"The San Jose Accord in full swing" Observer Reporter Saturday, March 22, 2003

WESTERN BUREAU -- Jamaica will next week sign an agreement with Ecuador for the supply of 12,000 barrels of oil per day from that country, as the Government puts measures in place to ensure that the country's oil supply is not affected by the US/Iraq war.

"The Venezuelan market should be restored for us to receive supplies within a month, but also, we have been able to pursue other markets," Commerce, Science and Technology Minister Phillip Paulwell told Montego Bay's business leaders yesterday.

He was speaking at a meeting called to discuss the impact of the war on the productive sector.

"We are therefore saying that with Venezuela back (soon), and Mexico under the San Jose Accord in full swing, and now with Ecuador coming on as a new partner, we will not have a shortage of petroleum products, whether this time or in the foreseeable future," he added.

But the minister stressed the need for energy conservation, as it was still not clear how high the price of the commodity would rise during the ongoing crisis.

"Initially the price (of oil) is falling but it is felt that we won't know where the price will reach until another week or so," Paulwell said.

At the same time, he repeated earlier reassurances given by the Government that they do not expect a shortage of food items during the crisis.

"We have adequate supplies of flour, chicken, eggs and other items that are imported generally; so we do not anticipate that we will have any problems with basic food supplies," Paulwell noted. "A lot of supplies come from North America and other areas but in none of these areas we believe the war will affect our ability to import."

The minister added that there should be sufficient domestic food items on the market due to this year's significant increase in domestic crop production.

Raising output above quotas a 'violation'

Tehran |Reuters | 22-03-2003

Opec price hawk Iran said yesterday any increase in the group's oil output would be a "violation" since no decision had been taken to raise its quota limits at Opec's meeting earlier this month.

After a dramatic oil price fall over the past week, many Opec states are now worried that recent output hikes above quota may have created a glut in the world market.

"Any increase in output limits by Opec members above the present quota of 24.5 million barrels per day would be considered a violation by its members," Hossein Kazempour Ardebili, an adviser to Iran's oil minister, told the official IRNA new agency.

Opec Secretary-General Alvaro Silva said on Thursday that members have been authorised to use their spare capacity to make up for the shortage of Iraq supply.

"Countries are authorised to use their spare capacity and they are ready to use it if necessary," Silva said.

But Kazempour Ardebili said Silva's comments were out of line with Opec's agreed policy. "The Opec general-secretary is not authorised to say this and it is Opec that could decide about it and none of the Opec ministers approved it," he told state television.

"It is giving a green light to America to launch an attack and none of the Opec members wants to give a green light to attack another Opec member," he said.

Silva also said markets were "more than well supplied" and other Opec officials have spoken of a possible big cut in production if the stoppage in Iraqi exports proves to be short-lived.

Opec President Abdullah Al Attiyah said on Thursday the exporter group saw no need to pump more oil into a saturated market.

"It would be economic suicide to increase output at this time... unless something drastic happens like oilfield sabotage, prices will continue to decline," an Opec source said.

Some Opec members, particularly Saudi Arabia, have increased output sharply in recent months to cover for a strike in Venezuela and cool an oil price spike ahead of the U.S.-led attack on Iraq.

Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh at last week's Opec meeting led opposition to a proposal by some members to suspend quotas in the event of a war in Iraq. He argued that the group should resist decisions which gave implicit backing to the U.S.-led military attack.

The quota suspension proposal was not approved in the Vienna meeting, but all 11 members agreed to ensure that markets were well supplied.

Kazempour Ardebili said any decision to alter Opec's quota limits could only be taken at an emergency meeting of Opec ministers.

"In the recent (Opec) meeting the members extended the 24.5 million bpd quota and any other decision needs an emergency Opec meeting," he said.

"The present situation in the market shows that there is no shortage of oil and the fall in the price proves that," he added.

Oil has lost a quarter of its value in a week as the U.S.-led war on Iraq began, lifting uncertainty over the war.

Opec's reference price stood at $26.51 on Thursday, having dropped back into Opec's $22-$28 target range on Wednesday for the first time since December.

www.azcentral.com Mar. 22, 2003 12:00 AM

Have those shallow thinkers who like to scream "It's about oil" ever stopped to consider it would make more sense to invade Venezuela, where much of our oil comes from? If oil was our goal, it would be a pushover and a 15-minute war wouldn't cost much. Let's be honest enough to accept that the overthrow of a dangerous tyrant is our goal, not oil. - Bill Egan

<a href=www.nytimes.com>But the path is proving treacherous. March 22, 2003 By JUAN FORERO with LARRY ROHTER

A PAZ, Bolivia, March 21 — Isabel Ortega, a full-blooded Aymara-Quechua Indian who dresses in the black bowler and heavily layered 19th-century dress common to her people, is one of Bolivia's newest members of Congress.

But that has not kept guards from trying to bar her from the ornate building where the halls of power have long been the exclusive domain of buttoned-down descendants of Europeans.

