Americas view

EVER since the Clarín Group’s newspapers and television stations gave favourable coverage to striking farmers in 2008, Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, and her husband and predecessor, Néstor Kirchner, have sought to weaken and possibly break up the company. The government’s tactics have included sending tax agents to raid its offices; accusing its principal stockholder of adopting children stolen from political prisoners in the 1970s; enticing Argentina’s football league to break its contract with a Clarín-owned cable channel; canceling the group’s license to provide Internet service; and trying to increase state control of the country’s sole newsprint manufacturer.

Perhaps the Kirchners’ most powerful attack, though, was the media law they pushed through Congress in 2009, which included numerous provisions aimed at Clarín. In particular, the law capped the number of radio and television licenses one company could hold at ten (Clarín now has 13), prohibited firms from owning a broadcast channel and a cable-distribution network in the same market (as Clarín now does) and banned them from operating in more than 24 cities or controlling over 35% of the market (Clarín says it has 47%). Moreover, the law gave Clarín just a year to comply. That meant the company would have to unload its assets at fire-sale prices—but ensured it would be crippled before the 2011 presidential campaign.

Clarín turned to the courts to defend itself. In December 2009, it secured an injunction from a judge preventing the one-year deadline from being enforced, on the grounds that Mr Kirchner himself had extended all broadcast licenses for ten years in 2005. The government appealed the ruling, eager to de-fang Clarín ahead of the vote. On September 28th, the Kirchners organised a demonstration outside the Supreme Court to demand that the injunction be lifted. At the rally, Hebe de Bonafini—a former campaigner against kidnappings during Argentina’s 1976-83 military dictatorship who has since become a strident leftist activist—called the justices “idiots” and threatened to organise an occupation of the court’s building if their decision went “against the people”.

Fortunately for Argentine democracy, the judges could not be cowed. On October 5th, they ruled that the injunction could stand. The verdict does not annul the media law’s new restrictions. But it does ensure that they will not be implemented before the Kirchners have to face voters: most experts say it could take two years just for the courts to decide whether a compliance deadline is constitutional. The first couple often take offence when they are criticised for weakening Argentina’s democratic institutions, insisting that the balance of power remains healthy. They must now be chagrined to be proven right.

AFTER a rather sleepy campaign, Brazilians put a jolt of energy into this year's presidential election by giving almost 20% of the vote to a third-party candidate, forcing a run-off on October 31st. An analysis of the first-round dynamics and preview of the second leads the Americas section this week, accompanied by a recap of the election's legal and political quirks. Two more stories address related conflicts in Argentina and Chile: the decision by Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Argentina's president, not to extradite Galvarino Apablaza, a former Chilean guerrilla leader—in part due to concerns over Chile's harsh anti-terrorism law—and the hunger strike by Mapuche Indians that got the law changed. (You can also vote on whether Mr Apablaza should have received asylum on this site). Finally, now that the smoke has cleared over Ecuador, we assess the impact of the September 30th police mutiny on Rafael Correa's ability to govern.

ARGENTINA’s ruling couple have made prosecuting the political violence of the past their signature issue. Néstor Kirchner, the president from 2003 to 2007, and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, his wife and successor, regularly call for “memory” and “justice” for the victims of the country’s 1976-83 military dictatorship. During their time in office, hundreds of ex-soldiers accused of kidnapping, torture and murder have been taken into custody.

No such justice has been extended to the (fewer) victims of Argentina’s leftist guerrillas—in fact, many former supporters of such groups have served in the Kirchners’ cabinet. But the first couple has deflected charges of a double standard by noting that the 2005 Supreme Court decision allowing “dirty war” cases to be reopened applied exclusively to crimes against humanity, which under Argentine law can only be committed by representatives of the state. On September 30th, however, Ms Fernández sabotaged her claim to support an apolitical reckoning with the past, when her underlings recommended that she grant asylum to a Chilean guerrilla leader.

