Around the Hemisphere

If I was undecided yesterday (which I really wasn't), then today I am decidedly certain...the real question is, why is this man smiling?

• With elections not looking favorable, Chavez looks to distract the electorate with more threat generation. This quote from a former Venezuelan ambassador to the UN is one of the best encapsulations of Chavez’s tactics that I have seen: "President Chávez has used his anti-Americanism as a form of government policy, not only internationally but also when faced with a series of errors that he cannot explain." Hell, he hates us so much he even goes after McDonalds…
  

• Argentina places restrictions on imports from Brazil and China. Is there lead in the empanadas?
  

• Jose Miguel Vivanco, the HRW official expelled from Venezuela by Chavez last month, tells his version of the story, as linked to by Daniel at VZ News and Views.

• Meanwhile, HRW goes after Uribe in Colombia for interfering with the judicial process by trying to lean on judges for investigating links between members of his government and paramilitaries.
  

• U.S. consulate in Monterrey, Mexico attacked.
  

• Carlos Menem is being investigated for arms trafficking, supposedly selling weapons to Ecuador and Croatia in the 1990s.
  

• The Cocaine Diaries is a BBC series featuring Alex James of Blur traveling around Colombia looking into how the cocaine business works. I haven’t had a chance to see any of the series, but it comes highly recommended. I’m hoping it will re-run on BBC America at some point. If anyone knows of alternative means of viewing, by all means share…
  

• Serious environmental disaster in Bolivia, as the heavily polluted Choqueyapo River poisons agriculture and drinking water

Photo: Foto-cualquiera.com

Who is the Least Popular President in the Americas? Not Bush...

The Colombian think tank CIMA has released its annual poll on governance and related issues. The results are culled from interviews done all over Latin America, the U.S. as well as Spain and Portugal, and assess various issues of importance to the region. Specifically, the group did 12,401 interviews in virtually every country in the Western Hemisphere, plus Iberia, and the results are pretty interesting.

Some of the highlights:

• In 11 out of 22 countries, the respective leaders had more than a 50% approval rating. The highest was Alvaro Uribe in Colombia with 85%. Bush, with a rock solid 21% approval, was surprisingly not the lowest. That honor went to now ex-President Nicanor Duarte of Paraguay, with an impressive 9%. Other notables: Chavez with 54%, Lula with 67%, Ortega with 29%.
  

• Overall in the region, the three main problems identified were lack of security, unemployment, and corruption. Complaints about the economy tended to vary depending on the respective conditions in each country. Only 3% of Venezuelans considered the economy a major problem, while 50% of U.S. Hispanics felt the same way.
  

• One strange question was asked about all the leaders in the region. On a scale of 0 to 100, how much do you sympathize with any given leader? For Hugo Chavez, 58% of Venezuelans sympathized with him, while only 10% in Spain felt the same way. Overall in the region, Chavez had a 26% rate of sympathy. When asked about Bush, 46% of U.S. Hispanics sympathized with him, while 56% of Colombians did the same. This stat is clearly not approval rating, so I’m not really sure what to make of that question.
  

I think overall these numbers should be looked at with a very critical eye. It appears the wording of this poll may have skewed some of the results, and allows one to read the numbers in ways to fit certain political views. For example, El Universal in Venezuela, which is not exactly pro-Chavez, gleaned from these statistics that Chavez was the “most unpopular” leader in the region. But he doesn’t have the lowest approval ratings? In any case, the report is a good read…