

Petroleum Products  1.7 bn                   

Pharma      1.63 bn  

Iron and steel  1.12 bn

Textiles 1.01 bn

Aluminum products  558 m               

Plastics   438 m 

Cotton  438 m  

Rubber products 418 m            

                 

Imports 

Main import items: 

 

Crude oil  7.44 billion dollars

Raw gold.        6.21 bn  

Vegetable oil 2.95 bn 

Raw sugar 1.95 bn

Copper    1.76 bn 

Machinery and equipment 960 m

Iron and steel 606 m

Wood        495 m

Chemicals 476 m

Fruits& vegetables 195 m

Paper pulp 101 m

 

 

Crude oil imports which reached a peak of around 15 billion dollars in 2013-14 has come down drastically due to US sanctions on Venezuela which supplied 10 bn dollars of crude in 2013-14.

 

Main sources of crude oil imports: Colombia 2.13 bn, Mexico 1.87 billion dollars, Brazil 1.48 bn, Venezuela 932 m and Ecuador 332 million

  

Raw gold import sourcing: Peru 2837 m, Bolivia 1077 m, Brazil 213 m, Colombia 737 m, Dom Republic 488 m, Argentina 346 m, Mexico 143 m and Ecuador 338 m. 

 

Latin America is the main source of soy oil imports of India. Argentina, as usual, was the #1 global supplier of soy oil with 1.98 billion dollars, followed by Brazil 1.03 bn. 

 

Brazil is the source of imports of raw sugar which India refines and reexports to other countries.

 

Chile, the main supplier of copper and other mineral concentrates from the region supplied 847 m, followed by Peru 212 m, Brazil 147 m, Panama 135 m and Colombia 115 m.

 

Main suppliers of wood from the region: Uruguay 114 m, Brazil 102 m, Ecuador 88 m, Argentina 76 m, Panama 39 m, Costa Rica 20 m and Colombia 17 m

 

 

Trade 2023-24

Figures in millions of US Dollars 

 

Country	exports	imports	Total trade
Brazil	6022	6210	12232
Mexico	5324	3104	8428
Argentina	1086	2497	3583
Peru	920	3114	4034
Colombia	1219	3086	4305
Chile	1183	1514	2697
Venezuela	175	1000	1175
Bolivia	71	1087	1158
Ecuador	459	797	1256
Dom Republic	347	571	918
Panama	297	371	668
Guatemala	559	30	589
Uruguay	521	135	656
Honduras	266	31	297
Costa Rica	184	118	302
Paraguay	212	31	243
El Salvador	129	3	132
Nicaragua	132	48	180
Cuba	45	2	47
Total	19151	23749	42900

 

 

Trade from 2010-11 to 2023-24

 

 

Year	exports	imports	Total trade
2023-24	19.15	23.75	42.90
2022-23	22.41	25.59	48.00
2021-22	18.89	25.62	44.50
2020-21	12.74	14.92	27.66
2019-20	13.18	20.67	33.85
2018-19	13.16	25.7	38.89
2017-18	12.1	24.4	36.45
2016-17	10.4	19.6	30
2015-16	10	19.7	29.7
2014-15	13.7	29.3	43
2013-14	12.77	31.31	44.08
2012-13	12.48	31.38	43.86
2011-12	11.33	18.42	29.75
2010-11	10.04	14.01	24.05

 

The fall in trade in 2023-24 from 2022-23 is due to the  reduced import of crude oil and soy oil from the region and export of petroleum products. 

  

Latin America is a substantial market of 19 countries, population of 620 million and GDP of 6 trillion dollars with a per capita income close to 10,000 dollars. The Indian exporters are still in the early stage of discovery and exploration in the last two decades. 

 

Except for Venezuela and Argentina, the economies of the other 17 countries of the region are stable and growing and have single digit average inflation. Even Argentine and Venezuelan economies have passed their worst and are recovering now. Venezuela’s GDP growth in 2024 is projected at 4%.

 

Latin America contributes to India’s energy security with crude oil helping with India’s strategy to diversify import sources. The region could also contribute to India’s renewable energy projects with supply of Lithium and other critical minerals.  The Lithium Triangle of South America (Chile, Bolivia and Argentina) has more than half of the global reserves. 

 

South America contributes to India’s food security with vegetable oils, pulses, fruits and vegetables. 

 

The Latin Americans seek to reduce their overdependence on China with which there is a huge trade and trust deficit. As part of their diversification strategy, they attach importance to the benign, large and growing market of India. 

 

Export target of 50 billion dollars

 

India could set a target of 50 billion dollars in the next five years. This is achievable if the Indian exporters, export promotion councils, industry bodies and the government intensify their export promotion seriously and systematically with adequate investment. 

 

External Affairs Minister Jaishankar has emphasized the importance of trade and business during his visit to the region last year. He has visited more countries in Latin America than any of his predecessors.

 

India should open embassies in Ecuador, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Uruguay which accounted for 1.76 billion dollars of exports.  Opening of embassies in these seven countries can be done with a mere one percent of the total export earnings from these countries. 

 

The Commerce Ministry should reactivate its Focus LAC program which had given a critical boost to India's exports in the late nineties. 

 

India should start negotiations for FTA with Mexico and Colombia, the 2^nd  and 3rd largest destinations of exports to Latin America besides concluding soon the ongoing FTA talks with Peru. The PTA with Chile needs to be upgraded to a FTA. The India-Mercosur PTA should be expanded with more products and deeper cuts in tariffs.

 

India should join as member of the Inter-American Development Bank to enable Indian companies to participate in the projects of the Bank. 

In recent years, Indian companies have started making entry in projects in the region in sectors such as power transmission and renewable energy. For example, Kalpataru Power Transmission Ltd of Mumbai has got about a billion dollars of projects in the region including the single largest EPC contract of 431 million dollars In Chile. 

 

India should consider extending more lines of credit to the region. While China has given more than 150 billion dollars of credit to Latin America, India’s credit is not even one billion. The proposal of the Export Import bank of India to open an office in Sao Paulo within the year of 2024 is good news for Indian project and equipment exporters. 

