Latin America Politics General Thread

[tarheelbillie]

It amuses me that Republicans used to warn of following a path like Venezuela. And now…

That was before their messiah arrived and told them the “truth”.

 

[CRHeel94]

State Department upgrades travel advisory for El Salvador

State Dept. gives El Salvador a massive upgrade as it disappears U.S. immigrants

The Trump administration lowered a travel advisory for El Salvador, as its leader holds hundreds of U.S. immigrants in a brutal prison.

www.msnbc.com

Lost in all this, I actually like El Salvador. People are very warm and inviting. Love myself some pupusas (the local dish, tortilla dough filled with beans, cheese or chicharron among other things...now found in many US cities). I've been traveling there for the last 30 years; one of my jobs took me to the most dangerous neighborhoods...the rough places in the US are child's play compared to those. Safety was a disaster for decades with one of the highest homicide rates around. Truth be told, Bukele has really cleaned it up and it feels very different. Last couple of years I felt normal walking around in San Salvador.

That safety has come with rather draconian measures (its estimated that about 5% of persons imprisoned under their martial law are innocent) and there is little due process. Bukele wiped his ass with their constitution, which prevented consecutive terms for presidents. He has a singular hold on power that is more similar to Venezuela and Nicaragua than to the democracies of the region.

 

[donbosco]

Been a while since I've been to El Salvador. I drove there back during the civil wars -- it was a roundly stupid thing to do but welp...there you go. Spent some time on the side of the road with my car being searched by soldiers (the only thing they confiscated was a box of Tijuana Fats' matches and a copy of Steppenwolf). Spent a couple of wild days in San Salvador which at the time was only barely functioning -- street signs were largely missing and stop lights were sometimes working, sometimes not. But there was beer.

August is big time holiday month there and in the old days Salvadorans would vacation in Guatemala during those weeks. Just get rowdy and tear shit up pretty often. A couple of times I was hired by Guatemalan friends that owned bars just to be a white guy behind the bar in hopes that would help keep the insanity down (they believed that would make a difference -- maybe it did).

 

[donbosco]

"Guatemala City (EFE).- Guatemala’s Public Prosecutor’s Office arrested on Wednesday the Deputy Minister for Sustainable Development Luis Pacheco on charges of “terrorism.”

Pacheco was a leader of the Indigenous organization of the 48 cantons of Totonicapán, and back in 2023, led protests against the Attorney General, María Consuelo Porras, for her attempts to overturn the results of the general elections that gave a victory to President Bernardo Arévalo de León.

The deputy minister was arrested early on Wednesday’s in a raid on his home in Guatemala City by the Prosecutor’s Office against Organized Crime and handed over to the judicial authorities, according to the National Civil Police (PNC)."

Prosecutors arrest deputy minister who defended President's election in Guatemala - EFE

Guatemala's Attorney General María Consuelo Porras is behind this move...she is a throwback to the time of corruption that preceded the upset election in 2024 of Bernardo Arévalo, himself an outsider to the kleptocracy that typically rules the country. This Wikipedia Entry on Porras is short but gives a good sense of who she is: María Consuelo Porras - Wikipedia (The Links In The References Check Out). In short, the office of Public Prosecutor is an appointed office that can only be vacated by resignation prior to the conclusion of a term of four years. In the case of Porras the previous president (Alejandro Giammattei) appointed her in his last days in office meaning that she can hold the position until 2026. She is a major anti-democracy force in the nation and a thorn in the side of President Arévalo.

Porras was the Organized Crime and Reporting Project's 2023 Person of The year: María Consuelo Porras

 

[donbosco]

𝙟𝙤𝙨𝙚 𝙯𝙖𝙢𝙤𝙧𝙖
@jczamora
>> On World Press Freedom Day, we stand in solidarity with journalists who risk everything to tell the truth. My father, #JoseRubénZamora, who has been held hostage in Guatemala for over 1,000 days by the criminal network entrenched in the
@MPguatemala under #ConsueloPorras and her complicit judges within
@OJGuatemala is one of them. Journalism is not a crime. Today would be a good day to free him. #WPFD #PressFreedom #FreeZamora c.
@BArevalodeLeon

 

[Paine]

Pepe Mujica: My Generation Made a Naive Error

The late Uruguayan statesman José “Pepe” Mujica argues that capitalism is not just property relations but a set of cultural values that the Left must confront with a culture of solidarity.

jacobin.com

RIP Pepe

“I’m not going to suggest obstacles to the creation of new revolutionary programs. On the contrary! But I don’t have a magic formula. It seems to me that creativity must be encouraged, because we are in a world with an old left that lives too much on nostalgia, a left that finds it hard to realize why it failed and has great difficulty in imagining new ways forward.

