<a href=www.nytimes.com>nytimes.com May 25, 2003 By LARRY ROHTER

BUENOS AIRES, May 24 — In the past 18 months, Argentina's enduring political and economic crisis has consumed five presidents and plunged millions of people into poverty. Now it is Néstor Kirchner's turn to try to set things right, and the demands for a new direction are more insistent than ever.

After hitting bottom, leaving a fifth of the work force unemployed and thousands of businesses bankrupt, the economy at least has begun to bounce back. But Mr. Kirchner, 53, will take office on Sunday with the country's future still clouded, Argentines' faith in institutions and leaders shattered and the deeper moral malaise that underlies and fuels the crisis very much intact.

What is not yet clear to Argentines, though, is whether Mr. Kirchner, the obscure Peronist governor of a remote province until he was catapulted into power in an unlikely turn of events, is the great reformer and renovator he claims to be or just another slick politician who will let the country down.

Mr. Kirchner finished second in the first round of the presidential election late last month, capturing just 22 percent of the vote. He was to have faced a former president, Carlos Menem, in a runoff on May 18. But Mr. Kirchner won by default when Mr. Menem withdrew, alarmed by opinion polls that showed him losing by more than 40 percentage points and hoping to discredit Mr. Kirchner's victory.

"This country must change because it desperately, urgently needs to change," said Marcelo Blanco, a 36-year-old graphic designer who voted for Mr. Kirchner in the first round of the election last month. "The expectations are great, but we don't know if Kirchner is going to be up to the challenge."

The departing interim president, Eduardo Duhalde, has sought to assuage those doubts, describing Mr. Kirchner last week as "a fresh breeze blowing up from Patagonia." Mr. Kirchner has also stoked the hopes for renewal by appointing a cabinet notable for its youth.

"Kirchner has a historic opportunity to break with the past, rebuild this country with a new model and initiate a new era," said Roberto Bacman, a pollster and sociologist here. The social contract that held the country together during the 1990's has fallen to pieces, Mr. Bacman said, with nothing to replace it.

In a regional context, Mr. Kirchner is part of a broader move to the left, beginning with the rise of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 1998. The leftist movement gathered force in the last year with the election of two other candidates sharply critical of the political and economic status quo — in Brazil and Ecuador — and the emergence of similar forces in Bolivia, Peru and Uruguay.

"The agenda of demands has changed, and Latin American electorates are turning from center-right to center-left," said Graciela Romer, a political consultant who works both here and in other countries of the region. "If the 90's were marked by a rejection of state intervention, today people want a greater presence of the state and a greater focus on social services."

The shift in attitudes can be felt in places like Quilmes, a once thriving industrial center south of the capital that has been left despondent and nearly destitute by Mr. Menem's decade-long experiment with free market policies. Factories there have been abandoned to crumble, shuttered stores are festooned with "for rent" signs and the mood is so glum that the mayor has been reduced to putting up posters that urge, "Let's get Quilmes back on its feet."

Yet there is also support for Mr. Kirchner and the hope that he can somehow bring better times. "If they'll just let him govern, maybe we can get out of this mess," said Júlio Álvarez, 37, a former factory worker who now sells scarves on the platform of the local train station. The "they" he cited referred to the others within the Peronist party, labor unions and the business elite who have supported Mr. Menem and benefited from his government.

"We need to believe, to be able to support something and to think that he is going to be able to do it," said Nora Cuéllar, a 40-year-old nurse. "We don't want to go back to the past, to presidents who are dishonest and rob the country blind or who are so weak they don't finish out their term of office."

Because he led an interim government, installed by congressional decree at the peak of the crisis in January 2002 after President Fernando de la Rúa resigned, Mr. Duhalde postponed many decisions on pressing economic and social issues. That means the tests will come early and often for Mr. Kirchner, beginning with negotiations with the International Monetary Fund to achieve a long-term accord that would allow investment and credit to resume.

In newspaper interviews this week, he minimized the importance of reaching such an agreement early on. "Argentina has already shown it can survive without an I.M.F. deal," he said. The economy, he added, "has little or no chance of paying the amounts sought" by creditors.

He has also taken a tough stance on corruption and human rights. He has indicated that he favors reopening impeachment proceedings against a Supreme Court that is seen as loyal to Mr. Menem and has presented himself as a representative of the generation that was brutalized under the old military dictatorship and now wants justice.

