www.msnbc.com By John Ness NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL

March 24 issue — There’s a spine-chilling moment in the film “Titanic,” after the ship has struck an iceberg, when an engineer declares disaster to be “a mathematical certainty.” Gerald Haug had a similar epiphany of doom one evening at his Zurich home last year.         HE HAD PUT his 3-year-old son to bed at 8 o’clock and then sat down to read “The Great Maya Droughts.” The book boldly addressed the biggest mystery in New World archeology—why the magnificent Mayan civilization, which had flourished for centuries and once had a population in the millions, disappeared so suddenly in the 9th century. The reason, argued author Richardson Gill, was three catastrophic droughts that struck with the consistency of a metronome: in A.D. 810, 860 and 910. Mainstream archeology wasn’t having any of Gill’s theory, but Haug, a paleoclimatologist whose lab had been taking climate measurements of the same period, found it riveting. At about 2 in the morning, he put down the book and checked the latest results from his lab. The data gave him a jolt: they showed a century ravaged by three successive droughts — beginning in 810, 860 and 910. “I was bouncing around the living room,” says Haug.         Haug’s measurements of ancient climate variations in the Cariaco Basin off the coast of Venezuela—hundreds of miles from the Mayan sites in Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, but affected by the same weather patterns—confirmed the existence of Gill’s droughts. Haug’s research, published last Friday in the U.S. journal Science , has provided the most conclusive evidence to date that a series of droughts in 9th-century Central America was an important cause—perhaps the main cause—of the collapse of Mayan civilization. The data downplays competing theories that emphasize a complicated interplay of ecology, disease, overpopulation and even class warfare. “Careers were made by coming up with these very complex theories,” says Gill.         For the past century archeologists relied on paleontology-centered methods of inquiry that put a premium on digging for artifacts and bones for evidence. Research yielded excellent portraits of Mayan social and economic interactions, but it never answered the Big Question. And it yielded no evidence that climate played much of a role—a big reason why archeologists discounted it. In the 1990s, a chorus of geologists, paleoclimatologists and other scientists began to reconsider. The most strident and unorthodox new voice was Gill, a former banker and freelance archeologist.         As a child growing up in Texas, Gill had seen severe drought. When the Texas economy tanked in the 1980s, he started investigating a hunch that drought killed off the Mayans. Most university archeologists told him respectfully—but plainly—that they didn’t think he was looking in the right place. The first supporting evidence came in 1995, from geologist David Hodell at the University of Florida. He and his team examined layers of sediment underneath Mexico’s Lake Chichancanab, which showed the first evidence of a catastrophic drought—the worst in 7,000 years—around the turn of the 10th century. That was enough for Gill. In his book, published in 2000, he proposed dates for three severe droughts. Most archeologists dismissed both the book and Hodell’s evidence—which relied on imprecise radiocarbon dating.         Haug, in 1996, was standing on the deck of a ship off the coast of Venezuela when workers hauled up a tube of sediment 170 meters long—encompassing 500,000 years of climate history. Six centimeters wide and greenish-brown, the core sample is made up of millions of tiny layers, a year to each half millimeter. As Venezuela’s rivers empty into the Cariaco Basin, they leave a chemical signature in the sediment that reveals how much rain fell that year. In 2001, Haug used the core-sample data to narrow the timing of the droughts to within four to five years, which left many archeologists unmoved. Haug then teamed up with chemist Detlef Gunther—who, like Haug, worked at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Using X-rays, Gunther was able to focus the precision to within two months. “It’s a superb piece of work and I want to know when these guys can come to the Near East with me,” says Yale archeologist Harvey Weiss, who has studied the effects of climate on the Mesopotamians. Haug’s latest results show enormous, abrupt swings of climate over the last century of Mayan society.         It will take time for scientists to integrate the great droughts into their story of the Mayan’s “demographic disaster.” They’ve already chronicled power struggles, crop failures and political crises. Three droughts must have put great pressure on Mayan society. Some Mayan archeologists, though, aren’t convinced that Haug makes an ironclad case. “This is not good science,” says UT Austin’s Karl Butzer. Others say Mayan specialists are just guarding their turf. “The significance of Hodell’s research was clear to all but the Mayan archeologists,” says Weiss. “But those Mayan archeologists who previously went ballistic with Hodell’s data will be hospitalized by this article.”         Scientists will convene in August in Guatemala to work through the new data. They’ll be a few hours’ drive from a spot where, toward the end, disillusioned Mayans are thought to have faced down their elites—and beheaded them. This year’s meeting will be more civil, but no less confrontational.

www.msnbc.com By Jorge G. Castaneda NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL

