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Chile learns how trust its military, 20 years after Pinochet

March 5th, 2010 Posted in Chile, history, Latin America, Politics

Chile has made great strides since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship in 1990. Under Pinochet there was extreme political repression, including at least 3,000 people who were “disappeared” and murdered because of their political opposition to the regime. In the last 20 years Chile has enjoyed rapid improvements in its economy and society, but mistrust of the military has remained strong.

With the recent earthquake and ongoing aftershocks, however, the Chilean military has begun to redeem itself in the eyes of the citizenry. Outgoing Chilean President Michelle Bachelet has deployed thousands of troops to the hardest hit areas, and they are doing a commendable job of orchestrating search and rescue missions and maintaing security. It is revealing, however, that distrust of the military was strong enough that it took two days of widespread looting and crumpled infrastructure after the quake before President Bachelet was willing to call upon the military for help.

The military’s history might be one of oppression and fear, but residents seem to be thankful for a military presence in this crisis. From the NY Times:

In Chile, the military clearly evokes mixed emotions because of the role it played in the torture and disappearance of some 3,000 Chileans during this country’s bloody 19-year dictatorship.

But in the five days since Chile was shaken by a magnitude 8.8 earthquake, one of the worst natural disasters in its history, the military’s relationship with the country’s people was turning a new page.

Tanks were stationed outside supermarkets that had been looted and vandalized for two days before the troops arrived. Soldiers organized lines for residents to enter banks, pharmacies and gasoline stations. And for the most part, emotional and exhausted residents like Mr. Ramírez embraced them.

…

“The military arrived so late here,” said Mrs. Henríquez, 49. “The looters took everything in this city, even the lights in the supermarkets. It was dreadful. And all because the president was worried about what happened in 1973. We don’t care about that now. We want order, not chaos.”

Chile, earthquake, michelle bachelet, military, pinochet

Rum and Revolution – Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba

October 4th, 2008 Posted in Arts, Culture and Society, Book Review, Caribbean, history

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washingtonpost.com

Drinkers the world round know the name Bacardi means rum, but few non-Cubans know that this global enterprise was founded — and is still owned — by a Cuban family that played an important role in the island’s social, political and economic history. Emilio Bacardi was a prominent activist in Cuba’s fight for independence from Spain, suffering lengthy periods of imprisonment for the cause. Other members of the clan, based in Cuba’s eastern city of Santiago, also stepped forward to oppose the sad parade of corrupt and dictatorial rulers that the island has since known. Longtime NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten writes in this absorbing familial and political history that the Bacardis are still remembered for “their class and their character. While they lived in elegant homes, rode in chauffeured carriages, and sent their children to exclusive private schools, they were also known as good Santiago citizens, generous and warmhearted and fair.”

A Spanish immigrant by the name of Facundo Bacardi founded a mom-and-pop distillery in Santiago in 1862, when the island was the world’s richest colony, thanks to its vast sugarcane plantations and sugar mills. Bacardi realized that, unlike other sugar-producing islands, Cuba was not using the molasses byproduct to make and export rum. Pooling family funds to launch his business, Bacardi pioneered a new technique to produce a light, mixable rum that became a powerhouse in the worldwide spirits business.
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Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba (being published next week) is at once a colorful family saga and a carefully researched corrective to caricatures of decadent pre-revolutionary Cuba and the 50-year disaster of Fidel Castro’s rule.

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Can’t See the Forest for the Trees

October 4th, 2008 Posted in Arts, Culture and Society, Brazil, history

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The University of Chicago Magazine: Features

The Amazon of the Western imagination, they say, is a place hardly touched by history or humanity. For colonists and entrepreneurs of various centuries it was both useful and profitable to see the forests as wilderness and to overlook the people who lived or had lived in them. The idea of pure and untrammeled nature has also served a more spiritual purpose, preserving the image of an unfallen world, untainted by war, industrialism, and other afflictions of civilization. To some an empty land ripe for exploitation, to others a lost Eden, the Amazon has seemed a forest out of time, inhabited, if at all, by Stone Age tribes living in harmony with nature, greeting helicopters with volleys of poison-tipped arrows.

Michael Heckenberger understands the myth’s attraction. An anthropologist from the University of Florida, he has studied indigenous people who live in the forests of the upper Xingu River, in southern Brazil. Here, in what was once among the least accessible regions of the Amazon, a large reserve has been set aside for the use of native tribes. In recent years, mile-wide soybean fields have been encroaching upon the forest. Entering the reserve from the kingdom of soybeans could not be more startling.

“It’s like driving through the gates of Jurassic Park,” Heckenberger said. “You feel like you’re going back into time into some primordial landscape.” A 2007 National Geographic article, “Last of the Amazon,” records a similar reaction. Recounting a trip to the upper Xingu, writer Scott Wallace describes his visit to “the very core of an ancient primeval forest” and “the green cathedral that towered above us.”