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Latin America includes 10 countries in South America, 6 in Central America, 2 Spanish speaking Caribbean (Cuba and Dominican Republic) and Mexico

 
He has given a graphic and moving account of the violence in Central America based on his direct interaction with criminal gangs, assassins, security forces, prison authorities, judges, prosecutors, police detectives, informants, government functionaries, political leaders, priests and the victims. He has taken enormous personal risk in visiting the areas controlled by gangs in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. He himself has faced several death threats.
 
Martinez traces the roots of the violence to the civil wars in the eighties and the role of US. He says, “The violent gangs weren’t born in Guatemala or Honduras or El Salvador. They came from the United States, Southern California, to be precise. They began with migrants fleeing a US-sponsored civil wars in Central America. The US supported brutal dictatorships, trained security forces and armed right-wing militias and death squads. This had caused hundreds of thousands of Central Americans fleeing from the violence and seeking refuge in US. Some of the young refugees found themselves living in an ecosystem of gangs already established in California. And so they came together to defend themselves and survive by forming their own gangs called as Mara Salvatrucha (Maras) and Barrio 18.  The US government deported about 4,000 of these gang members back to Central America. Those 4,000 have expanded to about  70,000, just in El Salvador. 
 
Besides the two main gangs, there are numerous smaller gangs called as Mara Gauchos Locos 13, the Crazy Cowboys 13, Los Valerios, Mirada Lokotes 13, Los Meli 33, the Twins 33, Los Chancletas (the Sandals) and Los Uvas (the Grapes). These gangs terrorise neighborhoods, extort businessmen, traffic in drugs  and recruit teenagers and train them in crime. They corrupt the political leaders and security forces and issue death threats to judges, prosecutors and police. They control the prisons and continue their criminal operations from inside the jails. The gangs overrun the police stations and outgun the police with more deadly weapons. Martinez narrates a case in which the helpless police officer calls on the families threatened by gangs to join him in prayers, as a last resort.

‘Trust’ is not a simple story for passive pleasure of reading. It is a complex and unconventional novel provoking the readers to think, detect, imagine and question. Within the book, there are four different books written by different fictional authors in disparate genres and styles. There are multiple characters at different time periods. The author describes ‘Trust’  as a polyphonic novel. The first section is a novel written by a fictional writer Harold Vanner about New York financier Benjamin Rask and his wife Helen who patronizes arts and culture. Although Harold Vanner is one of the central characters in the book he never appears in it. Vanner opens the book and triggers everything that happens in it: several people in “the real world” react to Vanner’s book, setting the whole plot in motion.
 
The second part is a memoir of Andrew Bevel, a Wall Street tycoon who wants people to believe that his pursuit of profit was always aligned to the social good. His wife Mildred is a connoisseur of music and a lover of literature. They live together physically but live apart mentally. They find that the living together improves by the vast distance between their minds of which one is obsessed with money and the other arts. At times, Mildred dabbles in stocks and gives valuable advice to her husband which he uses to make more money. 
 
The third part is about Ida Partenza a writer who becomes secretary to the tycoon and ghost-writes his autobiography. Her father is an anarchist and an immigrant from Italy. She is caught between the anti-capitalist rants of her father and working with the wealthy financier who wants her to help with his autobiography spinning a positive image of his business and the cultural activities of his wife who becomes mentally ill. Diaz says in an interview, “ I enjoyed particularly writing the character of Ida. She is like my hero—she’s fearless, effective, crafty, and very bold. I made her all the things that I wish I were. She’s also a very different writer from me, so I had to learn to write like her”. 
 
The fourth part is the personal diary of Mildred, the tycoon’s wife “that is also a sort of a prose poem and a love letter to modernism”, in the words of the author. Midred writes about music, art, philosophy, her illness, the stock market and Swiss mountain slopes among which she convalesces in a clinic.
 
The connecting themes in all the four books are the Wall Street money-making and the world of art and literature. The author has juxtaposed the two themes with provocative pronouncements challenging the conventional American narratives and myths about money. He has chosen the boom years of the Wall Street in the twenties and the bust in 1929 followed by the years of depression for context. 
 
Diaz says he wanted to write about the labyrinth of capital, how it works and distorts the reality around itself in the American value system. He is fascinated by the ‘transcendental and mythical place of money in the American culture’. He explores how wealth  creates isolation for the wealthy while  giving the person extraordinary outreach to the world of art, culture and politics. According to Diaz “money is also a fiction. It is just that we have all agreed on the terms and conditions and agreed to play it as a game. There is nothing that ties money to real value other than a narrative. Or the trust that we invest in that narrative”. 
 
In another interview, Diaz says, “Reading is always an act of trust. Whenever we read anything, from a novel to the label on a prescription bottle, trust is involved. That trust is based on tacit contracts whose clauses I wanted to encourage the reader to reconsider. As you read Trust and move forward from one section to the next, it becomes clear that the book is asking you to question the assumptions with which you walk into a text. I would even say that Trust aims, to an enormous extent, to question the boundaries between history and fiction”.
 
Here are some vignettes from the novel:
  
-He became fascinated by the contortions of money—how it could be made to bend back upon itself to be force-fed its own body. The isolated, self-sufficient nature of speculation spoke to his character and was a source of wonder and an end in itself, regardless of what his earnings. He viewed capital as an antiseptically living thing. It moves, eats, grows, breeds, falls ill, and may die. But it is clean. This became clearer to him in time. The larger the operation, the further removed he was from its concrete details. There was no need for him to touch a single banknote or engage with the things and people his transaction affected. All he had to do was think, speak, and, perhaps, write. And the living creature would be set in motion, drawing beautiful patterns on its way into realms of increasing abstraction, sometimes following appetites of its own that he never could have anticipated—and this gave him some additional pleasure, the creature trying to exercise its free will. He admired and understood it, even when it disappointed him.
 
-The root of all evil, the cause of every war—god and country.
 
- History itself is just a fiction—a fiction with an army.
 
