South America Watch Thread

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caltrek
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Political Alignment Powers Cooperation Across South America’s Lithium Triangle
by James Francis Whitehead
August 27, 2022

Introduction:
(Courthouse News) — Latin America’s new wave of left-wing governments is increasing regional cooperation between the countries of the lithium triangle, an area home to the world’s largest lithium reserves, the white mineral fueling a new era of clean energy.

As global demand for the so-called ‘white gold’ increases, so does the potential regional power of Argentina, Chile and Bolivia — the lithium triangle countries that share a 154,000 square mile area roughly the size of the state of California.

Since the leftward swing across Latin America beginning in 2018, there has been rising expectations when it comes to developing domestic lithium industries as well as regional cooperation in mining and production.

"Argentina has the second largest lithium reserves in the world,” said Argentina President Alberto Fernandez during a visit to the country’s first lithium battery manufacturing plant on Aug. 16. “We not only have to export it, but also industrialize it. I have seen how the world demands lithium as an energy source and I believe we have the opportunity to provide it.



Conclusion:
Although currently politically aligned, the governments of Argentina, Chile and Bolivia face multiple challenges to accelerate lithium production and strategically position themselves in the global supply chain. The uneven development across the region, the level of state versus corporate control, the role of China and the potential environmental harm from inefficient practices are all pending issues that need to be resolved if the lithium triangle can realize its regional power and become a key part of the global revolution in clean energy.

Read more here: https://www.courthousenews.com/politic ... triangle/

Edit: Date of article corrected.
Last edited by caltrek on Mon Aug 29, 2022 4:09 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Astro Emerges from Stealth to Connect Latin American Developers with U.S. Tech Companies
by Kyle Wiggers
August 29, 2022

Introduction:
(TechCrunch) Astro, a startup helping companies to build and manage developer teams with talent from Latin America, today exited from stealth with $13 million in Series A funding contributed by Greycroft with participation by Obvious Ventures and other unnamed investors. In an interview with TechCrunch, CEO Jacqueline Samira said that today marks the public launch of Astro’s platform; previously, the only way to become a customer was via an existing referral.

It’s well-established that there’s a severe shortage of experienced software developers. In a February poll by Infragistics, more than half (53%) of software developers and IT professionals said that the biggest challenge this year will be recruiting developers with the right skills. If the worst-case scenario comes to pass, the talent gap could become more severe in the coming years, with the U.S. Labor Department estimating that the global shortage of software engineers could reach 85.2 million by 2030.

Samira and Astro’s second co-founder, Frank Licea, founded Astro after experiencing the effects of the developer shortage firsthand. Before starting Astro, they worked at the same company — OwnLocal — where they found it was tough to compete against top tech firms for talent. Samira and Licea ended up broadening their search beyond Austin, Texas, where OwnLocal was based, to work with outsourcing partners in Latin America. But this presented its own challenges. OwnLocal couldn’t dictate pay rates, benefits and perks, and had little visibility into the work that was being done beyond a monthly invoice.


Read more here: https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/29/astr ... ompanies/
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Chile rejects draft constitution in blow to leftist President Boric
Source: Axios
Voters in Chile on Sunday rejected a progressive constitution that would have drastically changed the country.

Why it matters: It's a major blow to leftist President Gabriel Boric and his supporters who championed the draft text, which would have enshrined reproductive, education, housing and Indigenous rights.

It would have also required the country set up a national health care system, and made addressing climate change a constitutional state duty.

The draft text would have replaced the current constitution, which dates to 1980, when dictator Augusto Pinochet was in power.
Read more: https://www.axios.com/2022/09/05/chile- ... ect-rights
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'A Step in the Right Direction': How Colombia's President Plans to End 'the Failed War on Drugs'
by Alex Henderson
September 7, 2022

Introduction:
(Alternet) Before the rise of the Sinaloa Cartel’s Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán in Mexico, Latin America’s most notorious drug lord was Medellín Cartel founder Pablo Escobar (who was killed in 1993). Colombia is one of the world’s top producers of cocaine, and yet, the U.S. government and the Colombian government have long been major allies in the War on Drugs—which critics on both the left and the right have been denouncing as an abysmal failure.

Critics of the War on Drugs include not only liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), but also, right-wing libertarians such as former Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson and 2020 Libertarian Party presidential nominee Jo Jorgensen. These critics have long argued that the War on Drugs and the mass incarceration that goes with it haven’t ended drug use, but have encouraged drug-related violence.