In June 2004 Chile issued an international arrest warrant for Galvarino Apablaza, who was a leader of the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (FPMR), an urban guerrilla group set up by the country's Communist Party to fight the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. But the crimes Mr Apablaza is accused of refer to events that took place after Chile had returned to democracy: planning the murder of Jaime Guzmán Errázuriz, a conservative senator and Pinochet ideologue, and the kidnapping of Cristián Edwards, the son of a newspaper owner, in 1991. Five months after the warrant was filed, Argentine authorities detained Mr Apablaza in a Buenos Aires suburb, where he had been living under a pseudonym with his wife, Paula Chaín. Chile requested his extradition, and Mr Apablaza applied for asylum. After seven months, a federal judge denied the extradition request and he was released. But the Chilean government appealed to Argentina’s Supreme Court, which said it would not rule until the asylum question had been settled. Mr Apablaza remained free in the meantime.

Last month, in a televised interview, another former FPMR leader said that Mr Apablaza was a ringleader in Mr Guzmán’s murder. The ensuing pressure from Chile led Argentina’s Supreme Court to reverse its decision.  Since Mr Apablaza’s alleged crimes were not political and occurred after Chile's dictatorship had ended, the court said on September 14th that it would approve the extradition unless Ms Fernández granted him asylum.

This put the president in a bind. Among her staunchest supporters are the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group that protested the kidnappings of their children during the dictatorship but later became an extreme leftist organisation. Its leader, Hebe de Bonafini, claims Mr Apablaza cannot get a fair trial in Chile because a harsh Pinochet-era anti-terrorism law remains on the books. Ms Fernández has her own ties to Mr Apablaza: Ms Chaín works in her press office.

But denying the request looks like a bigger risk. It would severely strain relations with Chile, and weaken Argentina’s moral authority to request extraditions itself—like those of eight Iranians accused of masterminding the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires. It would also support the suspicion that the Kirchners’ supposed commitment to justice was merely an excuse to settle old scores.

Ms Fernández quickly made up her mind. On September 30th, Argentina’s National Commission for Refugees recommended that Mr Apablaza be granted asylum. One reason, it said, was that since Mr Apablaza was “a political militant” and “a fighter against the dictatorship” he was “not a common citizen”—an implicit argument that former guerrillas should be above the law forever. Ms Fernández said she would follow the guidance of the commission’s theoretically independent technocrats. But its voting members are all representatives of ministries controlled by the executive branch.

Chile is predictably outraged. Its president, Sebastián Piñera, who happened to be in Buenos Aires when the recommendation was announced, called it a “step backwards for justice and human rights in my country.” The foreign ministry has summoned Argentina’s ambassador in Santiago to explain the decision. But former guerrillas across Latin America are surely breathing easier now that it seems they can take shelter in a country whose “inalienable principles”, in Mr Kirchner’s words, include “the permanent fight against impunity”.

ROUBA, mas faz, goes the archetypal slogan of the old-style pork-dispensing, pocket-lining Brazilian politician. Roughly, it means, “He steals, but he gets things done.” It’s an attitude to corruption—complicit, accepting, despairing—that is slowly changing among the electorate at large. One sign is the mass movement that started in 2006 to push through a law known as ficha limpa, or clean record. Finally passed in May of this year, it bars convicted criminals and those who have misused office—or stepped down to avoid being impeached—from running.

And then the fun started. Politicians denounced their rivals; courts ruled; those barred from office appealed. On September 22nd, with just 12 days to go until the election, Joaquim Roriz, who was running for governor of the federal district, found himself before the supreme court appealing against a ban on his candidacy. The court has been a man down since one of its 11 members retired in August. And you guessed it: the ten remaining members split 5-5.

Mr Roriz, sick of waiting to hear his fate, eventually stepped aside in favour of his wife. But much more important was what should happen to the votes cast for the many other politicians appealing against bans. Should they be held, as if in escrow, until the appeal is heard? If a politician is cleared before the end of the year, should he get those votes back? If he isn’t, should they be split amongst fellow party members, or even members of other parties in the same coalition? Or should they simply be cast aside?

Unbelievably, no decision has yet been made. The electoral court only ruled yesterday, on the eve of the election, that politicians appealing against their fichas sujas (dirty records) can stand, but their votes will be set aside. Hopefully they will decide soon what happens next. Lots of the votes cast today may end up never being counted.