-Every life is organized around a small number of events that either propel us or bring us to a grinding halt. We spend the years between these episodes benefiting or suffering from their consequences until the arrival of the next forceful moment. A man’s worth is established by the number of these defining circumstances he is able to create for himself. He need not always be successful, for there can be great honor in defeat. But he ought to be the main actor in the decisive scenes in his existence, Whatever the past may have handed on to us, it is up to each one of us to chisel our present out of the shapeless block of the future.
 
-Every single one of our acts is ruled by the laws of economy. When we first wake up in the morning we trade rest for profit. When we go to bed at night we give up potentially profitable hours to renew our strength. And throughout our day we engage in countless transactions. Each time we find a way to minimize our effort and increase our gain we are making a business deal, even if it is with ourselves. These negotiations are so ingrained in our routine that they are barely noticeable. But the truth is our existence revolves around profit.
 
Hernan Diaz’s cerebral perspectives, intriguing plots and unconventional literary tools reminds me of Jorge Borges the famous Argentine writer. Diaz says, “Borges has shaped me not only as a reader and as a writer but also as a person. His playfulness with genre, his joyful disregard for taxonomies of any kind and his obsession with framed narratives are some of the aspects of his work that have influenced me”. Diaz has written a book “Borges, between history and eternity”.
 
Diaz believes that "fiction has palpable effects on reality. A lot of the power constraints that we feel in our everyday lives are based on fiction. Think of something that is as inherent and powerful to you as your nationality. That is, at the end of the day, a collection of ideological fictions. There's nothing in it. Nothing. Think about it for a second. There's nothing that makes you American or Belgian or anything aside from what you ascribe to that identity, and that is a series of narratives”.
 
Diaz is a voracious reader. In interviews, he quotes so many writers and points out parts of his novel  which have styles similar to some of the writers. After having read 29 books of P G Wodehouse he says, “ I love Wodehouse. Ever-surprising in his repetitiousness, never failing to delight, always making us safe in his breezy world. It is paradoxical that Wodehouse should give me so much comfort when he also makes me feel how mean and shabby my life is each time I emerge from one of his novels”.
 
Some authors write well but not impressive in speeches and conversations. Diaz is spectacular and mesmerizing both in writing and talking with his spontaneous thoughts and reflections. I have read some of his interviews which are as fascinating and inspiring as his book. He revels in abstract concepts and subversive thoughts. He calls writing as a monstrous act because it implies a metamorphosis. 
 

Diaz says, “I write with a fountain pen (received as gift twenty years back) in large format notebooks. I enjoy the feeling of flowing ink and the rumor of the pen on the paper. With a pen, you create your own geography, with its islets of thoughts and streams of associations”. 
 
‘Trust’ has won the 2023 Pulitzer prize for fiction. It is the second novel of Diaz. I cannot wait  to read his first novel “In the Distance”. 
 
Hernan Diaz is a potential candidate for Nobel Prize.
 

The novel brings out the life and situation in Costa Rica during the time of domination of American banana companies in the sixties. The companies exploit the workers and the country. Their use of chemicals to spray on the banana plants cause sterility among men. To hide this, the company's Gringo doctor falsifies medical records to show that the men were already sterile. He is foolish and arrogant enough to tell one of the worker Jose Maria that his two children might not be his own. The angry husband tries to kill his wife Teresa but murders his mother- in-law who fights back. Then he goes to the house of the Gringo doctor and sets it on fire. The doctor and the whole banana plantation as well as the arsonist are burnt and turned into ashes. 
 
Teresa runs away to US leaving her two kids Lyra and Carmen. The latter, who is traumatized after witnessing the murder of the grand mother and the burning of the plantation, commits suicide leaving her son as orphan. The boy is adopted by Lyra, the sister of Carmen. But she does not tell the kid about the tragedy till he becomes an adult. Lyra does not let her mother Teresa meet the grandson when she comes back from US. The boy comes to know just before Teresa dies of cancer.
 
The author has added many other fascinating typical Latino characters and sub plots in the novel. The three Marias, the spinster sisters who are involved in the life of Teresa family, are memorable with their quaint characteristics and playful dialogues. The author has added some magical realism which makes the novel more interesting and familiar for the fans of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Latin America’s GDP growth in 2024 is projected at 1.8%, down from 2.1% in 2023, according to the annual December report of ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and Caribbean). 

This lowering of growth is due to the general slow down of global growth and in particular the decline in Chinese growth and the fall in commodity prices exported by the region. The modest 4.2% of Chinese GDP growth in 2024 will impact particularly Chile, Panama, Peru, Brazil and Uruguay. China absorbs 39% of Chile’s goods exports, 32% of those of both Panama and Peru, and 27% of those of Brazil and Uruguay. Latin America’s exports of agro products and minerals and metals are projected to fetch less revenue in 2024 with the anticipated reduction in prices of these items by 4% and 2% respectively.

Brazil’s GDP is expected to grow by 1.6% (down from 3% in 2023), Mexico’s 2.5% (down from 3.6% in 2023), Colombia’s by 1.7% (up from 0.9% in 2023, Chile’s by 1.9% (up from 0.3% in 2023) and Peru’s by 2.4% (up from 0.1%). Central America’s GDP is expected to increase by 3.2%, down from 3.4% last year.

Surprisingly, Venezuela will have the highest growth among the major economies of the region with 4% (up from 3% in 2023). The country which had gone through historic economic crisis due to mismanagement and US sanctions in the last several years has now recovered. The US has recently loosened some sanctions on export of oil and investment of American and other foreign companies in Venezuelan oil production.

Unsurprisingly, Argentina will have a negative growth of 1% (better than the 2.5% contraction in 2023). It is the only country in the region to suffer economic contraction. All the other 18 countries will show positive growth. Poverty in Argentina increased from 21.5% in 2016 to 30.1% in 2022.The new President Javier Milei who took office in December 2023 has already started some reforms such as cutting down expenditure and privatization of public sector companies. He has postponed implementation of his radical proposals such as closure of the Central Bank and dollarization of the economy. In the coming months, there will be more economic and financial difficulties for the government and sufferings for the people. The country could recover next year.