One Colombian official who believes that his country needs to seriously rethink the War on Drugs is Colombia’s new president, Gustavo Petro. Christy Thornton, a professor of sociology and Latin America studies at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, examines Petro’s efforts in an op-ed/guest essay published by the New York Times on September 7. And she wonders how helpful — or unhelpful — officials in Washington, D.C. will be to the new Colombian president.

“Colombia, one of the world’s top producers of cocaine, has long been a key partner in Washington’s failed War on Drugs,” Thornton explains. “But Gustavo Petro, the country’s newly sworn-in president, has made good on a campaign pledge to take the country in a different direction. Last month, he said he would end forced eradication of coca, and support legislation to decriminalize and regulate cocaine sales in an effort to undercut illicit markets and the profit motive that drives them.”

Thornton continues, “Here at home, the Biden Administration has also signaled an important shift. In April, Dr. Rahul Gupta, the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, introduced a new strategy that directs federal resources to harm-reduction services.
Read more here: https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/colom ... on-drugs/
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The Bewildering Vote in Chile that Rejected a New Progressive Constitution
by Taroa Zúñiga and Vijay Prashad
September 11, 2022
Introduction:
(Alternet) On September 4, 2022, more than 13 million Chileans—out of a voting-eligible population of approximately 15 million—voted on a proposal to introduce a new constitution in the country. As early as March, polls began to suggest that the constitution would not be able to pass. However, polls had hinted for months at a narrowing of the lead for the rejection camp, and so proponents of the new constitution remained hopeful that their campaign would in the end successfully convince the public to set aside the 1980 constitution placed upon the country by the military dictatorship led by General Augusto Pinochet. The date for the election, September 4, commemorated the day that Salvador Allende won the presidency in 1970. On that date, those who wanted a new constitution suggested that the ghost of Pinochet—who overthrew Allende in a violent coup in 1973—would be exorcized. As it happened, Pinochet’s constitution remains in place with more than 61 percent of voters rejecting the new constitution and only 38 percent of voters approving it.

The day before the election, in the municipality of Recoleta (a part of Chile’s capital city of Santiago), Mayor Daniel Jadue led a massive rally in support of passing the new constitution. Tens of thousands of people gathered in this largely working-class area with the hope, as Jadue put it, of leaving behind the “constitution of abuses.” It, however, was not to be. Even in Recoleta, where Jadue is a popular mayor, the constitution was defeated. The new constitution received 23,000 more votes than Jadue had received in the last election—a sign that the number of voters on the left had increased—but the vote to reject the constitution was larger, which meant that new voters made a greater impact on the overall result.

On September 7, Jadue told us that he was feeling “calm,” that it was a significant advance that nearly 5 million Chileans voted for the constitution and that “for the first time we have a constitutional project that is written and can be transformed into a much more concrete political program.” There is “no definitive victory and no definitive defeat,” Jadue told us.
Read more here: https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/bewil ... titution/
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Stop Using ‘Latinx’ If You Really Want to be Inclusive
by Melissa K. Ochoa
September 9, 2022

Introduction:
(The Conversation) Most of the debates on the usage of “Latinx” – pronounced “la-teen-ex” – have taken place in the U.S. But the word has begun to spread into Spanish-speaking countries – where it hasn’t exactly been embraced.

In July 2022, Argentina and Spain released public statements banning the use of Latinx, or any gender-neutral variant. Both governments reasoned that these new terms are violations of the rules of the Spanish language.

Latinx is used as an individual identity for those who are gender-nonconforming, and it can also describe an entire population without using “Latinos,” which is currently the default in Spanish for a group of men and women.

As a Mexican-born, U.S.-raised scholar, I agree with the official Argentine and Spanish stance on banning Latinx from the Spanish language – English, too.

When I first heard Latinx in 2017, I thought it was progressive and inclusive, but I quickly realized how problematic it was. Five years later, Latinx is not commonly used in Spanish-speaking countries, nor is it used by the majority of those identifying as Hispanic or Latino in the U.S.
Read more here: https://theconversation.com/stop-using ... ve-189358

caltrek’s comment: Not something that should really be argued about in the United States – lord knows we have plenty of other issues to argue about. Still, it may be worth keeping in mind.
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Chile: A Case Study in Why It’s So Hard to Rewrite a Country’s Constitution
by Jesus Rodriguez
September 17, 2022

Extract:
(Common Dreams) …sometime between October 2020 and September 2022, the effort to amend Chile’s social contract unraveled. According to official figures from Chile’s Servicio Electoral, the “approval” camp won in only eight of 346 municipalities, and even more liberal urban centers like Santiago rejected the text by 55 percent of the vote. In the voting district with the largest Indigenous population — the militarized Araucanía region — almost three-fourths rejected the reform, despite the proposed constitution’s promise of new protections for Indigenous people.