Heckenberger and others call such impressions misleading. The forests are not nearly as ancient or primeval as they seem. In fact, before Europeans arrived at the New World’s doorstep, bringing disease and destruction, the Amazon was well settled: “There ain’t no part of it,” he said with folksy emphasis, “that wasn’t touched by human hands in one form or another.”
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The Real Great Depression – Lessons from history

October 3rd, 2008 Posted in history, India, United States

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ChronicleReview.com

As a historian who works on the 19th century, I have been reading my newspaper with a considerable sense of dread. While many commentators on the recent mortgage and banking crisis have drawn parallels to the Great Depression of 1929, that comparison is not particularly apt. Two years ago, I began research on the Panic of 1873, an event of some interest to my colleagues in American business and labor history but probably unknown to everyone else…In fact, the current economic woes look a lot like what my 96-year-old grandmother still calls “the real Great Depression.” She pinched pennies in the 1930s, but she says that times were not nearly so bad as the depression her grandparents went through. That crash came in 1873 and lasted more than four years. It looks much more like our current crisis.

If there are lessons from 1873, they are different from those of 1929. Most important, when banks fall on Wall Street, they stop all the traffic on Main Street — for a very long time.

The post-panic winners, even after the bailout, might be those firms — financial and otherwise — that have substantial cash reserves. A widespread consolidation of industries may be on the horizon, along with a nationalistic response of high tariff barriers, a decline in international trade, and scapegoating of immigrant competitors for scarce jobs. The failure in July of the World Trade Organization talks begun in Doha seven years ago suggests a new wave of protectionism may be on the way.

In the end, the Panic of 1873 demonstrated that the center of gravity for the world’s credit had shifted west — from Central Europe toward the United States. The current panic suggests a further shift — from the United States to China and India.
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Simon Bolivar’s Freedom Fight

September 30th, 2008 Posted in Arts, Culture and Society, history, Latin America

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Financial News – Yahoo! Finance

In 1805, a 21-year-old South American nobleman, Simon Bolivar, traveled through Europe, drowning his sorrows over the death of his wife.

Arriving in Milan with his former tutor, Simon Rodriguez, to see the coronation of Napoleon as king of Italy, Bolivar was repelled by the power-hungry man he had once admired. He also saw that one man could bend history to his will.

On the Continent, Bolivar ingested the democratic ideas of the Enlightenment. He dreamed of bringing his country, which was to become Venezuela, independence.

Traveling on to Rome, Bolivar heard the story of Sicinius, who had led the people to Aventine Hill to protest the rule of abusive patricians. Going to the top of the hill with Rodriguez and another friend, [Bolivar], the young man dropped on his knees and said, “I swear before you, I swear by the God of my fathers, I swear by my fathers, I swear by my honor, I swear by my country that I will not rest body or soul until I have broken the chains with which Spanish power oppresses us.”

The pledge was preposterous. South America’s mines yielded vast amounts of gold and silver that financed Spain’s worldwide empire. To protect that, the Spaniards suppressed 300,000 Indians[indigenous Americans] who had revolted 50 years earlier.

Making his words crazier, Bolivar had never been in a battle. Two decades later, he more than realized his dream.

“[Bolivar] is seen as the George Washington of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru, an area the size of Western Europe,” Marshall Eakin, a history professor at Vanderbilt University and author of the Teaching Co. course “America in the Revolutionary Era,” told IBD. “Like other great figures in history, he had an unshakable belief in himself and the rightness of his cause.”

On the Trail Of Latin American Heroes

September 14th, 2008 Posted in history, Latin America

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washingtonpost.com

On Saturday evenings, National Park Service ranger Mike Balis leads a walking tour along Virginia Avenue in Northwest to talk about men who were important figures in the liberation of much of South America from Spain. With Hispanic Heritage Month beginning Monday, the walk is a great way to learn about South America’s history.”It’s a neat story [that is] in many ways is parallel to our own,” Balis says. “To fight and die for a dream? That is powerful, and that is a connection we have.”

A little farther down the road commonly referred to as the Avenue of the Americas is a statue of Gen. José de San Martín. Born in what is now Argentina, de San Martín studied in Spain, became a sympathizer of the revolution in South America and traveled to Buenos Aires in the early 1800s. He was able to amass an army, help liberate Argentina from Spain, march across the Andes and then liberate Chile.

The next statue on the tour is of one of the general’s contemporaries, Simón Bolívar who was in the north, busy contributing to the independence of a long list of countries including Venezuela, [Colombia] and Peru. The two met in Peru, and Bolívar became the leader of the armies. Both men’s efforts led to the end of much of the Spanish rule on the continent.

The last statue on the tour is of José Artigas, known as the father of Uruguay’s independence. After leading forces to defeat the Spanish army, Artigas created a government modeled after the United States.