"This is a time bomb for the military," Mr. Bacman said, adding that Mr. Kirchner "can't find anybody to take the Army commander's post because so many of the military are worried about" the possibility that legal proceedings could be reopened against people accused of human rights offenses during the dictatorship more than two decades ago.

Today, newspapers here reported that Mr. Kirchner has decided to force the retirement of more than half of the armed forces' generals and admirals.

Because Mr. Duhalde decided to leave office nearly seven months early, the country must also face congressional, mayoral and gubernatorial elections in the next few months. While that gives Mr. Kirchner an opportunity to strengthen his support in a divided Congress, he has little in the way of patronage to offer potential adherents, and some of the country's powerful provincial governors are already expressing misgivings about him.

There is an old saying here that the country's dominant Peronist party always quarrels during an election and then makes up in order to divide the spoils. But the party had never been through an election like the last one, in which internal differences forced it to run three candidates.

"In Néstor Kirchner, Peronism has its last chance," said Joaquín Morales Solá, a columnist for the conservative daily La Nación. "If he has a fairly decent administration, they will remain united. But if Kirchner fails, the conditions for fragmentation and fracture are there."

Mr. Menem has made it clear that he intends to make life as difficult as possible for the new president. He remains the nominal Peronist party leader and has predicted that Mr. Kirchner will not survive his four-year term and that the country will again turn to Mr. Menem.

But Mr. Menem's own actions have reduced his capacity to make mischief. He is despised not only for having run the economy into the ground during his decade in power, but also for having quit this election when it became obvious he would suffer a humiliating loss.

Mr. Duhalde, Mr. Kirchner's nominal ally, is a more serious concern, political analysts here say. Mr. Duhalde, 61, has said he will never run for executive office again, but he remains the boss of the Peronist party machine in Buenos Aires Province, without which Mr. Kirchner could not have been elected.

"Of the old-school politicians, Duhalde is the only one who has anything left, and that is because he leaves the country in better condition than he received it," Mr. Morales Solá said. "Kirchner is going to need Duhalde, whose strategy has always been to wait until he is needed and then — well, everything has its price in politics."

Nonetheless, Mr. Kirchner has made it clear he wants to shake things up. Asked in interviews with Argentine news organizations whom he views as role models, he said that Bill Clinton was the American president of the past 50 years that he admires most and expressed admiration for Franklin D. Roosevelt and the way he pulled the United States out of a depression that threatened both the stability and prosperity of a democracy.

"Let's hope Kirchner can really turn out to be the Argentine Clinton," said Mr. Blanco, the graphic designer. "And we could certainly use a New Deal here."

Reuters, 05.24.03, 5:03 PM ET By Missy Ryan

CUSCO, Peru, May 24 (Reuters) - Latin American leaders urged the United Nations on Saturday to do more to stop rebel violence in Colombia, but stopped short of endorsing outside military action in the Andean nation's bloody four-decade war.

"We presidents of the Rio Group have agreed to ask the U.N. Secretary General (Kofi Annan) to call on the (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) FARC to halt violence and ... walk toward peace," Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo told reporters.

But Toledo cautioned that the joint declaration, signed at the end of an annual summit of 19 members in the mountain city of Cusco, did not mean that Latin America had decided it would commit to helping Colombia militarily.

"Peace is our concern. ... We should be facilitators and there was no decision about external forces participating in Colombia. The issue did not even come up," he said.

But that had appeared to be a possibility for Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, who said a day earlier that if the FARC did not follow the U.N. urging, "we would have to seek another remedy, which should entail all nations helping Colombia defeat terrorism militarily."

Still, it was not entirely clear whether the action the Rio Group wants the United Nations to take would mean a resolution urging a cease-fire and peace talks, or something else.

Thousands of people are killed every year in Colombia as the FARC and other armed groups battle security forces and each other. The Uribe government has promised a hard military line against rebels and the drug trafficking that it says finances rebel arms purchases.

The United Nations already has a small role in Colombia. Shortly after Uribe took office in August, he invited a U.N. special envoy to facilitate peace talks. There has been little progress in the negotiations.

SUPPORT NOT UNANIMOUS

Because of the many U.S. interventions in Latin America over the past 150 years, many Latin American countries bristle at any talk of intervention from the United States or elsewhere.

