Inflation could surge to over 50% ... price behavior is affected by regulations
<a href=www.vheadline.com>venezuela's Electronic news
Posted: Friday, May 09, 2003
By: VenAmCham
Venezuelan American Chamber of Commerce (VenAmCham) chief economist Jose Gregorio Pineda says the pressure on price behavior now being felt is strong enough to project an inflation rate exceeding 50%.
"Price behavior has been affected by the price and exchange controls, plus the deep plunge of purchasing power among the Venezuelan population ... inflation has been somewhat erratic in the last few months, through the overall trend has been upward, even if a little less intensively since February's surge."
Pineda points out that the variation of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for the Caracas Metropolitan Area (CPI-CMA) was 0.9 points in April, higher than the previous month's 1.7% ... that put the cumulative variation so far this year at 11.2%.
The VenAmCham economist also said that a breakdown shows accelerating price variations for four categories of the 13 that comprise the CPI, the most important of which is Food & Non-Alcoholic Beverages, which rose by 1.6% (5.3 points more than in March). Transportation prices increased by 2.4% (compared to a 0.8% decline in March), due to higher vehicle prices, taxi fares, and air fares.
"The prices of uncontrolled goods and services rose 2.1% in April, less than in the previous months. The conjunction of such factors as short supplies of certain products and contraction of demand brought about a slowdown in price variations in April. The variation of housing rentals increased from 1% to 1.4%, however."
Among the categories in which price variations were smaller in April were: Recreation & Culture (from 6.9% in March to 0.5%), Alcoholic Beverages & Tobacco (from 8.6% to 4.7%), Household Equipment (from 5.3% to 3%), and Communications (from 3.3% to 1.2%). The last category reflected a residential telephone rate increase offset by loser prices for cellular telephones and stable prices for cellular phone and Internet use.
Extradition pleases slain woman’s family--Colombian rebel accused of killing Keshena native
Posted May 09, 2003
The Associated Press
SHAWANO — A Wisconsin mother is heartened to learn that a man accused of killing her daughter has become the first leftist Colombian rebel extradited to the United States.
Colombian President Alvaro Uribe on Wednesday ordered Nelson Vargas Rueda to face murder charges in the 1999 slaying of three American activists in Colombia, including Ingrid Washinawatok, 41, a Keshena native and member of the Menominee Tribe.
Ingrid’s mother, Gwen Washinawatok, said it was good news for the family.
“I didn’t think anything more was going to happen, other than to get her home,” she said. “That is a great development for us.”
Vargas is one of six members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, indicted in April 2002 in federal court in Washington for the murders of Terence Freitas, 24, of Los Angeles, Lahe’ena’e Gay, 39, of Pahoa, Hawaii, and Washinawatok, who was living in New York City.
They were in northeastern Colombia to help set up a school system for the 5,000-member Uwa Indian tribe when FARC rebels kidnapped them in February 1999, according to the indictment.
Days later, the kidnappers shot the victims. Their bullet-riddled bodies were found across the border in Venezuela.
Facing international outrage, the FARC admitted its fighters killed the Americans. They blamed a rogue lower-level commander and said he would be punished internally.
The murders prompted the United States to suspend all contact with the FARC, a leftist rebel group that has been fighting a series of elected governments in this South American nation for 38 years.
The United States considers the FARC an international terrorist organization and has provided Colombia with millions of dollars, mostly military aid, to fight the organization and other rebel groups.
The State Department considers most of the country unsafe for Americans. Vargas has five days to appeal the order, the first Uribe has approved. The United States has also asked for the extradition of several other FARC rebels, including top leaders, in drug trafficking cases.
Rebuilding Iraq not an easy task
Hernando Today
JOHN HERBERT
Published: May 9, 2003
Some Iraqis can't wait for us Americans to leave their country. What's the hurry? They've already suffered a generation of Saddam Hussein's terror. We've hung around Kosovo and Afghanistan more years than first anticipated. I don't hear any complaints, except from, possibly, a closeted Taliban.
Before we go anywhere, we should stabilize and then rebuild Iraq. There are numerous cries to let the United Nations do the rebuilding job. Not on your Nelly! We still hold lots of cards.
One thing we don't need in Iraq is a U.N.-type bureaucracy. And we certainly don't want to reward the likes of France, Germany and Russia if they see the U.N. as a way to get in the back door of a new Iraq.