ON THURSDAY afternoon I joined a group of foreign journalists who are visiting Brazil to write about the elections. Even though I live here now, because I write for a London-based paper the government communications and press office has invited me too. Our first meeting is with Sérgio Guerra, who is a senator in Pernambuco state, the president of the Party of Brazilian Social Democracy (PSDB) and the campaign coordinator for José Serra, the conservative presidential candidate.

Mr Guerra starts with a lengthy description of the many obstacles the opposition faced during the presidential race: the unmatchable life story of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the current president; the effective political machine that he built from the ground up and strengthened further during his eight years in government; and his willingness to ride roughshod over Brazil’s strict election rules (he was fined several times for starting to campaign early, and for using his office for party business). “The opposition did not have the machinery to cope,” he says.

Then he moves seamlessly on to the PSDB’s likely successes in various state races for governors and senators and suchlike. Brazil’s regions vary greatly, he says; true. And in some places, like São Paulo, the PSDB is doing very well; also true. But unless I missed it somehow, he has talked about Lula and about Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s chosen successor—but he hasn’t yet mentioned his own presidential candidate’s name.

I ask how come Mr Serra’s solid record hasn’t been used effectively during the race. The question comes out slightly unfairly, because Mr Serra’s campaign ads do recite his life and political achievements. And I probably deserve the response: “I hope we’re watching the same campaign.” I was thinking of when Mr Serra was asked whether if he were president he would maintain Bolsa Família, the conditional-cash-transfer programme that has helped build Lula’s popularity. The intention was to force him to praise Lula, and it was regarded as a success for the president’s left-leaning Workers’ Party. But Mr Serra had a great answer that for some reason he didn’t give. He could have said: “Of course I would continue it. We started it, during the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso.”

Actually, I know the reason he didn’t say that, but don’t understand it. It is because the PSDB don’t want to mention Mr Cardoso. Somehow the party has failed to defend its record in office during Lula’s eight years as president, and thus allowed Lula to rewrite history, without them in it. And now talking about their history seems to bring no dividends, because it is too late for them to re-find that space.

The PSDB’s strategy, Mr Guerra explains, is somehow to get into a run-off with Ms Rousseff, at which point voters will suddenly start to focus on the two candidates and notice that Mr Serra is superior. “Dilma will have a hard time in the run-off,” says Mr Guerra. José Eduardo Cardozo, Ms Rousseff’s coordinator, who meets us next, doesn’t seem to be trembling. Still, he starts by saying that the campaign team are hyper-vigilant against the possibility of early complacency. He uses a Brazilian metaphor: “When you walk in high heels, it’s easy to take a tumble.”

He, too, has a complaint about the fairness of his opponent’s campaign. Apparently some of the attacks against Ms Rousseff were “prejudiced against her, because she hadn’t run for elected office before. They thought she would fail.” Discrimination against politicians for being electorally untested: this surely is taking the politics of victimhood to ridiculous heights.

I ask the question that I most often hear from people back home: who is Dilma Rousseff? She is so unknown, such a back-room figure suddenly to appear in frontline politics. It’s faintly surprising that there isn’t more nervousness in the markets and in foreign diplomatic circles. But again I slightly miss the mark. I should have said: who is Ms Rousseff now? Because what I get is a recital of her life story, which I know. I’m no wiser about the character and current thinking of the woman who will almost certainly soon be the president of the world’s fourth-biggest democracy.

In the evening we head out to the TV Globo studios to watch the final debate. It’s interesting how much better both Marina Silva, the Green Party candidate, and Ms Rousseff are than they were just a month ago: they are sticking to time, rambling less and speaking more clearly. And against my expectations, the topic of taxes does come up briefly, though the discussion is about reform, more than outright cuts. Mr Serra, however, does use the “c” word: he points out that as state governor of São Paulo he removed state taxes entirely on various staple products, including meat and milk. But the federal government still charges taxes on these basic products, he complains.
And then he is asked about Bolsa Família. And, finally, he answers: we in the PSDB started it. The programme built on the great foundations we laid. He even mentions Mr Cardoso by name. Maybe if Mr Serra and his party had talked about these things earlier, they might have got somewhere. Maybe if they had started four years ago.