Milei will cause some minor disruptions in the process of deepening of integration of Mercosur with his anti-Lula rhetoric. However he will not have accomplices for destabilization of the region as a whole with his anti-Left policies since all the other major powers such as Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Venezuela are ruled by Leftist governments.

Latin America’s sovereign risk reached the level of 410 basis points in October 2023, as measured by the J. P. Morgan EMBI Global Diversified Index (EMBIGD) of emerging markets. This indicator measures the spread between interest rates on a country’s debt obligations and those of the United States, which are considered risk-free. The countries with the lowest sovereign risk index are Uruguay (about 90 basis points since the second half of the year), followed by Chile and Peru (both below 200 basis points). At the other extreme are countries with the highest credit risk namely Venezuela (15867), Argentina(2576) and Ecuador(1755) followed by Bolivia (1599)

Average inflation of the region was 5.2% in September 2023, down from 8.2% in September 2022. It has remained in single digit for the last two decades. Exceptions are Venezuela with inflation of 318% ( down from 138000 percent in 2018), Argentina 140% and Cuba 37%. The only other country with double digit inflation is Colombia 11%.

The region's ratio of gross external debt to GDP was 42% in September 2023. The region has relatively comfortable position of foreign exchange reserves with 860 billion dollars. But Argentina, Venezuela and Cuba have acute shortage of forex reserves.

Average lending rate (Q3 of 2023) was the highest in Argentina at 108%, followed by Venezuela at 48.6%, Brazil (42%) and Mexico at 32%.

In 2024 there will be presidential elections in Mexico, El Salvador, Panama, Dominican Republic, Uruguay and Venezuela. However, these will not bring out any dangers such as Bolsonaro or drastic changes and challenges.

In the Mexican elections in June, the current president Lopez Obrador’s protégé Claudia Sheinbaum is leading in the opinion polls and expected to win and continue the policies of the current government with more pragmatism but without the eccentricities of Obrador. In El Salvador, the Cool Dictator Nayib Bukele is expected to win in the June elections. He has consistently high popularity ratings with his successful containment of crimes and murders. The popular incumbent President Luis Abinader of Dominican Republic is poised to get a second term in the June elections. The elections in Panama and Uruguay are open but there is no polarizing radicals among the leading candidates. President Maduro will ensure his reelection by hook or crook in the last quarter of the year. He and his top political and military leadership have no other option. They cannot afford to let power pass to the hands of the opposition. The US government has announced (in 2020) a bounty of 15 million dollars on the head of president Maduro and several million dollars on other political leaders of Venezuela on trumped charges of drug trafficking and other crimes. So Maduro and other top leaders will certainly be killed or deported to US prisons immediately.  If Maduro is reelected, the US will make some pro forma noises about rigged elections but will get on with its resumption of business with Venezuela. The US will not repeat its regime change policy, after having failed miserably in the last several years.

Latin America will continue to be a large market for India’s trade and investment in 2024 and in the coming years and decades. India’s exports to the region were 22.5 billion dollars in the financial year April 2022-March 2023. Indian companies have invested around 12 billion dollars in the region. The region is contributing to India’s energy and food security with supply of crude oil, edible oil, pulses and fresh fruits. India is exploring opportunities in the region for mining and production of Lithium, needed for electrification of vehicles. India will continue to source copper, gold and other minerals from Latin America which has abundant reserves of them.

In 2024, India will deepen its engagement with Latin America and work closely with Brazil, the current president of G-20. Argentine President Milei has switched teams. He will play for Team USA while his predecessors played in BRICS and Global South teams. But this will not make any difference to India or BRICS since Argentina is completely mired in the economic crisis from which it will take time to get out. 

In a referendum held yesterday, 56 percent of the Chilean voters defeated a draft centre-right constitution.
 
Last year, the voters defeated a leftist constitution, which was drafted by the constitutional assembly which was dominated by social activists and idealists. 
 
The Chileans decided in a referendum held in 2019 to go in for a new constitution to replace the existing constitution imposed by the military dictatorship of Pinochet. Although this has been amended many times, still it perpetuates inequality and social injustice. The students and masses had risen in violent protests in 2019 seeking reforms in education, health care and pensions. It was because of these protests that it was decided to change the current constitution.
 
Both sides have now realized that they cannot impose their agenda on the other. So there is need for compromise and mutual give and take. 
 
The voters have also learnt that neither Left nor the Right has the exclusive solutions. So they have exercised smart choice in the presidential elections of the last two decades. They have voted the Left and the Right to power alternately in each of the last five elections since 2006. 
 
The current President Gabriel Boric, a Leftist, is the youngest to be elected at the age of 35. He was one of the student union leaders who lead the protests for equality and justice. He is trying his best to advance his leftist agenda but has only limited success due to the strong opposition of the conservative forces. He has also realized that he needs to be more pragmatic and realistic.
 

The Chilean constitutional experiment is a lesson for many other democracies of the world which are also struggling to balance the demands and interests of the haves and have-nots.
 

Panama’s economy doing fine without a Central Bank in the last hundred years.
 
Javier Milei, the President-elect of Argentina, has promised to close the central bank and dollarize the economy to get the country out of its crisis. Many people consider this as yet another crazy proposal of the Mad Milei. 
 
But there is a Latin American country whose economy is doing well without a Central Bank. It is Panama. It does not have a Central Bank since its independence in 1903. Panama is the only country in Latin America that has not experienced a financial collapse, high inflation or currency crisis in the last hundred years. On the other hand, the economy has experienced stable and resilient growth with low inflation and interest rates. This is even more amazing in view of the fact that the country has suffered with political crises and corruption cases. Panama’s unique economic management without a central bank is an intriguing case in global economics. 

The country does not print currency and has adopted US Dollar as de facto currency. The absence of a central bank has resulted in a completely market-driven money supply and interest rates. There are no capital controls despite the presence of a large number of foreign banks. There is no deposit insurance and no lender of last resort, so banks have to act responsibly at their own risk. No bail out or rescue by government. 
 