But Camila Vergara, a Chilean political theorist and legal scholar at the University of Cambridge, said that the outcome was not completely unexpected. The referendum, she said, was marred by a conservative disinformation campaign that lured centrists to the “Reject” camp as well as by a process that shut out everyday citizens from having meaningful influence over the revision. The rejecters’ victory was driven by conservatism, but even for some progressives on the ground, “they were going to reject [the proposed revision] because they saw it as legitimation of an elitist project,” Vergara said

A referendum on the president and the process, not the text
One explanation for the new constitution’s poor showing was that the referendum wasn’t about the constitution at all but the president in power. In the months since his election, (President) Boric has seen his approval shrink — which may well have doomed the constitution he promoted.

On social media, claims that the constitution would have permitted “late-term abortions” on demand, the secession of Indigenous communities from the body politic, and the expropriation of private property were prevalent. None of these claims were true, yet they spread like wildfire.

Julie Suk, a professor at Fordham Law School who studies gender violence and women’s rights, and a participant in the “Democracy Constitution” project, put it this way: The proposal “doesn’t become law today, but I think there are a lot of very interesting and innovative provisions in it that will reset the baselines from which the Chileans, and even people around the world, debate about what a constitution can do.”
Read more here: https://www.vox.com/2022/9/17/23356815 ... m-america
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Colombia's First Leftist President Charts a New Path on Venezuela
by Omar Ocampo
November 22, 2022

Introduction:
(Foreign Policy in Focus) New Colombian President Gustavo Petro's plan to reestablish diplomatic relations with Venezuela was officially completed this November when Petro met his counterpart Nicolás Maduro in Caracas.

The two met privately, held a press conference together, and released a joint statement.

While critics derided the meeting as just another propaganda spectacle for Maduro, Petro has sent a signal to opposition parties in Colombia and the international community, particularly the United States, to rethink its approach if they hope to improve relations and achieve a successful political transition in Venezuela.

Former Colombian president Iván Duque's ideologically driven policy of putting political and economic pressure on Maduro via isolation and non-recognition—known as el cerco diplomático, or diplomatic siege—did not succeed in its desired goal of regime change. And Duque's recognition of Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó as interim president only brought Colombia international ridicule, especially after Duque submitted an extradition request for fugitive and ex-Congresswoman Aída Merlano to Guaidó despite the latter not having authority over any official levers of state power.

Petro, on the other hand, has a much more pragmatic albeit optimistic approach.
Read more here: https://fpif.org/colombias-first-lefti ... enezuela/
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U.S. Provides Chevron Limited Authorization to Pump Oil in Venezuela
by Sam Fossum
November 26, 2022

Introduction:
Washington (CNN) — The US has granted Chevron limited authorization to resume pumping oil from Venezuela following the announcement Saturday that the Venezuelan government and the opposition group have reached an agreement on humanitarian relief and will continue to negotiate for a solution to the country’s chronic economic and political crisis, including a focus on the 2024 elections.

A senior Biden administration official described Saturday’s announcements as “important steps in the right direction,” but noted that there is still much to be done as both parties work toward a more permanent solution to the ongoing crisis. The official also highlighted the license’s limited nature saying that they do not expect this to have a tangible impact on international oil prices and that the move is intended as an inducement for the negotiations – not a reaction to high global oil prices.

The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control on Saturday issued Venezuela General License 41, which authorizes Chevron to “resume limited natural resource extraction operations in Venezuela,” according to a news release from the Treasury Department. This is a 6-month license, and the US can revoke it at any time. Additionally, any profits earned will go to repaying debt to Chevron and not to the Maduro regime, according to the senior official, and states that the US government will continue to require significant reporting by Chevron on its financial operations.
Read more here: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/26/politic ... ndex.html
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Peru's president reportedly detained and accused of sedition
Source: The Guardian
Peru’s president has reportedly been detained and accused of sedition after he announced the dissolution of congress and the installation of a “government of exception” to rule by decree – just hours before he was due to face an impeachment vote.

The country’s national police tweeted on Wednesday that “former president” Pedro Castillo had been detained, shortly after the country’s congress voted to remove him from office on Wednesday and replace him with the vice president.

That vote came after Castillo ordered a night-time curfew and the reorganisation of the judiciary and prosecutor’s office, which is investigating him for alleged corruption and influence-trafficking – charges which he denies.

The congressional vote put an end to Castillo’s tumultuous 17 months in power which has already seen five cabinets, six criminal investigations and two failed attempts to impeach him.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... tillo-coup
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