The United States has a presence in Colombia. It has poured about $2 billion into the anti-drug war in Colombia, the world's top cocaine producer, in the last two years.

One of those opposing a larger U.N. role in Colombia was Venezuela's left-leaning Presidents Hugo Chavez, who warned it could set a perilous precedent.

"What this (declaration) establishes is very dangerous. ... It opens the door to something much more serious than a war: (foreign) intervention," said Chavez, who, nevertheless, signed the declaration "with reservations."

"Never on this continent has this been proposed. For example in Peru, which had a rebel problem, no one proposed that ... a multinational force come in to occupy," he added.

The summit concluded with a resolution focusing on political party reform and new financial mechanisms to secure investment, give more access to credit and fight poverty. Leaders signed the resolution, which will be translated into the Andean language of Quechua, at an Inca fortress as locals bearing golden shields stood guard.

Latin America may be emerging from economic woes that led the regional economy to a 0.6 percent contraction in 2002, but the United Nations says even projected growth of near 2 percent in 2003 will not slash troubling poverty rates.

Toledo said that Rio Group nations would look to Brazil and Mexico -- the region's biggest economies -- to speak for Latin America at a June Group of Eight nations meeting.

"The industrialized world needs to know we believe in democracy and governance ... and that globalization means we all play by the same rules," Toledo said.

<a href=www.arabnews.com>Arab News Tariq Ali, The Guardian

LONDON, 25 May 2003 — Unsurprisingly, the UN Security Council has capitulated completely, recognized the occupation of Iraq and approved its re-colonization by the US and its bloodshot British adjutant. The timing of the mea culpa by the “international community” was perfect. On Thursday, senior executives from more than 1,000 companies gathered in London to bask in the sunshine of the re-established consensus under the giant umbrella of Bechtel, the American empire’s most favored construction company. A tiny proportion of the loot will be shared.

So what happened to the overheated rhetoric of Europe vs. America? Berlusconi in Italy and Aznar in Spain — the two most right-wing governments in Europe — were fitting partners for Blair while the Eastern European states, giving a new meaning to the term “satellite” which they had previously so long enjoyed, fell as one into line behind Bush.

France and Germany, on the other hand, protested for months that they were utterly opposed to a US attack on Iraq. Schroeder had owed his narrow re-election to a pledge not to support a war on Baghdad, even were it authorized by the UN. Chirac, armed with a veto in the Security Council, was even more voluble with declarations that any unauthorized assault on Iraq would never be accepted by France.

Together, Paris and Berlin coaxed Moscow too into expressing its disagreement with American plans. Even Beijing emitted a few cautious sounds of demurral. The Franco-German initiatives aroused tremendous excitement and consternation among diplomatic commentators. Here, surely, was an unprecedented rift in the Atlantic alliance. What was to become of European unity, of NATO, of the “international community” itself if such a disastrous split persisted? Could the very concept of the West survive?

Such apprehensions were quickly allayed. No sooner were Tomahawk missiles lighting up the nocturnal skyline in Baghdad, and the first Iraqi civilians cut down by the Marines, than Chirac rushed to explain that France would assure smooth passage of US bombers across its airspace (as it had not done, under his own premiership, when Reagan attacked Libya), and wished “swift success” to American arms in Iraq. Germany’s cadaver-green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer announced that his government, too, sincerely hoped for the “rapid collapse” of resistance to the Anglo-American attack. Putin, not to be outdone, explained to his compatriots that “for economic and political reasons”, Russia could only desire a decisive victory of the US in Iraq.

Washington is still not satisfied. It wants to punish France further. Why not a ritual public flogging broadcast live by Murdoch TV? A humbled petty chieftain (Chirac) bending over while an imperial princess (Condoleezza Rice) administers the whip. Then the leaders of a re-united North could relax and get on with the business they know best: Plundering the South. The expedition to Baghdad was planned as the first flexing of a new imperial stance. What better demonstration of the shift to a more offensive strategy than to make an example of Iraq. If no single reason explains the targeting of Iraq, there is little mystery about the range of calculations that lay behind it. Economically, Iraq possesses the second largest reserves of cheap oil in the world; Baghdad’s decision in 2000 to invoice its exports in euros rather than dollars risked imitation by Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and the Iranian mullas. Privatization of the Iraqi wells under US control would help to weaken OPEC.

