www.guardian.co.uk AP in Porto Alegre Friday January 24, 2003 The Guardian

Around 100,000 anti-globalisation activists gathered last night for the World Social Forum in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre for a six-day protest against the World Economic Forum taking place simultaneously at the Swiss ski resort of Davos.

Tens of thousands were expected to open the social forum with a march against a war on Iraq. In between protests, participants will hold talks on alternatives to tame the excesses of global capitalism.

The forum is now in its third year and Brazil's new leftwing president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, is to address the gathering on Friday. Venezuela's embattled president, Hugo Chavez, is expected to attend on Sunday. After the Brazilian leader speaks, he will fly to Davos to participate in the economic forum, which is expected to attract 2,000 business and government leaders.

Social forum participants say their opposition to American-style capitalism should strike a chord. The summit follows a year of unprecedented business scandals involving multinational corporations.

Prominent activists attending include the actor Danny Glover, and Aleida Guevara, the daughter of Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

www.accessatlanta.com [ The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: 01/23/03] By MICHAEL E. KANELL The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

If the United States is going to attack Iraq, timing the assault for mid-February may minimize chances of a spike in oil prices.

Because oil is so critical to world commerce, a dramatic leap in prices -- whether or not supply is curtailed -- could shove vulnerable economies into recession. U.S. planners, of course, want any attack to go smoothly and quickly. Best-case scenarios call for shutting down only Iraqi oil production -- and that temporarily.

But any economic impact would be softest in a time when demand is decreasing and when countries are adding production.

Mid-February is that time.

"From the perspective of countries which rely on imports of crude oil from the region, the timing is optimal," said energy economist James Williams at WTRG Economics.

Demand for crude oil dips in spring by 2 million to 2.5 million barrels per day. The United States generally uses that time to pump up inventories in preparation for summer, when the use of cars and air conditioning zooms.

War's impact on prices, then, could be moderate, assuming all goes smoothly in Iraq. Economic danger rests mostly in the vulnerability of pipelines and shipping to terrorism, Williams said.

"Our concern remains the unintended consequences of war," he said.

On Wednesday, Russian military officials said they have information convincing them the United States intends to move against Iraq sometime around the middle of next month, according to the news agency Interfax.

The United States imports most of its oil. But only two of its top 10 suppliers -- Saudi Arabia and Iraq -- are in the Persian Gulf.

"If war disrupts shipments from the Gulf, it would hurt the Europeans more than it would hurt us," said economist Rod Duncan at Georgia State University. "The U.S. only gets about 12 percent of its oil from the Gulf."

But oil's price is determined by the world market, so any supply disruption would jack up prices for everyone, including the United States. And the U.S. economy is vulnerable.

If oil, now selling for just under $35 per barrel, were to rise to $60 per barrel, economic growth -- about 3 percent last year -- would be dragged down 1 percent. Every $10-per-barrel increase is like a $120 billion tax, according to the Institute for International Economics.

Yet the higher prices of recent months are largely because suppliers are betting that war will mean a price spike -- so they are holding back supplies. As a result, inventories have been depleted, and that makes prices more volatile.

But if the war is over quickly, prices could rapidly fall. Even if Iraqi oil fields do not pump for some time, several big oil producers -- especially Saudi Arabia, the largest -- are raising production. And Venezuela, whose oil industry was paralyzed by political turmoil, may be turning the corner back toward more production.

"I don't think the price of oil will change much at all," Duncan said.

www.forbes.com Reuters, 01.23.03, 7:53 PM ET

CARACAS, Venezuela, Jan 23 (Reuters) - Venezuela's opposition, fighting a campaign to oust President Hugo Chavez, said Thursday they had extended for a 54th day their strike aimed at pressing the populist leader to resign.

The stoppage, which began on Dec. 2, has slashed Venezuela's vital oil production and output, rattled energy markets and driven the world's No. 5 crude exporter deeper into recession.