Mexico and Chile are now key swing votes in the U.N. Their actions could change the shape of Latin American diplomacy

March 24 issue — In Chile and Mexico a vigorous debate is taking place. Many in Santiago and Mexico City are questioning whether these two countries should have joined the U.N. Security Council, only to find themselves between a rock and a hard place: support the United States on Iraq and betray their principles, or oppose the United States and pay the consequences.         BEHIND THIS DEBATE lies a broader, more complex dilemma: whether Latin America should actively participate in the construction of the new post-cold-war world order, characterized both by U.S. hegemony and by the rest of the world’s effort to limit and control it, knowing that this participation involves the acceptance of new responsibilities, the modification of basic principles and the ceding of important segments of sovereignty. Or whether the subcontinent should remain faithful to its traditions and convictions, knowing that this implies its “absence at the creation” of an order it will have to submit to in the end.         Most arguments used in Mexico and Chile against participation in the highest body of multilateral legitimacy are contradictory. A country cannot support multilateralism, the United Nations and international law on the one hand, and refuse to participate in the Council on the other; a nation cannot denounce U.S. unilateralism and then refuse to belong to the only mechanism that can, very rarely, place limits on that unilateralism. The arguments used against Chile’s or Mexico’s belonging to the Council (“We’re very vulnerable because of the border or the imminent approval of a free-trade agreement”; “We’re more committed than others to the principles of the U.N. Charter, in view of our nationalist and/or foreign-policy traditions”) can be applied to almost every country in the region.         Three countries—and, until recently, four (El Salvador, Panama, Ecuador and Argentina)—still use American currency; there is a strong and growing U.S. military presence in Colombia; Venezuela sells a considerable proportion of its oil to the United States; Costa Rica largely lives off U.S. retirees. And there is no shortage of countries in the region imbued with a strong nationalist tradition in foreign policy: from Peron’s Argentina to Vargas’s Brazil and, of course, Mexico, Chile and Cuba. If every Latin American country that is to some degree vulnerable to the United States and/or maintains a traditional foreign policy abstained from joining the Security Council, it would be left without Latin American membership.         Beyond this unpersuasive reasoning, a contradiction of even greater dimensions stands out. Latin America is one of the regions of the world whose interests would best be served by the existence of a new international order that is at once rigorous, broad and precise. When it comes to environmental law, indigenous people’s or migrants’ rights, human rights or international trade, the defense of democracy or workers’ rights, Latin American nations have more to gain and less to lose than almost any other region in the world from the creation of a regime of universal values.         But, at the same time, few parts of the world today demonstrate such commitment to a series of traditions and principles contrary to this universalist project. Nonintervention, the unrestricted defense of sovereignty, the reluctance to accept any explicit ceding of sovereignty, an emphatic rhetorical and ideological nationalism, are all constants in the stances and sentiments of most Latin American governments. Partly for historic reasons, occasionally due to internal political considerations, in other cases for geographic motives, the majority maintain a great deal of skepticism about the type of new order that can be constructed.         Identifying the opportunities offered by today’s situation and taking advantage of them is now up to two Latin American governments in particular. Not because either, Mexico or Chile, has the capacity to alone determine the direction of the new international system. Nor because both coincidentally hold a nonpermanent seat on the United Nations Security Council during 2003. But because these two nations—due to their economic and political clout, their geographic location, their diplomatic vocation and tradition and their vision of the world—are perhaps the only ones capable of championing forward-looking stances in the region. Nonetheless, they still face an uphill battle against the ideological resistance and baggage, which constantly undermine their ability to provide diplomatic leadership in Latin America. Part of the problem is that their national identities were forged by 19th and 20th centuries’ nationalism, which forms the backbone of their creation as nation-states. And this nationalism, instead of basing itself on the search to preserve and pursue national interests in an international context necessarily in flux, is anchored to Westphalian concepts of sovereignty that are by definition timeless.         Latin American elites have demonstrated a stubborn reluctance to engage in their countries’ separation from the past. Mexico and Chile, the countries and governments that, fortunately, represent Latin America in the Security Council, are without a doubt the most capable of breaking this inertia and assuming leadership: it’s not an easy task, but it has become increasingly indispensable and unavoidable.        

Castaneda stepped down as Mexican foreign minister in January 2003; he teaches International Relations at the National Autonomous Mexican University and at New York University.

www.sun-sentinel.com By Joe Kollin Staff Writer Posted March 16 2003

WESTON · With no controversies to debate, the most divisive issue in Tuesday's city election was the ethnic background of the candidates.

But those candidates appealing to Weston's large Hispanic population failed to win office.