Of course, Panama is a small country of 5.5 million people with a special historical link to United States which built and controlled the Panama canal for a long time. Panama’s model may not work with large economies and it might be complicated for Argentina which has its own unique crisis with excessive external debt and severe shortage of foreign exchange.
 
More in the article… https://mises.org/library/panama-has-no-central-bank
 

Argentina is going through yet another cycle of crisis with three digit (138%) inflation, steep currency depreciation, increased poverty and unemployment, shortage of foreign exchange reserves and huge unbearable burden of external debt. Part of the blame lies with the leftist Peronist governments in power for most part of the last two decades.  So, the voters elected the centre-right Mauricio Macri as President in 2015. However, his government also failed to arrest the deterioration of the economy. Macri made it worse by sinking the country in a huge debt trap by taking a 43 billion dollars IMF loan towards the end of his term. These billions were not used for any productive or revenue generating projects. The money simply disappeared, leaving the country with a severe burden of debt. During the Peronist rule between 2003 and 2014 the country was virtually debt free since the Wall Street cartels and their Washington DC accomplices kept Argentina isolated from the international capital markets. They wanted to punish Argentina for its audacious debt structuring on its own in 2002 ignoring IMF, the US Treasury Department and the Wall Street. President Nestor Kirchner pulled off a financial coup by making the creditors (over 93%) agree to receive 30 cents to a dollar. This way he reduced the debt from 90 billion to 30 billion dollars. He and his wife Cristina Fernandez, who succeeded him as President, refused to be blackmailed by the American vulture funds who did not accept the debt restructuring formula and insisted on full payments. So the Wall Street mafia blockaded Argentina from the western financial capital markets. This was a blessing in disguise. Argentina remained free from external debt since there was no one to extend credit except for the Chinese who came to the rescue occasionally with some credit and financial swaps. Argentina struggled but remained free from the curse of external debt, which had caused many crises in the past. But this situation was changed by the pro-US Macri who made a deal with the vulture funds and took the disastrous step of taking in 43 billion loan from IMF. This was irresponsible and unpardonable. This IMF debt of 43 billion dollars has become an unbearable burden for the country which has severe shortage of foreign exchange reserves. This has aggravated the economic crisis of the country. This is the reason why the voters punished Macri and defeated him in the 2019 elections when he sought reelection. His candidate Bullrich was given the same punishment in the 2023 elections. The electors are not yet ready to forgive the grave sin of Macri.
 
Obviously, the country needs a change from the leftist Peronists who have failed in economic management and the rightists who worsened the crisis by adding the the debt burden. It was in this context that the situation was ripe for an outsider. Javier Milei, the Libertarian candidate, was the natural choice at this time of anti-incumbency. Milei, a professional economist, promised a shock treatment and radical free-market reforms. His angry attacks against the political caste which got the country into the mess, resonated with the public. He got the most votes in the primaries held in August this year. This boosted the confidence of Milei who went overboard with extremist statements, crazy outbursts and attacks against those whom he did not like. He derided Pope Francis as “a malignant presence on earth,” “filthy leftist”, “a donkey”, “a jackass” and “a leftist sob”. This has not gone well in the catholic country which is proud of the first Argentine who has become Pope. 
 
Milei proposes to close down the Central Bank, dollarize the economy, shut down 10 of the 18 ministries and cut social expenditure. He has taken disturbing and unrealistic foreign policy positions. He attacks President Lula and admires the disgraced ex-president Bolsonaro. He is critical of Mercosur, the regional economic bloc as well as China, the most important economic partners of Argentina. He considers global warming as a “socialist lie”.
 
The masses struggling with poverty and economic difficulties realized that Milei has no agenda for them. Their situation would only worsen with Milei’s proposal to cut social expenditure. So they have ditched Milei and voted for the leftist candidate Massa, a known devil. In any case, Massa is a pragmatic and moderate leftist unlike the Kirchners who were extremists and confrontational.
 
Milei has got the message of the voters now and is toning down his rhetoric. He has realized the need for support of the moderate centre-right voters. 
 
I believe that Argentina needs a change from the traditional left and right.  An unconventional shock treatment by an outsider would be good at this time. So  Milei is a natural choice. But he needs to moderate himself and become more realistic and pragmatic. Only then he has a chance in the second round of elections on 19 November. 
 
In any case, even Milei gets elected as president he cannot impose his crazy proposals and become a monster like Bolsonaro or Trump.. His party does not have the legislative majority. In the Congressional elections held simultaneously  with the Presidential elections on 21 October, the leftist Peronist coalition has won the maximum seats. They got 34 seats in the House of deputies and 12 in the Senate. Milei’s party got 8 deputies and 8 senators while the centre-right coalition got 24 deputies and 2 senators. With these results, the new (Lower) House of Deputies will have 108 leftists, 38 Libertarians and 93 rightists out of a total of 257. In the Senate of 72 members, the leftists will number 34 while Libertarians will be 8 and rightists 24. So, Milei will need the support of the moderate rightists to pass his legislative reforms. He will have tough time in contending with the Leftist coalition which has the largest number of Deputies and Senators.
 
Milei would also have to live with another reality. The leftist incumbent candidate Axis Kicillof has been reelected as governor of Buenos Aires, the largest province with 17 million people out of the total country’s population of 45 million. There are also several other provinces with leftist governors. 
 
If Milei gets elected as president, the country would get a much-needed shock therapy. At the same time, he would not be allowed to become disastrous like Trump or Bolsonaro since the voters have built firewalls of opposition with their smart voting. It would not be bad either if the leftist Massa wins.  He is mature, balanced, pragmatic and has the much needed political experience of crisis management in recent times. 
 
 

Ecuador elected Daniel Noboa as President in the elections held on Sunday. 

At 35, he is the youngest to become the President of the country.  His wife Lavinia Valbonesi, age 25, will be the youngest First Lady. She is a Social Media Influencer with interests and investment in health food, fitness and fashion. The dashing young, athletic-looking, entrepreneurial and successful couple have attracted the votes of the youth.

