November 01, 2012
The Associated Press takes a look at Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa’s plan to tax banks to pay for an increased subsidy to poor families and for other “wealth redistribution activities.” The measure, which would increase taxes on bank’s assets abroad among other changes, is estimated to raise $200-$300 million per year. The AP notes that Correa has doubled social spending and that “Ecuador now devotes a greater share of its economy, 10 percent of gross domestic product, to public investment in infrastructure, education and other purposes than any other nation in Latin America and the Caribbean.” Speaking over the weekend at the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Correa said “This is the challenge the world over: beating poverty, which for the first time in history is not the result of scarce resources or natural factors, but of perverse and exclusive systems. For this to happen, changes are required in power relations and political processes”.
A U.S. free trade agreement with Panama, negotiated during the Bush administration, went into effect yesterday reports Reuters. The agreement, the third along with Colombia and South Korea, to be finalized in the past year, was praised by business groups and senior lawmakers. Yet others, such as Lori Wallach of Public Citizen, criticized the deal. Wallach told The Hill, “The presidential candidates are sparring over who would best crack down on offshore tax evasion and reduce our budget deficit, so it’s a sorry statement about the power of corporate campaign money that both candidates support a pact with the hemisphere’s leading tax haven.” Wallach has previously pointed out that since the FTAs with South Korea and Colombia, imports from those countries have outpaced exports, implying an estimated loss of 15,000 jobs.
Ecuadorean plaintiffs, who have waged a long legal battle with Chevron over pollution in the Amazon, will sue the company in Argentina and Colombia to try and enforce a $19 billion court ruling, reports Dow Jones. Pablo Fajardo, an Ecuadorean attorney representing the plaintiffs said, “We’re going after Chevron wherever in the world it has assets.” The suits in Colombia and Argentina follow similar moves in Brazil and Canada. Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked Chevron’s attempt to prevent the plaintiffs from enforcing the judgment. Luis Yanza, another representative of the Amazonian groups suing Chevron, told Dow Jones that the pollution has directly affected 30,000 people, raising cancer rates and causing other problems. “For us, what Texaco [later acquired by Chevron] did is a crime against nature and against humanity,” Yanza said.
Honduras’ second-ever openly gay man to run for national political office, Erick Vidal Martinez, was in San Francisco last week as part of a ten-day California tour, reports the San Francisco Reporter. Martinez has worked for the past three years for a Honduran human rights group, recording human rights violations against members of the LGBT community. After the coup in June 2009, violence against the LGBT community has increased. The Reporter notes, “During the first six months of the coup, nine gay men and 12 transsexual women were murdered. Since then five lesbians, 42 gay men, 28 transsexual women, and an unknown number of bisexuals have been murdered.” Martinez is running on the Libre ticket, a political movement borne out of the resistance to the 2009 coup. Martinez was originally on the ticket as a substitute candidate for Erick Martinez Avila, but Avila was killed just two weeks after accepting his nomination.