Why are they so anxious to get back into Iraq in the first place? To cover up their pre-war messes? We've already dug up quite a few arms and missiles with European or Russian lettering on them. They aren't exactly covered by the U.N.'s Iraqi "Oil for Food" program.
Alternative proposals would put peacekeeping NATO or European Union forces in a new Iraq. That would be ridiculous. The country isn't even European. A European-based organization like NATO or the E.U. doesn't belong in Iraq. They are both huge bureaucracies like the U.N. The E.U. alone has over 12,000 translators on its staff!
Whoever rebuilds Iraq should be more action than words. According to the Geneva Convention on the rules of war, the invading party (that's us) should be in charge of a country's postwar recovery. That system worked out just fine in the post-WWII rebuilding of Germany and Japan. Both programs were led by American generals. We have the same basic approach to post-Saddam Iraq. With much of the financing by the country's oil exports, though, the U.N. will probably insist on a say-so.
We have to remind our critics -- armchair generals and foreign governments alike -- that we battled for democracy in Iraq. It's what your average Iraqi in the street wants, too; not another Iran. It would be a pity to hand the country over now to a hostile theocracy or a religious dictatorship. We already have fanatics there chanting "Death to America; death to Israel." Enough of that.
Rebuilding Iraq won't be easy. We've already seen fanatical mobs take over some cities. The potential for turf wars is huge. Just look at the armed tribes of Afghanistan. There are leadership vacuums in Iraq for the moment. The U.N., Russia, Germany or France shouldn't complicate matters. Nor Democrats with a totally different agenda, for that matter.
The Iraqis have been through a very difficult spell. They've spent almost 30 years living under the constant threat of execution. The relevant question is how long it might take the Iraqis to live in freedom. I suspect years rather than months.
Just as we don't want to hand over Iraq to religious fanatics, we don't want to see the nation wind up as a socialist Venezuela or in civil strife a la Nigeria, either. Both of those countries are as rich in oil as Iraq, but we can't risk a Nigerian or Venezuelan climate in Baghdad.
What we've got ahead of us on a practical level is the rebuilding of Iraq's infrastructure. You can't expect a democracy to function without water, electricity, telephones and media (what would Iraq become minus cell phones and the Internet?), schools and hospitals, airports, harbors and road haulage. Food should be high on the list, too.
We've seen television reports that Iraq is preparing to introduce a new currency or even to introduce a dollarization of the economy. Using the dollar as Iraq's money sounds too much like imperialism.
Cash without Saddam's smush on it would be warranted. That entails little niceties such as accounting, a central bank and a broader financial system.
Looking over that initial shopping list, President Bush's request for $2 billion in immediate rebuilding funds won't last long in Iraq. There's a two- or three-year need for $50-$60 billion. With so much money at stake, it's no wonder the critical Europeans and U.N. want back in.
No doubt, they'll get a piece of the action at some point. Perhaps when their countries start contributing to finance the rebuilding effort. What speaks in their favor is that many European firms have long and wide experience of doing business in Iraq, whatever that may mean.
Herbert writes regularly for Hernando Today. He lives in Spring Hill.
Not the worst hole, but Don jail's close
May. 9, 2003. 06:24 AM
LINDA DIEBEL
<a href=www.thestar.com>TORONTO STAR
So, okay, maybe the Don jail isn't the worst stinking hole in the world.
But that's only because there's no torture room.
There's no "parrot perch,'' or hanging metal bar that is a staple of most Brazilian prisons. Prisoners on the perch have been stripped naked, thrown over the bar, hands and ankles tied, then beaten and jolted with electric shock until they pass out, or die.
At the Don, there's no saw-horse, a device similar to the parrot perch, except that torturers get the added kick of being able to submerge a prisoner's head in water while administering shock treatment to the genitals and anus.
I've seen these torture chambers.
As the Star's Latin America correspondent for many years, I have seen more than my share of Third World prison conditions. I have nightmares to last a lifetime.
But I came away from a tour of Toronto's Don jail this week thinking the biggest difference with any Third World hellhole I've ever seen is the absence of endemic physical torture.
That's it.
Otherwise, with the possible exception of Haiti, where I once saw prisoners, some of them clearly mad, sitting deep in their own excrement, the Don jail could just as easily be the Guerrero state prison in Iguala, Mexico, or fit nicely into the Vieira Ferreira Neto penal complex in Niteroi, Brazil.
A vermin-infested cell is a vermin-infested cell.
In some ways, living conditions at the Don are worse.