Noboa has an MBA from Kellogg School, Masters in Public Administration from Harvard and another Masters in Political Communication and Strategic Governance from George Washington University. He started his own company at the age of 18, before joining his family business later. 

Noboa is born into one of the wealthiest families. His grandfather became a millionaire exporting bananas and other products. His father expanded the business and built a large group with dozens of companies in various areas including in exports, logistics, fertilisers, fishing and real estate.

In fact, his father Alvaro Noboa was a presidential candidate five times in the past but unsuccessfully. Even in this election he put up his candidature but withdrew it in favour of his son. 

Predictably, Daniel Noboa is pro-business, but not at the expense of inclusive development. He wants to increase social spending on poverty alleviation, employment, healthcare and education. His wife is in favour of allowances for single mothers. While his conservative father used to call his leftist opponent Rafael Correa as “communist devil”, the son avoided harsh words, confrontation and hate speech. His calm and responsible comportment and pragmatic approach during the TV debates endeared him to the voters. 

Noboa’s opponent, the leftist Luisa Gonzalez got more votes than him in the first round with 34% as against his 23%. But in the second round she got 48% while he had secured 52%. She took the defeat gracefully and issued the following statement, “To those who did not vote for us, also our congratulations, because the candidate they chose has won and as Ecuadoreans we also embrace them. And of course to the candidate, now President-elect Daniel Noboa, our deepest congratulations because it is democracy. We have never called to set fire to a city nor have we ever gone out shouting fraud. Enough of hatred, enough of polarization, Ecuador needs to heal. And count on us for a common agreement for our country,”.  

What a graceful gesture in comparison to the ugly and undemocratic shenanigans of the defeated candidates of Brazil and US in their recent elections. Even during the campaign and election debates, the two candidates did not indulge in hate speeches, indecent comments or or lies like those of Trump/Bolsonaro. The discourses of the two candidates were civilized and proper.  

This kind of democratic maturity should be a lesson for the rest of Latin America and the US. 

Noboa will assume office in November 2023 and govern until May 2025, completing the shortened term of President Guillermo Lasso who resigned as President in a confrontation with the National Assembly which proposed to impeach him on corruption charges. He dissolved the Assembly and his presidency as provided in the constitution. 

Noboa’s top priority is to tackle the unprecedented high level of violence and crime unleashed by the drug cartels which use Ecuador as a hub to ship drugs to Europe and US. Two weeks before the first round of elections in August, the gangs  assassinated  a presidential candidate Fernando Villavicenio who promised tough action against them. They went on to murder five more politicians. Later they killed all the seven who were in jail accused of involvement in  Vicenzio’s murder. Noboa was wearing bullet-proof vest during his campaign.

His second priority is to revive the economy which has not yet recovered from the pandemic hit. The main income of the country is oil exports but part of the oil shipment goes to service the Chinese debt. Ecuador is a dollarized economy since 2000. After the severe economic crisis of 2000, the country abandoned its national currency 'Sucre' to deal with hyper inflation, fall in exchange rate and capital outflow. Even the extreme leftist anti-US Correa did not try to change the system of using US dollars as the national currency. This means that Ecuador does not print its own bank notes. Panama and El Salvador are the other two Latin American countries which are also dollarised. 

Noboa’s main challenge would be lack of legislative support. His party has only 11 members in the 137 strong unicameral National Assembly. The leftist party of Gonzalez, Revolución Ciudadana (RC), is the largest with 42 members. The party is controlled by ex-President Rafael Correa who ruled from 2007 to 2017. He is in exile in Belgium with his Belgian wife. He has been convicted to prison on corruption charges. He calls the charges as politically motivated and wants a Presidential pardon to get back to the country. It was he who was responsible for the downfall of the centre-right President Guillermo Lasso. He will continue to cause instability until  he is rehabilitated. This will be the biggest challenge for the young President Noboa who has political experience of just two years as member of the Assembly in 2021-22. Rafael Correa turned around the country during his ten-year rule with his successful Inclusive development policies and programmes. But he was a polarizing figure within and outside the country. 

Noboa would be the toast of Washington DC which is desperately looking for centre-right leaders in Latin America which is dominated at present by leftist Presidents. In 2009, President Rafael Correa kicked out the Americans from the Ecuadorian military base in Manta, in the Pacific Coast. The Americans used the base for drug interdiction and surveillance of the region. But Correa’s successor signed an Agreement with US for resumption of American airforce activities in Ecuador. The US started cultivating Ecuadorian armed forces with supply of equipments and training. The US will push Noboa to open more doors. 

Although Ecuador is a relatively small market of 17 million people, India’s bilateral trade was substantial at 1.4 billion dollars in 2022-23. Crude oil is the main item of imports out of a total of 1016 million from Ecuador. India’s exports were 400 million dollars and there is good potential to increase the exports. Given the high level of trade, there is a need for India to open an embassy in Quito. Ecuador has one in New Delhi. 

 
Galvez is an engineer and entrepreneur. She has a degree in computer engineering and founded two tech firms. She is a senator and was head of the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples during the administration of Vicente Fox (2000–2006). Ideologically she is a free-spirited independent with a mix of conservative and progressive policies.

 
She is an indigenous Mexican from a poor family. She used to sell tamales in the streets as a kid.  Her father was an Indigenous Otomi schoolteacher. She learned to speak her native ñähñu language as a child. She rides E-bikes in Mexican streets wearing the loose embroidered indigenous blouse known as a huipil. She has a sense of humour and enjoys engaging with the public.

 
Firstly, this clear and decisive election of an anti-establishment outsider is a victory for democracy. The current ruling establishment of President Giammattei had tried a lot of dirty tricks and prevented some candidates from contesting in the elections. They even went after the Movimiento Semilla (Seed Movement) party of Arevalo with accusations of irregularities. Sandra Torres, the rival of Arevalo was favoured by the incumbent administration. This situation lead to fears that the elections might be derailed or Arevalo himself might be prevented from contesting in the second round. These concerns went beyond the borders of the country to regional and international levels. The Organization of American States and the US State Department as well as the Congress members had  issued statements. It is against this backdrop that Arevalo’s election with a convincing margin of 16% (against 37% of Sandra Torres) has given a clear message that democracy in Guatemala is safe, healthy and resilient. The elections were held peacefully without any major incidents. President Giammattei has already congratulated the winner and has invited him for talks for a smooth transition. 