"We continue with this national civic protest...We must brace ourselves for this fight," anti-Chavez business leader Julio Brazon told reporters.

Strikers, including state oil firm PDVSA workers, say they will strike until Chavez resigns, calls elections and reinstates fired oil workers. Some blue-collar oil workers have returned to work. But support for the strike remains strong among skilled workers at oilfields and refineries, and managers.

Chavez, a former paratrooper who was elected in 1998 and survived a coup, has refused to step down. He says he is defeating the strike using troops and replacement workers. Strikers dismiss his claims, but oil production has crept up since the stoppage began.

www.voanews.com VOA News 24 Jan 2003, 00:45 UTC

The six-member "group of friends" of Venezuela meets Friday in Washington for talks on the political crisis facing the oil-rich nation.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell joins officials from Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Spain and Portugal for the meeting, which will take place at the headquarters of the Organization of American States.

The six-member group was formed to add diplomatic support to the OAS, which has spent several weeks trying to mediate the crisis between Venezuela's government and opposition.

The Washington talks come one day after the Bush administration urged the two sides in the dispute to carefully consider settlement proposals offered by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter.

The proposals, released earlier this week in Caracas, call for either a constitutional amendment that would trigger early elections or a national referendum in August on the rule of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. In return, the opposition would be required to end a long-running general strike, which has severely disrupted Venezuela's vital oil industry. Before the strike began, Venezuela was the world's fifth-largest oil exporter.

Mr. Chavez has said he is open to the proposals put forth by Mr. Carter, who visited Caracas earlier this week.

news.pacificnews.org El Norte Digest Compiled and Edited by Marcelo Ballve, New California Media, Jan 23, 2003

“El Norte” is a weekly report on news and views from the Latino press and communities.

• Latino Media Interpret South America’s ‘Left-Turn’ Differently
• Deportees from U.S. Flooding into Border Area
• Bush’s Affirmative Action Position Attacked by California Latinos
• U.S. Colombians Coalescing Politically, Economically

Latino Media Interpret South America’s ‘Left-Turn’ Differently

With populist presidents inaugurated in both Ecuador and Brazil, major mainstream U.S. newspapers speculated about a continent-wide shift to the left in South America. But Latino editors and analysts said the leaders showed no clear signs yet of breaking with market-friendly policies.

On Jan. 1, Brazil inaugurated Workers’ Party leader Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva, who is a former union leader. Since Brazil is Latin America’s largest nation and economy, the country’s elections were watched as a barometer of political thought in the region.

But Brazzil, a Los Angeles-based monthly published for overseas Brazilians, cautions in its January 2003 issue of making too much of the election results. In the cover article, “So this is Lula?” Ted Goertzel of Rutgers University points out that Lula selected a multi-millionaire connected to evangelical Christians as vice president and that Henrique Mereilles, former head of BankBoston, was picked as Central Bank president. “Lula’s government will be one of continuity. … He will easily manage the disappointment of the ideological leftists.”

In Spain’s widely read El País daily, former Uruguayan president José María Sanguinetti writes, “In reality, Latin America is not being pushed by an ideological wave in either direction.”

Guillermo Martinez, writing Jan. 18 in the New York Spanish-language daily El Diario/ La Prensa, says Ecuador’s new president, Lucio Gutierrez was relying principally on the support of indigenous members of his coalition, rather than actively courting any Marxist-inspired faction.

President Gutierrez, a former coup leader and military officer, backtracked already on his opposition to having the U.S. dollar as Ecuador’s currency. Martinez says the new president was also unlikely to adopt the same incendiary class rhetoric used by President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

Deportees from U.S. Flooding into Border Area

U.S. homeland security efforts to increase border surveillance and speed up deportation of illegal immigrants are beginning to impact fragile Mexican border cities, which are often the first stop for returned migrants. In one city deportees are overwhelming social service agencies.