"The campaigns trying to divide the city didn't work," Mayor Eric Hersh said. "Quite frankly, all that voters were looking at was the people who had the most to offer and they didn't vote along ethnic lines, and never have."

Daniel J. Stermer, who won 60 percent of the vote in his three-man race for the City Commission's Seat 3 -- which represents the north-central area of Weston -- agreed.

"My view is that the residents of our city consider not where you're from, but who you are," he said.

But Murray Chermak, who won Seat 4, which serves the Bonaventure area, said the candidates seeking the Hispanic vote influenced the outcome because "from whatever quarter, they pulled votes."

Two candidates, Don Gonzalez running for Seat 3, and Nino DiLoreto, who sought Seat 4, emphasized their Hispanic roots during the campaign. Gonzalez came in third in his three-man race, while DiLoreto came in third in his four-man race.

"I guess the Hispanic vote didn't materialize," said DiLoreto, whose business interests, including a cable television program he produces, target Hispanic audiences.

DiLoreto, who was born in Italy and raised in Venezuela, said he will turn his energies toward showing immigrants the importance of voting.

"They need to participate fully in the American system, which includes voting, which is the essence of the American system," he said. "I'll meet with Hispanics and educate them."

No breakdown of voting by ethnic group is available. Current figures show only that most voters stayed away from the polls, with 4,168 of the city's 29,685 registered voters, or 14 percent, bothering to vote.

The 2000 federal census showed Weston with a higher proportion of Hispanic residents than any other city in Broward County -- 30.2 percent, a proportion thought to be even higher today.

One resident of Hispanic descent, New Jersey-born Barbara Herrera-Hill, serves on the five-member commission. She was not up for re-election.

The winners in each of the two races also raised the most money.

In the Seat 3 contest, Stermer's $55,614 was no match for Gonzalez's $14,525 or James D. "Jim" Norton's $8,002.

"Quite obviously his money and the amount of personal support he had was tremendous and was more than I could overcome," said Norton, who also lost to Stermer in September when the two fought to fill the term of Alexander "Sandy" Halperin, who resigned from office.

In the race for the Bonaventure seat, Chermak's $37,909 overwhelmed incumbent Edwin Jacobson's $29,148; DiLoreto's $1,350; and Joseph Preite's $7,165.

Jacobson, who was elected in 1997 to the first City Commission after Weston was incorporated in 1996 and was re-elected in 1999, said his defeat doesn't mean he will quit working to serve the city.

"We wish Mr. Chermak good luck and we'll be around," he said.

Chermak was Jacobson's campaign manager in his first two elections, but the two drifted apart.

Hersh and City Manager John Flint say the election wouldn't have gone smoothly had the city not helped Broward County Supervisor of Elections Miriam Oliphant. The city provided and trained 23 people to serve as voting technicians in the city's 19 precincts and had more City Hall workers manning a phone bank to make sure voting went smoothly. Hersh and Flint said the city crews performed "flawlessly."

The only problem was the brief loss of electricity in Bonaventure, but the voting machines have battery backup and voting went on, the officials said.

"The city did a lot more work than it should have done for an election and, in some instances, taxpayers are actually paying twice for having Weston step in to ensure we had a fair and accurate election," Flint said.

The extra cost to taxpayers won't be known for a while but is expected to be minimal. Two private companies that have contracts to provide services to the city, Calvin Giordano & Associates and Severn Trent Environmental Services, provided the personnel, the officials said.

"We'll work out the cost later, that's the type of relationship we have with our providers," Flint said.

How much the city pays the supervisor's office isn't known, either. Hersh said the city had always paid the supervisor's office $250 per precinct, but Oliphant recently said she wants $500.

"We haven't been given any idea what she will bill us for," Hersh said.

Joe Kollin can be reached at jkollin@sun-sentinel.com or 954-385-7913.

www.miami.com Posted on Sun, Mar. 16, 2003 BY ELISA TURNER and DANIEL CHANG elisaturn@aol.com

In the past decade, Miami has become the international stage of choice for contemporary artists and galleries drawn by the city's reputation as a center of Latin American culture and commerce.

A new wave of artists and curators have relocated to South Florida. Dealers and fairs have followed suit and infused Miami with the promise of becoming a capital of contemporary Latin American art.

But whether South Florida can fulfill that potential is open to interpretation. The region remains hindered by the absence of a major museum collection that regularly showcases Latin American art, the conservative tastes of local galleries and collectors, and the lack of a research center turning out groundbreaking scholarship and exhibits.

What's more, some see no glory in the label ''Latin American art'' and others challenge its accuracy in an era when contemporary art has shed nationalist tendencies and adopted a global identity.