I believe that this is a time of much rehearsal, a lot of experimentation and creativity. And for that there are some parameters we can follow, because, as I said, my generation did not place enough emphasis on culture. I am referring to the culture inherent in the common and ordinary relationships that people have, which, under capitalism, now uses the events of daily life only to ensure further accumulation.”

 

[donbosco]

 

[Paine]

Looking forward to reading!

 

[superrific]

At first I thought that was a bad photoshop of Schumer and McConnell as an Odd Couple.

 

[donbosco]

Mujica's influence on Uruguay made it a good consideration for relocation. There was a disruption but the left has returned to power there.

 

[donbosco]

 

[donbosco]

 

[CRHeel94]

Well this is a way to end the week.

Nicaragua legislature votes to end dual citizenship

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -Nicaragua's National Assembly approved a constitutional amendment on Friday to eliminate dual citizenship in a move that would impact thousands of people, including government opponents. The reform of articles 23 and 25 of the constitution must be approved again in 2026...

www.yahoo.com

 

[Zoo_View]

Well this is a way to end the week.

Nicaragua legislature votes to end dual citizenship

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -Nicaragua's National Assembly approved a constitutional amendment on Friday to eliminate dual citizenship in a move that would impact thousands of people, including government opponents. The reform of articles 23 and 25 of the constitution must be approved again in 2026...

www.yahoo.com

I’m guessing that negatively impacts you and possibly your family?

Nicaragua under the Ortegas is beyond a mess.

 

[CRHeel94]

I let my Nicaraguan passport lapse about seven years ago, though it’s always nice to have a second passport (you just never know). Affects some of my family, more as an inconvenience.

The broader implication is on the country itself. This is a move to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters down the line. It eliminates possible future presidential candidates on the grounds that they’re not Nicaraguan. Then again the Sandinistas have decided that fair elections are no longer necessary.

It could prevent Nicaraguans from being able to return to the country, which is highly overindexed on the opposition. That means some persons could be marooned in Costa Rica, the US (which wa ya go send people back) and other places.

But what bothers me the most is the blatant disregard for a Constitution that they already have butchered. I know there’s been discussion about birthright citizenship…this is the regime’s attempt at stripping persons birthright in one fell swoop for their political gain.

 

[donbosco]

Pepe Mujica’s Long Revolution​

For the Uruguayan leader, a longtime icon of the Latin American left, economic fairness was inseparable from human decency.
By Jon Lee Anderson
May 16, 2025

"José Mujica—the former guerrilla fighter, political prisoner, philosopher, and Uruguayan President, known affectionately throughout Latin America as Pepe—died on Tuesday, at the age of eighty-nine. Mujica was many things, but most of all he was a good-hearted man who spent his life fighting to secure a more equitable future for his country, first as an armed combatant and later as Uruguay’s ultimate elder statesman. A short, burly figure with a mustache and a mop of unkempt hair, he dressed in rumpled, worn clothing, yet his eyes twinkled with wry humor. In public appearances, he often spoke movingly of the transformative power of political action, but also left room for plain talk, once describing a fellow head of state as “crazy as a goat.” Like many Uruguayans, he loved yerba maté and was never without his flask and bombilla, the silver straw dedicated to drinking tea. He was also an incorrigible smoker, and over the years his voice turned to a throaty growl."

Mujica was given a diagnosis of esophageal cancer in the spring of 2024, and the final few months of his life were an extended farewell, as old friends, reporters, and heads of state came to see him for a last time. Mujica received his guests alongside his wife of many years—Lucía Topolansky, an ex-guerrilla who later served as Vice-President—in their dilapidated farmhouse, a tin-roofed, single-story structure off a dirt road outside Montevideo. The Brazilian President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was among the visitors. “He was aware that he didn’t have much time left,” Lula told me recently. “But it wasn’t a problem. He had already made history.”