Strategically, the existence of an independent Arab regime in Baghdad had always been an irritation to the Israeli military. With the installation of Republican zealots close to Likud in key positions in Washington, the elimination of a traditional adversary became an attractive immediate goal for Israel.

Lastly, just as the use of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had once been a pointed demonstration of American might to the Soviet Union, so today a blitzkrieg rolling swiftly across Iraq would serve to show the world at large that if the chips are down, the US has, in the last resort, the means to enforce its will.

The UN has now provided retrospective sanction to a pre-emptive strike. Its ill-fated predecessor, the League of Nations, at least had the decency to collapse after its charter was serially raped. Analogies with Hitler’s blitzkrieg of 1940 are drawn without compunction by cheerleaders for the war. Thus Max Boot in the Financial Times writes: “The French fought hard in 1940 — at first. But eventually the speed and ferocity of the German advance led to a total collapse. The same thing will happen in Iraq.” What took place in France after 1940 might give pause to these enthusiasts.

The lack of any spontaneous welcome from Shiites and the fierce early resistance of armed irregulars prompted the theory that the Iraqis are a “sick people” who will need protracted treatment before they can be entrusted with their own fate (if ever). Such was the line taken by David Aaronovitch in the Observer. Likewise, George Mellon in the Wall Street Journal warns: “Iraq won’t easily recover from Saddam’s terror” — “after three decades of rule of the Arab equivalent of Murder Inc, Iraq is a very sick society”. To develop an “orderly society” and re-energize (privatize) the economy will take time, he insists. On the front page of the Sunday Times, reporter Mark Franchetti quoted an American NCO: “’The Iraqis are a sick people and we are the chemotherapy,’ said Corporal Ryan Dupre. ‘I am starting to hate this country. Wait till I get hold of a friggin’ Iraqi. No, I won’t get hold of one. I’ll just kill him.’”

No doubt the “sick society” theory will acquire greater sophistication, but it is clear the pretexts are to hand for a mixture of Guantanamo and Gaza in these newly occupied territories.

If it is futile to look to the UN or Euroland, let alone Russia or China, for any serious obstacle to American designs in the Middle East, where should resistance start? First of all, naturally, in the region itself. There, it is to be hoped that the invaders of Iraq will eventually be harried out of the country by a growing national reaction to the occupation regime they install, and that their collaborators may meet the fate of former Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Said before them.

Sooner or later, the ring of corrupt and brutal tyrannies around Iraq will be broken. If there is one area where the cliche that classical revolutions are a thing of the past is likely to be proved wrong, it is in the Arab world.

— Tariq Ali’s new book, Bush in Babylon: Re-colonizing Iraq, will be published by Verso in the autumn.

<a href=www.voanews.com>VOA News 24 May 2003, 18:33 UTC

Unknown gunmen have fired on an opposition rally in Venezuela's capital Caracas, leaving one person dead and at least 17 injured. The wounded include two National Guard soldiers.

Police say the shooting Saturday occurred as hundreds of opponents of President Hugo Chavez marched through a narrow street in the poor neighborhood of Catia, a bastion of support for the populist leader. Authorities said the shots came from a housing complex that faced the street rally.

The violence comes one day after Mr. Chavez announced a political deal with his opponents to hold a referendum on his presidency later this year. Opponents accuse the former paratrooper of imposing an authoritarian rule that is ruining the economy of the world's fifth-largest oil exporter.

Political rallies in Venezuela have been a frequent target of violence in recent months, and several people have been killed

May 24 (<a href=quote.bloomberg.com>Bloomberg) -- Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said he will ask members of the Rio Group of 19 Latin American nations to allow Cuba's presence at the organization's annual summit next year in Brazil.

The Rio Group, which serves as a forum for cooperation among members, has excluded Cuba since its creation in 1986.

``Since the next meeting is in Brazil, I plan to consult all members of the Rio Group so that Cuba could take part, at least as a special guest, in our meeting,'' Lula, a former union leader, said in a press conference at the end of this year's Rio Group summit in Cuzco, Peru, 1,165 kilometers (725 miles) southeast of Lima.

In the two-day Cuzco summit, Rio Group presidents agreed in to support an accord between Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez's government and the opposition for a referendum. Presidents also called for the United Nations to push rebels to join peace talks in Colombia.

The Rio Group includes Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.

The group doesn't have a permanent headquarters office and only works around annual presidential meetings. Last Updated: May 24, 2003 14:35 EDT