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Article Artículo

Honduras

Latin America and the Caribbean

World

Amid Repression, Honduran Congress Fast Tracks Resource Development

A contentious new law on “development promotion” that quickly passed the Honduran congress last month has provoked alarm in communities already trying to halt projects that could roll over indigenous rights and damage the environment. The “Ley de Promoción del Desarrollo y Reconversión de la Deuda Pública” (Development Promotion and Public Debt Restructuring Act) – passed under unusual and controversial congressional rules - will facilitate the sale of various public and natural resources for development purposes.

Legislators promoting the bill cited Honduras’ fiscal woes, saying revenue generated through the sale of concessions and of public assets would help the government pay off its debt. A new report [PDF] from the Congressional Research Service notes:

Honduras suffered an economic contraction of 2.4% in 2009 as a result of the combined impact of the global financial crisis and domestic political crisis. Although the economy has partially recovered, with estimated growth of 3.3% in 2012, the Honduran government continues to face serious fiscal challenges. The central government’s deficit has been growing in recent years. As it has struggled to obtain financing for the budget, public employees and contractors occasionally have gone unpaid and basic government services have been interrupted. Honduras also continues to face significant social disparities, with over two-thirds of the population living in poverty.

The CRS report goes on to state that “President Lobo also inherited a weak economy with high levels of poverty and inequality.” But as we described in a November 2009 report, “poverty and inequality decreased significantly during the Zelaya administration, with rapid growth of more than 6 percent during the first two years,” and “Some expansionary monetary policy was used to counter-act the global downturn in 2008.” This was interrupted by the coup – the “domestic political crisis” referred to by CRS -- to which we noted the Honduran economy was “especially vulnerable,” as well as to the global economic downturn.

CEPR / August 02, 2013

Article Artículo

Health and Social Programs

Workers

Full-on Recession, Part-time Boom

Throughout all of the post-WWII recessions, the prevalence of involuntary part-time work has closely mirrored the unemployment rate (recessions are shaded in the chart below). This relationship has even held in the Great Recession. However, the latest recession was unique because the rise in involuntary part-time employment was so sharp and it has persisted for so long.

milla-pt-work-fig1-2013-08

The increase of involuntary part-time workers in the most recent recession (99.78 percent) was more than double that of earlier recessions (about 40 percent on average). Also, at this point, in the five recessions before the Great Recession, the part-time rate had already returned to close to “normal.” In those recessions the number of part-time workers for economic reasons had dropped back to between 15 and 35 percent above the pre-recession levels. In this recovery, five and a half years after the recession began, the share of workers involuntarily working part-time remains more than 80 percent over the pre-recession rate.

CEPR and Milla Sanes / August 02, 2013

Article Artículo

Latin America and the Caribbean

What Bradley Manning Taught Us about US Policy in the Americas

Colonel Denise Lind has announced [PDF] that she found U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning “guilty” of five counts of violating the vaguely-worded Espionage Act, among other charges -- carrying a possible sentence of over 100 years imprisonment -- for providing information to journalists including those at Wikileaks. Manning had been prosecuted for over 20 charges, including “aiding the enemy.” Manning had pled guilty to 10 lesser offenses.

Manning faced possible life imprisonment were he to have been found guilty of the charge of “aiding the enemy,” which U.S. government prosecutors claimed he did since material Manning is said to have leaked was made available to Al Qaeda following its publication by Wikileaks. (Glenn Greenwald has suggested that Bob Woodward published “far more sensitive” information – which actually was read by Osama bin Laden – than Wikileaks did.)

Manning is just one of eight whistle-blowers to be charged under the Espionage Act by the Obama administration – more than twice as many as all other presidents combined – demonstrating an unprecedented campaign against those who expose government wrong-doing. It also represents an assault on the freedom of the press, since one significant impact will be that fewer whistle-blowers will be as likely to go to the media with previously undisclosed evidence of U.S. government misdeeds. As Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project said, “[I]t seems clear that the government was seeking to intimidate anyone who might consider revealing valuable information in the future."

In addition to the ACLU, Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders have condemned the verdict, among others.

CEPR / July 30, 2013

Article Artículo

Latin America and the Caribbean

Analysis from National Endowment for Democracy Used in The Atlantic, with Significant Errors and Omissions

This month, readers of The Atlantic were treated to a lengthy article documenting alarming threats to democracy in certain Latin American countries with progressive and leftist heads of government. The piece, written by Kurt Weyland and titled “Why Latin America is Becoming Less Democratic,” is riddled with significant errors and mischaracterizations. Perhaps even worse, editors at The Atlantic didn’t make clear that the article was first published in a “journal” that is funded by the U.S. government.

The original article was published in the Journal of Democracy, which has long focused on providing analysis to justify U.S. government intervention abroad.  The Journal of Democracy is an official publication of the National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) International Forum for Democratic Studies. Although nominally a “nongovernmental” organization, the NED receives most of its funding from the U.S. Congress.  In 1991, Allen Weinstein, who helped found the NED and then became its acting president, told the Washington Post, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA" [1].

Some examples of the NED’s work include using U.S. government resources to fund groups and individuals involved in the short-lived 2002 coup d’état in Venezuela, and two years later funding organizers of the recall effort against then-president Hugo Chávez. One of the NED’s core grantees is the International Republican Institute, which played a major role in overthrowing the democratically-elected government of Haiti in 2004.

These are just a few examples that highlight the NED’s disreputable history in Latin America, which would take far more space than a blog post to tell.  While it clearly would have been worth noting the source of the article, the article itself is full of both factual errors and egregious mischaracterizations.  To keep this post brief, I’ll only review a few of the most egregious errors here.

    1. Weyland writes: “Since the third wave reached Latin America in 1978, the region had seen only occasional threats and temporary interruptions of democracy in individual nations.”

This statement is only reasonable if one completely ignores the U.S. government’s role in the region, which constituted a threat to democracy that was neither “temporary” nor limited to “individual nations.”  Throughout the 1980s, the U.S. conducted a massive and well-organized campaign, especially in Central America, using Cold War pretexts to install and support leaders who would foster favorable conditions for U.S. business interests. 

CEPR and Stephan Lefebvre / July 30, 2013