FOR one of Latin America’s most politically tumultuous countries, Ecuador has been surprisingly stable since Rafael Correa became its president in early 2007. Today, however, that relative calm was shattered, as police and soldiers staged a mutiny in protest of some aspects of a new civil-service law that their leaders said would reduce their benefits. Across the country, police abandoned their posts and seized control of their barracks. Because of the lack of security, looting broke out and four banks were robbed in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city. In Quito, the capital, protesting members of the air force closed the international airport until the early evening, and residents stocked up on supplies while stores closed early. The government declared a five-day state of emergency.

Mr Correa tried to resolve the conflict directly by visiting one police installation in an attempt to negotiate. But the discussions quickly degenerated into a shouting match and he was attacked: a few officers shoved him and one launched a tear-gas canister at him. On crutches following a recent knee surgery, he promptly fled to the adjacent police hospital. There, he accused the officers of treason and plotting a coup, and said they had been misled by opposition political parties. He later began negotiating with a delegation of striking officers at the hospital.

Mr Correa has antagonised many powerful groups during his presidency, but the police have fared fairly well. In a bid to reduce corruption, he increased their salaries from $700 a month to $1,200. He has also bought them new equipment, including Austrian-made Glock pistols. Nonetheless, the overall increase in government spending led some officers to fear that Mr Correa would use their pensions to fund infrastructure investments. On Wednesday night, he used a line-item veto to change a civil-service law that had been passed by Congress, which had the effect of changing the accounting regime for police officers' bonuses. Although his ministers said that the new policy would not harm officers' benefit packages, they still went on strike in response.

Even if Mr Correa is able to placate the police, the overall political situation may continue to deteriorate. Some of the president's other line-item vetoes were overruled in Congress, leading him to threaten legislators with dissolving the congress. That would subject both lawmakers and Mr Correa himself to an early recall election. But in the period before the vote, the populist, leftist president would be able to rule by decree. Mr Correa is Ecuador's first democratically elected president since 1996 that has not been toppled by street protests—so far.

WITH Brazil's presidential election just three days away, a briefing in this week's issue takes stock of what Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has achieved during his eight years in office and the problems he is leaving behind, and a leader argues he needs to give his successor independence. We have also posted an edited transcript of our recent interview with him. Elsewhere in the paper, we take stock of the strong performance by the opposition to Hugo Chávez in Venezuela's legislative election, how official statistics may understate the size of Mexico's economy and the killing of a leader of Colombia's FARC guerrillas.

BLOODY violence has torn through parts of Mexico over the past four years, as the government has ramped up its fight against the criminal gangs that have grown rich smuggling drugs into the United States. More than 28,000 people—many of them traffickers, but plenty of them innocents—are believed to have been killed since Felipe Calderón launched an intensified fight against the “cartels” on becoming president at the end of 2006. The government has boasted of recent successes in the form of the capture or killing of a series of senior mobsters, but as long as the rate of killing continued to grow, it was hard to see these achievements as being more than public-relations coups.

Now, however, Mr Calderón has numbers to suggest the tide may be turning. I just spoke to Alejandro Poiré, the president’s spokesman on security, who said that today or tomorrow the government will release figures showing that Mexico’s murder rate has plateaued since the beginning of August. “In the last month…the rate of growth has stopped,” he said. Moreover, “in certain areas like Baja California and other places where the violence is concentrated, [there has been] a diminishing of the violence rates.”

This is not the first time the seemingly inexorable upward trend in killings has temporarily abated. The first three months of 2009 were less murderous than the last three of 2008, but the rest of the year turned out to be far bloodier. And other serious crimes, such as kidnapping, are still on the rise. Nonetheless, Mr Poiré’s new numbers are still a welcome respite from the drug war’s steady stream of grim headlines.

UPDATE: Mr Poiré has just clarified the figures, and the new ones are even more encouraging. The national murder rate stabilised from June to August, and has actually decreased in September.