I first met Mujica in Havana, in the mid-nineties, at the home of an old revolutionary in the Miramar neighborhood. I was conducting research for a biography of Che Guevara, and Mujica had known him—they were fellow-partisans in the revolutionary ferment of the sixties. As a young man, Mujica had joined a Marxist urban guerrilla group known as the Tupamaros, whose campaigns were met with vicious repression by Uruguay’s military dictatorship.


Mujica spoke to me about the time he attended a nocturnal meeting between Guevara and the Tupamaro leader Raúl Sendic, in a safe house outside Montevideo. Guevara was travelling in disguise, en route from Cuba to Bolivia. As Mujica told it, he was there to ask for help from Sendic’s guerrillas. In addition to a fake Uruguayan passport and other logistical support, Guevara wanted the Tupamaros to commit to a continental guerrilla struggle that he proposed to ignite—the only way, he suggested, to overcome their class enemies. “He wasn’t mistaken,” Mujica said. “We were very aware, because of the dimensions of Uruguay and the context of that time, that we had to be part of something bigger.”

A year later, Guevara died leading a guerrilla uprising in Bolivia. Though he did not succeed in forging Latin American unity, Mujica held on to the goal. “You know, the notion of ‘continentality’ goes much deeper than just sparking off guerrilla wars throughout Latin America,” he told me. “We Latin Americans came late to the advent of modern capitalism and continue to be distant from it. If we don’t find some way to integrate ourselves, as the poor countries of the region, then we are condemned to be dependent” on the rich industrialized countries of the North.

Mujica declined to live in the Presidential palace, donated most of his salary to charity, and drove his 1987 Volkswagen Beetle to work. Photograph by Natacha Pisarenko / AP

The fight for political change was fierce, at least at the beginning. As a member of the Tupamaros, Mujica participated in battles and sustained wounds. He was captured several times, and once took part in a dramatic prison escape. In the end, though, he and a handful of others were recaptured and held hostage by Uruguay’s military, in a bid to break the back of the insurgency. Mujica was imprisoned for thirteen years, much of it in a solitary underground cell—an experience that nearly drove him mad.

Cont.

 

[donbosco]

Continued...

The Tupamaros formally disarmed after the end of the dictatorship, in 1985. Mujica emerged from prison and, in 1994, embarked on a political career in Uruguay’s restored democracy. He served as a parliamentary deputy, as a senator, as a cabinet minister, and finally, from 2010 to 2015, as President. Even then, he refused to move from his farmhouse into the Presidential residence, and donated a large majority of his salary to charity. He drove to work in his sky-blue 1987 Volkswagen Beetle.

Mujica never budged from his left-wing views, and he expressed solidarity with the region’s other leftist Presidents—veterans including Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and Lula, and later such newcomers as Chile’s Gabriel Boric and Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum. But he was also a pragmatist, able to engage with domestic political adversaries and with foreign leaders to his right. He was sometimes likened to Nelson Mandela, that other legendary political prisoner of the Cold War, who similarly spent his postwar life working to reconcile his countrymen and extolling the virtues of nonviolence. In our first meeting, I asked Mujica how he had managed to come out of prison without wanting to seek revenge. “I had comrades who used their power to settle scores,” he said. “But I fought myself not to do that, because I realized it would just create more obstacles. I had to decide what the priority was—the future or the past. It’s not about forgetting the past, but, if you concentrate on it to the extent that it kills your future, then you’ve failed.”

I visited Mujica’s farmhouse in 2017, and met him at the guardhouse outside, a ramshackle structure where El Turco, his loyal bodyguard, was stationed—and where Mujica came to sneak cigarettes out of sight of Lucía, who had forbidden him from smoking. As we chatted, he rolled his own cigarettes, one after the other.

Castro had died a year earlier, and Mujica reminisced about their last meeting, saying that even at the end Castro had remained “able to say things that needed to be said.” Still, Mujica lamented the ebbing of a revolutionary consciousness in Cuba, where the socialist society that Castro had tried to build was disintegrating. “The number of consumers has increased, but not their social conscience,” he said. “In our time, we thought society could be automatically changed if we transformed the relationship between production and distribution—but, by emphasizing that, we relegated the importance of art and culture.” That, he said, had been a profound mistake.