Nuevo Laredo and Tijuana have seen sharp increases recently in the number of deportees turning up on city streets, according to Frontera NorteSur, a daily New Mexico-based news service.

Nuevo Laredo’s daily El Mañana newspaper cites figures documenting a dramatic rise in deportees: in January 2001, 296 Mexicans were returned; in 2002, the number was 718; in the first two weeks of January 2003, over 2,000 Mexicans were returned over the bridge linking the city to Texas.

In Tijuana, the daily Frontera newspaper said in mid-2002 that the number of deportees returned to Mexico through the city climbed sharply from low 2001 levels to a flow of 100 deportees per day arriving from San Diego.

In Nuevo Laredo, the Casa del Migrante, an immigrant aid organization, has been overwhelmed by the influx and can no longer house and feed deportees. The city’s Civil Protection Unit was activated to provide emergency housing and help transport migrants home.

The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service has made speedy deportation a hallmark of its ongoing overhaul under the planned Department of Homeland Security. One new measure—called “mandatory surrender”—was approved last year and says that from that date forward, immigrants with “removal” orders handed down against them must turn themselves within 30 days or be prohibited from contesting their deportation. Before, illegal immigrants or visa violators could stave off deportation by appealing to immigration judges.

Bush’s Affirmative Action Position Attacked by California Latinos

In California, where the state’s university system has already abolished using racial criteria in its admissions, the Latino media has blasted the White House for opposing affirmative action at the University of Michigan in a U.S. Supreme Court case.

On the popular LatinoLA web portal, two commentators made the case for affirmative action. Karen Salazar, an undergraduate at UCLA, writes that California is an example of how abolishing affirmative action would lead to the “resegregation” of higher education. She says that while the Black and Latino population in California boomed in high schools, minority students’ representation in the university system declined precipitously since affirmative action was abolished in 1996.

Attorney Sylvia Trujillo, a Harvard and University of California graduate, says she was “outraged” that President Bush implied that universities had somehow “overvalued” the importance of including the perspectives of minorities in the student body.

“Bush is looking for a fight that he didn’t need,” says the La Opinión daily in Los Angeles, with over 600,000 daily readers. In the Jan. 19 editorial, the newspaper said “diversity is a hugely important goal for a teaching institution that operates in a society of inequalities, with a background of racism and discrimination and abysmal economic disparities.”

Raul Caballero, a Texas journalist writing in the same newspaper, highlighted U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s public statements dissenting with the president’s position the day before the Martin Luther King holiday. “(Powell’s dissent) made me feel pain and pride.”

Latino community organizations such as the National Council of La Raza and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund have urged the White House to support affirmative action.

U.S. Colombians Coalescing Politically, Economically

After a decade of heavy immigration, U.S.-based Colombians are beginning to make economic and political ripples in the Northeast and Florida. Colombian businessmen are investing heavily in U.S. real estate, while some are forging ties with other Latinos to launch political careers.

Many Colombians arriving are professionals fleeing the instability and conflict of the 1990s, and their political impact is being felt quickly, both in Colombia and in the United States. In a Jan. 21 report, Miami’s Spanish-language daily El Nuevo Herald says some $5 billion in Colombian capital had been invested in the United States, notably in Miami real estate, during the past five years. The article estimates that there could be over 2 million Colombians in the United States, with 250,000 in South Florida.

The movement in money has been accompanied by some political clout. Juan Carlos Zapata, a Colombian representing a district in the Miami area, was voted into the Florida legislature according to the Nuevo Herald. Zapata has attributed his victory to close ties with the state’s 1 million-strong Cuban community. In Rhode Island there are Colombians on city councils, as well as one representative in the state legislature.

The U.S. Association of Colombian-American Organizations, or NACAO for its syllables in Spanish, plans to meet in September in New York. According to New York Spanish-language daily El Diario/La Prensa, the organization will push for a higher profile for Colombians within U.S. Latino organizations. They also want overseas Colombians to be able to vote for their own representative in their home country’s legislature.