 
The author has given a graphic account of the ongoing political, economic and social crisis in Venezuela. She has narrated the struggle of ordinary people amidst the shortage of food, medicines and other necessities. The Chavista gangs do a roaring business of selling goods in the black-market. The militias control the streets and unleash violence at will. The author calls the gangs as " Sons of the Revolution". The security forces and intelligence services harass, detain and torture the opponents of the regime. 
 
The protagonist Adelaida Falcon has no other option but to go to the black market to buy medicines at exorbitant prices for her mother undergoing cancer treatment in a clinic. Since the Clinic has perpetual shortage of essential items, she has to buy from the black market everything from syringes and saline bags to gases and cotton buds. Her apartment is taken over by a Chavista female gang, who throw  her out brutally. They beat her up and threaten to kill her if she returns to her apartment. Her friend’s brother is kidnapped during an anti-government protest march, detained, tortured and eventually killed by the Intelligence Services.
 
After losing her apartment, Adelco moves into another apartment which becomes vacant after its owner dies unexpectedly. She takes over the Spanish identity of  the owner and escapes from Venezuela to Spain. 
 
The author brings out an important part of the Venezuelan character which attaches too much importance to appearances. She says, “Nobody wants to grow old or appear poor. It is important to conceal, to make over. Those are the national pastimes: keeping up appearances. It does not matter if there is no money, or if the country is falling to pieces: the important thing is to be beautiful, to aspire to a crown, to be the queen of something … of Carnaval, of the town, of the country. To be the tallest, the prettiest”
 
Venezuela, which has the potential to be one of the richest countries in the world, is in a deep political and economic crisis in the last two decades. The crisis has got aggravated by the US sanctions and attempts for regime change. More than four million Venezuelans have gone out of the countries as refugees. Although the economy seems to be turning a corner, it will take some time for the country to return to democracy and normality. Till then, there will be a boom in the novels of Venezuelan exiles like Karina Sainz.
 
 
 
 

Rivera’s art and personality were influenced by the Mexican Revolution (1910-20) and the Russian Revolution (1917-23). Mexico, which was going through a crisis of identity after the Revolution, started recognizing and becoming proud of its indigenous culture. The country wanted to strike out an image of its own, free from the European inheritance and North American shadow. Secondly, Communism was becoming a fashion among artists and intellectuals of the country. Rivera became a believer and activist. Besides these external influences, Rivera’s own personality as an adventurer had guided his destiny. His life was filled with many women and scandals. But there was one woman who had the most decisive impact on him. It was Frida Kahlo who matched his adventures and recklessness with her own. She married him, divorced and remarried him.
 
Like other artists of his time, Rivera went for art studies and tours in Spain, France, Italy and Netherlands where he saw European art and interacted with his counterparts. He came across famous contemporaries such as Picasso and imbibed various styles and schools of thought. Rivera visited Picasso’s studio in 1914 and was awestruck by the quantity of Picasso’s paintings scattered around the walls. They had long conversations over lunch and dinner. Later, Picasso came to see Diego’s work, approved of what he saw and made Rivera part of his circle  Rivera lived the typical austere and struggling life of an artist in the Left Bank in Paris. After this, he came back to Mexico which offered him opportunities to try out mural and fresco work in public buildings. His success in Mexico had opened the doors for commissions in US in cities such as San Francisco, Detroit and New York. 
 
Besides having an extraordinary artistic talent, Rivera put in long hours of hard work in his projects. The scaffolding in front of the panels became his home where he worked, ate and often slept. Once he fell asleep, rolling off the scaffold and plummeting to the concrete below. The plastering crew found him unconscious with head injuries. 
 
Rivera was fascinated by Communism and let it influence his paintings and murals. He was a life-long believer in the ideal of Communism and mostly in denial concerning its ruthless reality. He joined the Communist party and their activities and meetings. He visited USSR where he was initially celebrated as a communist artist and was promised a mural work to be done in Moscow. However, the hosts turned hostile to him because of ideological and power struggles within the party. Later, Rivera was expelled from the Mexican Communist party accused of betraying the proletarian ideals. His membership was eventually restored. Rivera hosted Trotsky when he took refuge in Mexico and put him up in his own house for two years.
 
Rivera considered himself as a “people’s artist”. He was critical of the easel paintings which ended up in rich people’s homes. He believed that murals were the true People’s Art, painted where the public could see them. But he realized that he needed to make paintings for living. So he made lot of paintings and sold to rich people and took commissions of work from American capitalists. But his work with Rockefeller ended up as a failure. He was commissioned to make a mural work in the iconic Rockefeller building in Manhattan, New York. Rivera’s inclusion of Lenin in the murals incensed Rockefeller who got the half-finished mural demolished, although he paid Rivera the full amount as contracted. 
 
In his personal life, Rivera lead a colourful and adventurous life. He spent six months in the Mexican civil war fighting at the side of Emiliano Zapata and his southern army. Diego’s specialty was blowing trains off their tracks with explosives. For many years, he used to carry a large-calibre Colt revolver ostensibly to fight off attempts on his life. 
 
Many women had passed through his life including Russian, Mexican and American. He had numerous affairs with his models and even with the sisters of two of his wives. But one woman matched and impacted him the most. It was Frida Kahlo. In her first meeting with him she told him, “I haven’t come here to flirt, even though you are a notorious ladies’ man. Some of your good friends have advised me not to put too much stock in what you say. They say that if it’s a girl who asks your opinion and she’s not an absolute horror, you are ready to gush all over her. I just want to show you my pictures and seek your comments and advice”.  Frida was eighteen and Diego forty-three when they got married in 1929.  Frida had many affairs with both women and men including Trotsky. She used the house of her sister to meet Trotsky while the sister had an affair with her husband. 
 