A LANDSLIDE in the early hours of Tuesday morning may have killed hundreds of people in Mexico’s southern state of Oaxaca, according to early reports. As many as 300 houses were buried in the town of Santa María Tlahuitoltepec, according to state officials. The death toll could be as high as 1,000—a tenth of the town’s population.

The landslide is said to have been caused by heavy rains, which soaked a 200m-wide section of mountainside above the town. At roughly four in the morning on Tuesday, the sodden cliffside crashed down onto the town, burying residents as they slept. Rescue efforts will be hampered by the same heavy rains, which have rendered some roads in the remote region impassable.

The army, navy and federal police are being flown to the scene with digging machinery and rescue dogs. “We hope to arrive in time to rescue the families who were buried under the hillside,” Ulises Ruiz, Oaxaca’s governor, told the Televisa television channel this morning.

Santa María Tlahuitoltepec lies in one of Mexico’s poorest regions. Like many towns in Oaxaca, it combines the indigenous name of the town with a saint’s name, added as a prefix after the Spanish conquest. Oaxaca is one of Mexico’s most ethnically diverse states, with one of its most complicated governments. The state is divided into some 570 municipal authorities, making it home to nearly a quarter of all of Mexico’s municipalities, despite representing less than 4% of its population. The complex, often fractious relations between Oaxaca’s independent municipalities and the state and federal governments could provide another obstacle for rescue workers in the coming days.

This year’s rainy season has been particularly heavy, causing widespread flooding in Mexico and parts of Central America. Storms off the Caribbean have whipped up more rainfall: in July Hurricane Alex brought devastating floods to the northern city of Monterrey. Earlier this month some 16,000 residents of the state of Veracruz were forced to evacuate their homes because of flooding caused by Hurricane Karl. In the same state, flood-waters inundated a crocodile-breeding centre, allowing some of the reptiles to escape their cages (though they remained trapped in a nature reserve, according to officials). Tropical Storm Matthew has worsened the rains in Oaxaca in recent days. Overall, floods have displaced around 250,000 Mexicans in 2010.

UPDATE: The mudslide appears to have been much less deadly than than early reports had indicated. Mr Ruiz now says that 11 people are missing, eight of them children—far fewer than the 1,000 that he said yesterday might have perished. Moreover, only a handful of homes are believed to have been destroyed. Nonetheless, the town has been evacuated as a precaution against further landslides.

A FRIEND passed along a horrifying tale yesterday from Ascensión, a small farming town in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, which for years has been ground zero in the turf war among the country's drug traffickers. In recent months, the town has suffered a wave of kidnappings, and residents have been pooling their savings to pay ransom after ransom. Local authorities have not been able to stop the crimes.

On the morning of September 21st, eight gunmen showed up at a restaurant and abducted the owner's daughter niece in a car. Her family immediately called the army and police. But with the state's poor record of catching kidnappers in mind, they also called their friends and neighbours to pursue the criminals themselves. Some 20 people started giving chase, causing the kidnappers to crash two of their three vehicles and flee on foot.

Half an hour later, a mob then 200-strong found two 17-year-old boys they believed were part of the criminal group and began attacking them. The police managed to get the boys into a car and drive to a nearby army barracks. But the mob had grown to over 2,000 people, and some of its members used trucks to break into the barracks and drag their targets outside to be beaten. In a last-ditch effort to save the boys, federal police officers got them back into one of their cars and closed the windows. But they still died that afternoon. It is unclear whether they suffocated in the car or succumbed to wounds from the beating.

Vigilante justice is endemic in Guatemala, Mexico's southern neighbour, where criminal gangs have long acted with complete impunity. But Guatemala isn't far removed from a failed state, while Mexico is one of Latin America's richest and most stable countries—or at least it has been for the last 80 years. Last year, Mexican officials angrily denounced an internal Pentagon report that warned of the possibility of their country becoming a failed state. But if what happened in Ascensión on Tuesday doesn't count as nasty, brutish and short, I don't know what does. Mexico's murder rate is still modest by Latin American standards. But the drug war's downward spiral is starting to threaten the country's social contract itself.