Still, South Florida's influx of Latin American artists, galleries and curators has created the momentum for a movement, as evidenced by the latest fair to showcase the genre -- arteAméricas Miami 2003 -- which debuts Friday at the Coconut Grove Convention Center.

''Miami's on the radar now,'' says curator Sylvia Karmen Cubiñá, who has been busy assembling exhibits in Miami's Design District since she moved to South Florida from Puerto Rico in fall 2002.

''It used to be more of a South Beach scene,'' Cubiñá says. Now the city can be a place that ``will not only be a commercial scene with buying and selling, but where people will create and ideas will boil.''

For years, Miami has been home to collectors of works by modern masters such as Wifredo Lam, as well as galleries that represent a range of contemporary Latin American art, but with a heavy emphasis on more traditional painting.

But Miami's new love affair with Latin American art is due, in part, to increased immigration from South America. An influx of émigrés from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela and elsewhere during the past decade has made Miami a synthesizing frontier where contemporary Latin American art can thrive unencumbered by nationalism or tradition.

''I think that's one of our strengths,'' says Miami Art Museum associate curator Cheryl Hartup. ``Miami has a strong international mix.''

FEELING AT HOME

Milagros Bello is an art critic and judge on the selection committee for arteAméricas Miami 2003, which will feature works from 15 U.S. galleries and 30 from the Caribbean and Latin America.

Bello describes a local art scene that thrives at the intersection of two of South Florida's overriding themes: tourism and immigration.

''People who come here on business or to shop, they run into a museum or know someone who has art from another country,'' she says. ``That's where the interchange happens, with business and culture and vacations.''

As a city not bound by decades-old conventions, Miami also offers creative freedom and opportunity, says Odalis Valdivieso, a Venezuelan artist who moved to South Florida a few years ago.

''We were tired or bored in our own countries, or [left] because of social and political situations,'' says Valdivieso, who has been showing her large-scale drawings at Locust Projects and other local venues. ``Now we are here to do what we couldn't do over there.''

LOCAL CONSERVATISM

Some artists, though, see a conservative, even staid, bent in the local art scene. Maria José Arjona, a performance artist who moved to South Florida from Bogotá, says Art Basel opened Miami's eyes to a variety of art from the rest of the world.

Yet, Arjona says, ``a lot of people are willing to see oil paintings on canvas, but forget about drawings or whatever is new.''

Some even argue that the term ''Latin American art'' is limiting and clashes with the international realities of Miami and of the contemporary art world.

Fred Snitzer, owner of Fredric Snitzer Gallery in Miami, represents some of Miami's best-known Latin American artists, including Cuban-born painter Jose Bedia. Snitzer believes there's too much passing for Latin American art.

''In many ways Latin American art is a catchall for anything in Latin America and there's a wide range of quality in terms of that,'' Snitzer says. ``There's very, very good art being made in Latin America and there's tons and tons of garbage -- decorative, sort of not interesting work. Maybe its only promotional value is that it's Latin American.''

Another local dealer takes issue with a fair being marketed as only for Latin American art, insisting that ``regionalizing contemporary art today doesn't have any meaning.''

OPENING DOORS

But as a young city increasingly open to more experimental work Miami has opened new doors for artists.

Artist and curator Robert Chambers, for example, presented Arjona's work at the Bass Museum of Art in 2001, and that led to an invitation for her to perform last fall at Exit Art in New York.

South Florida still lacks the hallmarks of a true capital of Latin American art, namely a pace-setting research center and a museum where a range of artists can be seen regularly -- though current shows at the Lowe Art Museum, MAM and the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale do feature a variety of work by artists from Latin America.

Hartup, the associate curator at MAM, says more should be done. ''Miami doesn't have a big presence in Latin American art discourse, in terms of scholarship and organized exhibits,'' she says.

Perhaps Florida International University could build upon lectures and courses offered by professors Carol Damian and Juan Martinez and contribute ''more programming, faculty positions, and recruiting [of] top students,'' Hartup said. ``It's just a natural.''

RACIAL EVOLUTION

If the nation's demographics are any measure, it may be a matter of time before art from Latin America becomes second nature.

As Hispanics become a larger part of the nation's population -- and as countries like Mexico become important trading partners -- many are discovering a taste for Latin America.

Gregorio Luke, director of the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, Calif., sees the preponderance of Latin American art as an indicator of America's ethnic and racial evolution.

''What is really going on and nobody wants to call it by its name but what you're really looking at is that the U.S. itself is becoming Latin American,'' Luke says. ``What is the essence of Latin America? It's a simple thing. It's the mixture of races that does not exist in the North.''