Diego Rivera is part of the three greatest "los tres grandes"  Mexican muralists along with José Clemente Orozco and David Siqueiros. 
 
Satish Gujral, the famous Indian painter, received a Mexican government scholarship to study for two years (1952-54) at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico city, where he was apprenticed to Diego Rivera. Gujral worked with Rivera in the mural painting of “ Teatro de los Insurgents” in 1952-53. Later Gujral joined the studio of Siqueiros and collaborated with him in his mural works. After his return to India, Gujral had arranged an Indian government invitation to Siqueiros to visit India in 1956. The Mexican influence is evident in many of Gujral’s murals and paintings. 
 
Gujral was one of the earliest beneficiaries of the Mexican Cultural Exchange Programme started by their embassy in New Delhi established in August 1951 with ex-president Emilio Portes Gil as the first ambassador. The interview board of the embassy which interviewed various Indian artists including Ram Kumar and Satish Gujral had included the famous poet and writer Octavio Paz, who was the cultural attache in the embassy.

 

Anita’s family has a precarious and dangerous life in a slum in El Salvador where rival criminal gangs fight and cause misery to the residents. Anita’s mother is harassed by a security guard involved in human trafficking. She escapes taking  Anita with her. She tries to enter US through the Mexican border. The US authorities catch her and separate the mother and daughter. They put the daughter in a detention centre and deport the mother to Mexico. The mother is eventually killed by the security guard. Anita suffers abuse and ill-treatment by the guards and the private contractors who run the detention centres. She is rescued by Selena, a volunteer working with such separated kids. Anita gets asylum to stay in US.
 
Anita is sent to her aunt Leticia, working as house keeper in a large mansion in San Francisco. Leticia was born in a remote Salvadorian village called as El Mozote.  When she falls sick in the village, her father takes her to the hospital in the city. When he returns, his family and the other villagers have been massacred brutally by the military which wanted to teach a lesson to the indigenous people for their alleged sympathies  to the leftist guerilla fighters. He then decides to leave the country and tries to enter US illegally carrying his daughter on his back. He is caught and deported to Mexico while Leticia is lucky to get asylum. She finds work as a house keeper in the San Francisco mansion.
 
Samuel’s parents in Austria are sent to their death in concentration camps by the Nazis. However, they let the boy go to England, arranged by a charity organization along with other kids separated from their parents. The boy goes through series of foster homes and ultimately ends up with a caring family. He studies music and goes to US to join the San Francisco orchestra. The hippie daughter of a rich family marries him but later she divorces and dies leaving a large house for Samuel. His house keeper Leticia is the aunt of Anita. Samuel who has suffered as an orphan is moved by the story of Anita, lets her stay in his house and teaches her music.
 
Isabel Allende, the author has fictionalized the real life tragedies suffered by Jews under Nazis and the sufferings of the indigenous people in El Salvador during the civil war in the eighties during the Reagan era. El Mozote massacre happened actually in December 1981. Allende rightly blames the US which supported the military dictatorship in El Salvador and trained their security forces to fight ruthlessly against leftists. 
 
The US is responsible, to a large extent, for the civil wars in Central America. To protect and promote the commercial interests of the American corporations in the region, the US administration had converted the Central American countries as ‘banana republics’ by undermining democracies and encouraging and installing right wing military dictatorships. In 1954, CIA overthrew the democratically elected leftist government of Arbenz in Guatemala and installed pro-US military dictatorship. The immediate reason for the coup was the Guatemalan government’s land reforms which affected the interests of United Fruit Company, the single largest land owner in Guatemala and which had over three million acres of land in Central America. Incidentally, Che Guavara got his anti-imperialistic revolutionary inspiration after seeing personally the destruction of the Guatemalan democracy by the US. Using the pretext of anticommunism, the US had forced the governments and security agencies of Central America to persecute leftist parties and liberals. When Sandinistas came to power in 1979 after defeating the US-supported Somoza dictatorship, the Reagan administration turned its guns against Nicaragua and involved the other Central American countries too in the dirty and illegal “ Contra War” against the Sandinista government. The US sent arms, trained local militias and paramilitary death squads and waged an all-out war to hurt Nicaragua and tried to bring about regime change.  These atrocities of US destabilized Central America causing deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
 
During the civil war, over a million people had fled to US to escape the violence. Many of them went to Los Angeles. Unable to fit in the social milieu, the poor and marginalised illegal immigrant youth joined the criminal gangs in LA. The Reagan administration denied refugee status to these Central American immigrants, who were forced into clandestine lives. In the nineties, the US authorities cracked down on the gangs and deported thousands of the gang members to Central America. But many of the deported, who were born or brought up in US, found it difficult to adjust in Central America and continued with their LA gang culture. They regrouped themselves locally with guns smuggled from US and scaled up their crimes, taking advantage of the weak law enforcement and justice system of these countries.
 
El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala in Central America have the highest homicide rates in the world caused by gangs such as Maras and Barrio-18, who originated from Los Angeles. The rivalry between these two became so violent at one stage in 2012, the government of El Salvador intervened and brokered a ceasefire between the rival gangs. In order to bring the two sides to the negotiating table, the government relaxed conditions in the prisons in which the members of the two gangs were held. Following this peace deal, the murder rate had dropped immediately. But this truce broke down in 2014 and crime has gone up again.  Earlier this month about 50 women prisoners were killed in the fight between female gangsters in a prison in Honduras. 
 
The Central American  gangsters and Mexican cartels use guns illegally trafficked from the US. But the US, which complains about trafficking of drugs from Latin America, does not do anything to stop the trafficking of weapons to Mexico and Central America. There are about 7000 gun shops in the US side of the 2000 mile border with Mexico. These are the sources of guns which kill hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans every year.
 
The flood of illegal immigrants from El Salvador as well as Guatemala and Honduras is the harvest US is reaping for sowing the seeds of destabilization and violence.   

             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 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. 
 
 

 
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.

 

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

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. 

 “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. 

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 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”.

 

 

India’s exports to Latin American countries are more than to neighboring countries and traditional trade partners