UPDATE: A few commenters have requested the latest news on the situation. According to the El Paso Times, police have said that the two boys who were killed were indeed part of the group of kidnappers. And the abducted girl was rescued after her captors crashed their getaway car.

“A HUGE success” was how Brazil’s finance minister, Guido Mantega, described it; and he was not exaggerating. Despite months of doubts among investors about Petrobras’s mammoth share offer, the company said on September 24th that stock worth around $70 billion had been taken up—a world record, and more than three times the size of Agricultural Bank of China’s giant share offer two months ago. Of that total, almost $43 billion-worth of the shares will be taken up by the government in return for giving Petrobras the right to develop 5 billion barrels of reserves.

The share issue is an important element in Brazil’s plan to exploit the sizeable oilfields it discovered off its coasts in 2007. These “pre-salt” fields (so called because they are under a thick layer of salt, deep below the seabed) are thought to contain enough oil to make Brazil a significant energy exporter, albeit not quite on the scale of Saudi Arabia. Petrobras is planning to double its output to 5.4m barrels a day by 2020. If so, the government—which owns a controlling stake in Petrobras—will enjoy a gusher of revenues. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva wants to spend this money to transform Brazil into a developed country, through projects to boost education, welfare and infrastructure. This grand scheme has also been a key part of his campaign to get his chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff, elected next month (Lula is constitutionally barred from standing again).

Although $70 billion is a sizeable sum, it is only a fraction of the $224 billion that Petrobras intends to spend over its current five-year plan, which runs to 2014. The company will still have a fairly high debt load after the share issue, and investors will still have some doubts about the scale of the challenge it is taking on—and about Brazil’s future energy policy. Such worries have contributed to a fall of about a quarter in Petrobras’s share price since the start of the year.

Because of the election campaign Lula and his candidate (who was energy minister until recently) felt obliged to drive a hard bargain with Petrobras, to avoid any suggestion that its outside shareholders were getting a generous deal at the Brazilian taxpayer’s expense. The government has swapped its 5 billion barrels of reserves for shares at an effective price of $8.51 a barrel—which is about two dollars more than industry analysts think would be fair. Of course, it will cost a lot more than this to produce the oil, given the difficulties of drilling in deep waters-just ask BP. Petrobras thinks it can exploit the pre-salt oil profitably as long as the world oil price is above $45 a barrel, (it is currently trading at about $30 more than this). This seems optimistic, to say the least. At a recent conference in Rio for foreigners considering investing in Brazilian infrastructure, a figure of $65 or so was generally thought to be nearer the mark.

Changing the rules
The government is convinced that there is much more oil still waiting to be discovered off Brazil’s coasts, so it intends to change the way it licenses exploitation, to maximise its take from the new fields. Until now, oil firms have bid for concessions under which they pay taxes and royalties but keep the oil they produce. In future the oil will belong to a newly created state firm and Petrobras will be the sole operator (although it will be allowed to bring in other oil firms as partners).

Finding enough qualified people for such a big expansion will be difficult enough for Petrobras. The government is making things harder still by insisting that 65% of future contracts for drills, ships, platforms and so on must go to Brazilian firms. The country’s shipbuilding and oil-services businesses are growing fast, but they too may struggle to rise to the challenge.

A bigger fear is that this is just the start of a revival in wholesale government meddling in industry. Such worries will hardly be eased by the news that, since other state firms and federal agencies have taken part in Petrobras’s share issue, the government’s total stake in the firm will rise from 40% to about 48% (it already has a majority of the voting shares). Ms Rousseff, who looks likely to win the presidential poll, remains an unknown quantity. A former revolutionary who fought the country’s 1964-85 military dictatorship, she has sounded rather keener on a strong state than Lula, though she may turn out to be a pragmatist, as he did after first getting elected in 2002. Although some countries have kept a tight grip on their national oil companies and done well out of it, Brazil need look no further than Venezuela and Mexico—two countries with ample oil reserves but feeble, politicised state oil firms and a notable lack of progress towards first-world status—to see the risks it may be running.

From our special report on Latin America: The region's commodities blessing, or curse