Such attitudes point to a sea change in the art market, where a younger generation is more accepting of the diversity of Latin American and contemporary art.

Because of that change, Coral Gables gallery owner Gary Nader no longer will host an annual Latin American art auction. Instead, Nader says, he will participate in fairs that feature a range of international artists.

''Before it was only Cubans buying Cubans, Venezuelans buying Venezuelans. That was the norm, and now it's the exception,'' Nader says. ``Now people want to have a more open collection. Globalization has taken over.''

www.indystar.com Ted Evanoff ted.evanoff@indystar.com March 16, 2003

DETROIT -- America's economic jitters were on display in February when oil prices rose and sales of new autos plunged 7 percent. Analysts now are trying to make sense of what might happen to the U.S. economy later this spring if American forces wage war in Iraq. Disaster scenarios suggest an economic recession if the war drags on and Iraq's immense oil fields are set on fire, reducing the volume of oil on world energy markets. Most forecasts, however, take a milder position. They predict crude oil, already at $37 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, could surge briefly into the mid-$40 range as war begins. Oil at $45 a barrel could push the price of gasoline at Indianapolis service stations to more than $2 a gallon from the current $1.73. Pump prices gradually would fall in a short war, experts say, as long as Iraqi oil still flows and Persian Gulf oil ports stay free of disruptions by terrorists. "You'll have a spike in the price over the first couple of days. But if we have Bush's rosy scenario, the price will come down 10 or 15 cents a gallon fairly soon," said Dennis O'Brien, director of the Institute for Energy Economics and Policy at the University of Oklahoma. What is more worrisome for Indiana's crucial auto economy than $45 oil is the prospect of a prolonged war that erodes the confidence of Americans. Consumers have kept the economy rolling for two years in large part by buying new cars and trucks at a rate of about 16.8 million vehicles annually. Brisk orders kept Indiana auto parts plants and most of the state's 92,000 autoworkers busy. But in the last week of February, real consumer anxiety appeared. Sales of new autos fell 7 percent to an annualized rate last month of 15.5 million vehicles. Half the sales decline traces to mid-month storms that kept shoppers home. That cost the auto industry sales of about 500,000 vehicles. Another 500,000 sales were lost as tensions over Iraq built among the United States, some traditional European allies and the United Nations, said economist Bob Schnorbus. "If it turns into a quagmire in Iraq, it'll play havoc on consumer confidence and business confidence," said Schnorbus, an auto industry analyst in the suburban Detroit office of the research firm J.D. Power and Associates. Schnorbus predicts auto sales will rebound and the industry will wind up with respectable sales of 16.4 million vehicles this year. The forecast assumes a short and successful war. "If that doesn't happen," Schnorbus said about a short war, "the risk of going into another recession is real." While consumers brace for what may come, they already have seen a rapid rise in gasoline prices since last year when crude prices dipped to less than $20 a barrel. Analysts contend the rise in pump prices has less to do with uncertainty over Iraq than the weather. "You have a bunch of I-can't-believe-it situations hitting all at once," said oil analyst Pete Stark of IHS Energy in suburban Denver. An unusually long spell of cold weather depleted natural gas and heating oil burned in furnaces. An unanticipated general strike in oil-producing Venezuela sapped deliveries. And oil companies failed to order enough crude oil for emergencies. "The oil industry has done a terrible job in terms of building oil stocks," said Anthony Cordesman, energy analyst at the Institute for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Thin oil supplies tend to make gasoline prices jump erratically when oil traders sense a problem that could deplete supplies even more. But Cordesman shrugs off the notion of oil companies intentionally keeping supplies low. "People have been seeing conspiracies since the days of the elder Rockefeller, and that was probably the last time they were right," Cordesman said. "This is a business, a highly regulated business, where people operate with a great deal of transparency." What few in the industry expect is a shortage of oil if war unfolds in Iraq. Russia and OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries led by Saudi Arabia, insist they will pump enough oil. Analysts figure the commodity price will drop back to an OPEC target range of $25 a barrel by next year. "Our feeling is that with any spike into the range of $40, the price would be short-lived," said Stark in Denver. In Indianapolis, wholesaler Walker Oil Services Inc. is keeping its diesel and gasoline tanks only one-third filled. Mike Walker said fuel prices should ease after the war begins. Then he'll restock fully. Until then, he doesn't want to be caught with full tanks. "If the price suddenly drops 20 or 30 cents at the pump, we can't charge our customers the old price we paid for the oil," Walker said. "We'd just lose money."

Call Star reporter Ted Evanoff at 1-313-417-9215.