That's because prisoners don't have the same access to a tropical outdoors and frequent family visits. They also live with constant, mind-numbing din and the psychological tension it creates.
I'd never been in a prison with that kind of decibel level before my Tuesday afternoon tour of the Don with Brant MPP Dave Levac.
As Liberal corrections critic, he wanted to revisit the jail this week after yet another Toronto judge condemned "medieval" conditions that don't meet minimal standards for housing prisoners laid out by the United Nations.
Now, I wasn't there at Carandiru prison in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1992 when military police put down a prison riot over brutal conditions, killing 111 inmates.
Clearly, with the gunfire and screaming, it must have been louder than the din I heard Tuesday.
But is that really what we want in Canada?
It would take little Canadian flags stitched on orange jumpsuits to differentiate between some of the inmates I saw — drooling, toothless, hair matted, talking to themselves — and prisoners in Brazil, Colombia or Venezuela.
It's bad enough prisoners are treated with inhumanity anywhere in the world.
But, as the critics of Ontario's corrections system point out, this jail is in our very own backyard.
Right here in east-end Toronto, prisoners live with vermin, overflowing toilets and the same all-encompassing stench of human excrement that knocks you off your feet when you walk into Vieira Ferreira Neto prison, not far from Rio's Copacabana beaches, where the tourists romp.
One prisoner at the Don talked about being "peed on.'' Happens all the time.
"We Canadians view ourselves as a just society and we like to think of ourselves that way," says Richard Coleman, co-ordinator for Toronto's drug treatment court and a veteran counsellor of Don jail inmates.
"But we've become a very hard-edged people, and it's been coming on for many years now.''
We are, he adds, "punishing people in the most brutal ways imaginable.
"It is social science gone horribly wrong, because the reality is that the criminal justice system was created to reform, not merely to punish."
Father Barry McGrory, a retired Catholic priest and volunteer at the Don jail, says he weeps to see such "devastation of the weakest" in our society.
"They are still human beings,'' he says. "They are not people from Mars. I hear heartbreaking stories from these men, and the thing of it is, we, any one of us, could end up in that place."
He, like Coleman, bristles at what he views as hypocrisy. He cringes at the comfortable Canadian notion that things are so much better for everyone here than in the Third World.
"I hate it when people say, `Oh, they should go and see what bad conditions really are. Go to the Third World,''' he says. "How much worse can it get for a prisoner than in the Don?"
For me, the cold-shower realization of the many ways in which, like it or not, Toronto wears aspects of the worst of the Third World has been the hardest part of my transition back to Canada, and home.
It was one thing to walk into a prison in Brazil and chronicle horrible conditions in somebody else's country for readers of the Toronto Star.
But it was a shock to see it in my own.
And we're not just talking about conditions in the Don jail.
For years, for example, I wrote about the murdered women of Juarez, Mexico, the disposable women whose corpses — often in pieces — have been turning up in the Mexican border town. It's estimated that, since the early 1990s, more than 300 women have been killed a stone's throw across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas.
Their deaths remain unsolved and, to be blunt, it's not a big issue in Mexico, or anyplace else.
Who cares? These are faceless women, poor, indigenous and, too often, anonymous.
But I came home recently to a Canada where 500 aboriginal women have disappeared or been found murdered over the past 15 years in a similar atmosphere of neglect.
I was appalled.
In Canada, you say?
There's more.
At any intersection in Acapulco or Cancun, Canadian tourists tsk-tsk — how sad! — at pregnant women begging for money, raggedy children holding their skirts or playing in the gutter.
A few years ago, a Canadian reporter wrote with disgust about a Mexican woman who agreed to sell her baby after his newspaper widely advertised for a child. He didn't buy the baby, of course.
And, yet, in my city, this past January, a newborn baby was left to die, umbilical cord still attached, in the shadow of City Hall, left by a wandering, seemingly witless homeless woman, and found in the nick of time.
Every year, an estimated 300 babies — and probably far more — are born to women living in the streets of Toronto.
There are two ways, it seems, of looking at this issue.
You can say, "Oh, things could be worse. You could be living in Calcutta or Juarez. So get used to it."
Or, you can say, as Father McGrory does, this is not acceptable anywhere.
But the problem is that Juarez is creeping closer to Toronto, and not the other way around.
"We are being swallowed by our dark side,'' says McGrory.
The Don jail is Vieira Ferreira Neto — without the torture chambers.
And, without the Brazilian sunshine.