The left had failed, its energy replaced by that of global capitalism. This was a reality that had to be acknowledged, because it posed huge problems for humanity, Mujica said. “The changing nature of society, the growth of globalized transnational corporate power, and international finance have brought insecurity to the middle classes,” he said. “The changes in places like Detroit, because of new technologies, meant that those people were very vulnerable to protectionist and racist messages—‘It’s the fault of the Blacks, the Mexicans’—which generate the worst kinds of egocentrism.” As a result, he said, “you see the rise of reactionary politics, the hypernationalism: Germany for Germans, or whatever.”

He felt as strongly as ever that capitalism could not entirely feed the soul. “Humanity has been overwhelmed by a type of civilization that has as its epicenter the market,” he said. “Everything now depends on the success of the market, from the means of production to the risks to the ecological balance.” Contemporary society was adrift, he went on. “It needs a political administration which it cannot have, because the market, and not a social conscience, is its driving force.”

This past September, I went to see Mujica for the last time, in the cluttered, book-lined front room of his farmhouse. He sat in an easy chair and wore an oversized black cardigan against the winter chill. The room was warmed by an old wood-fired heater. He and Lucía and I spoke about everything from the “narcissism” of selfie-obsessed modern society to the phenomenon of immigration and, as ever, the apparent collapse of the political left and the rise of the extreme right.

Mujica rarely criticized his fellow-leftists in public, but he was privately critical of those, such as Daniel Ortega and Nicolás Maduro, who had become increasingly dictatorial in recent years, and he expressed concern about autocratic polices and human-rights abuses in Cuba and other countries. “Often, those who lead governments fall in love with power,” he said. “They don’t want to leave it, and they don’t prepare for a succession. They turn the love of power into a raison d’état, which is insane.”
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He pointed out that he was nearly ninety, and not far from death. “Biology is not something you can appeal. You can’t go against nature,” he told me. “I am very aware that a political succession must be created and cultivated intellectually, and not be left as a trauma for future generations.” He had taken care to cultivate younger leaders in his own party in Uruguay, and was happy that it had found an enduring place in a politically diverse coalition. “Now, what happens after I am gone, who knows?” he said. “But at least they are prepared to go on.” One of Mujica’s last public appearances was on March 1st, at the inauguration of the country’s new President, Yamandú Orsi, whose candidacy he had supported.

Latin American leaders I spoke with told me that Mujica left an enduring legacy. “His life will continue to linger in the air,” Lula said. “And I hope that many young people find in Pepe Mujica the inspiration to do politics.” One of his most successful protégés is Boric, Chile’s young President. “Pepe was a guiding light,” he wrote to me, flying back from a state visit to Japan. “Through his own example, he showed that one achieves nothing through superficial voluntarism, empty arrogance, and hatred for those who think differently. He demonstrated that forward paths can be found by forging unity between progressive forces, and that permanent changes in society can also be achieved through moderate steps. I felt him to be a brother and a comrade. He also repeated to me that happiness is only real when it is shared. That is not something one forgets.”

It is a philosophy that sustained Mujica to the end. On my final visit with him, he told me, “As humans, we love ourselves too much, and at times that dominates us. I believe that we need to look hard at everything we have done and where we are today, and we must have the intellectual courage to acknowledge the contradictions posed by the world around us. But we cannot give up and decide that what we once sought is no longer possible. No! I think humanity can build a better world than it has done and do so deliberately, even though achieving the impossible always requires a little more effort. Because, if we lose our ability to have faith, what is the point of life?” ♦

[POSTED IN FULL IN CASE ANYONE IS HALTED BY A PAYWALL...I don't do that as a rule but am for this]


Jon Lee Anderson, a staff writer, began contributing to The New Yorker in 1998. His books include “Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life.”

Pepe Mujica’s Long Revolution

For the Uruguayan leader, a longtime icon of the Latin American left, economic fairness was inseparable from human decency.

www.newyorker.com

 

[CRHeel94]

Mujica is an interesting figure. Probably one of the few figures of the left that is widely respected for walking the talk.

I have philosophical difference with his positions...and as that article suggests, he was far too accommodating of the totalitarian governments that emerged in the Latin American Left.

 

[superrific]

that is widely respected for walking the talk.

I know this is a typo but it's pretty funny.

 

[donbosco]

This is very interesting -- skip to about the 12 -13 mark to get by the introductions and opening remarks.