"The guards would say, How can you come in?' And then they pushed me out," said Ms. Ortega, 49. "They would say, An Indian is coming into the palace.' "

Such racism and resistance have not stopped Ms. Ortega, who is part of a new Congress with three times as many indigenous lawmakers as the last one. Nor have they deterred a growing number of other leaders from forgotten classes across Latin America who are promising a political and economic upheaval.

They and their supporters are organizing as never before and using new, more open democracies to take on the traditional, light-skinned ruling classes they blame for keeping their countries mired in poverty and their people on the sidelines of power for 500 years.

Whether filled with Indians in the Andes, blacks and mixed-race "caboclos" and "mulatos" in Brazil or the poor of Argentina's outlying provinces, the ranks of these new political movements are united by the dark color of their skin and their low economic station.

With popular protests and new political parties, they are challenging the orthodoxy of market reforms as the region faces its worst economic crisis in decades. In the process, Latin America's political landscape is being redrawn. Parties that have been the pillars of governments from Caracas to Quito to Buenos Aires are collapsing or fast losing influence.

"Latin America is undergoing a fundamental redefinition of identity," said Elisa Carrio, the leading antiestablishment candidate in the presidential election scheduled in Argentina in April.

"That identity is being tinkered with in different ways in each country," she said, "because we are all different and not a single package, but there is one thing in common: we are finally electing leaders who look like the people they represent."

In Bolivia and Peru, this change has been accompanied by violent protests. Elsewhere, it has meant the rise of new leaders like President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, a former labor leader born a peasant, and Lucio Gutiérrez in Ecuador, a former army colonel who led the coup that overthrew President Jamil Mahuad, a Harvard-educated favorite of the International Monetary Fund, in January 2000.

Mr. Gutiérrez was elected president in November after railing against traditional politicians and promising to cut poverty and scale back market reforms. He was supported by a powerful indigenous movement, Pachakutik, and inspired in part by another former army colonel and coup plotter, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.

In Mr. Chávez, the many dark-skinned people of Caracas's poor barrios believe they have found a powerful spokesman — and the nation's traditional political and business class, a reviled antagonist. In the last year, Chávez supporters have defended his four-year-old presidency against weeks of strikes by an opposition whose leaders are mostly of European descent.

These new Latin American leaders do not offer a uniform solution to region's problems. But their political base is decidedly anchored on the left, and all have toyed with the populism that has been a staple of Latin American politics since the 1930's.

What they have in common is the promise to replace the policies pushed by the International Monetary Fund with a return to a system of state-owned companies and protected markets.

"It is not very well thought out, but it is the opposite of the status quo," said Amy Chua, author of a new book, "The World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability." "The problem with these policies is they are more anti- than affirmative anything."

Mr. Chávez, who introduced a new Constitution in Venezuela and is redirecting oil profits toward social programs, has taken the most aggressive tack. Others, like Evo Morales, the head of Bolivia's main opposition movement, emphasize the traditions of indigenous people who have organized their communities collectively for generations.

More moderate leaders have begun groping for a middle ground between appeasing the powerful financial and capital markets of a global economy and addressing the complaints of those who feel excluded from the benefits of more than a decade of market-driven economic reforms.

But the path is proving treacherous.

In Peru, a host of independent movements, several with strong indigenous representation, swept recent regional elections and are eroding the standing of the market-friendly government of President Alejandro Toledo.

In Brazil and Ecuador, the new governments have leaned toward fiscal prudence rather than following through immediately on promises to redistribute wealth. Disappointed followers are already criticizing both Mr. Gutiérrez and Mr. da Silva, who assumed Brazil's presidency on Jan. 1.

But even absent clear answers, these new leaders have been helped by the disintegration of traditional political parties, whose ranks have been thinned by the defection of those who feel past reforms have not helped them.

Venezuela's two main established parties are in disarray. Peru's long-dominant parties have lost ground to an amalgam of independent parties. The two parties that have ruled Colombia for more than a century suddenly face new challengers, as is also the case in Uruguay.

In Argentina, the Peronists, long the country's dominant party, have split into three warring factions, and their rivals in the Radical Party have been equally discredited by the worst economic crisis in the country's history.

None of the five leading candidates in the presidential election on April 27 have been able to win the support of more than 19 percent of voters. But a recent poll showed that if Brazil's president, Mr. da Silva, were allowed to run, more than 50 percent of Argentines would vote for him.

In no other country is the gap between the traditional ruling classes and the majority of the population as wide as in Bolivia. One Western diplomat described the country as Latin America's South Africa — a land of virtual apartheid — dominated for centuries by the descendants of Spanish colonists, while most of its eight million people, indigenous and desperately poor, remained disenfranchised.

Here, the experiment with market reforms has come full circle. President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada was the architect of the government's free-market reforms in the 1980's. For a while they tamed inflation and restored growth. But today Bolivia — much like the rest of the region — is mired in recession, unable to create enough jobs for the 100,000 people who join the work force each year.

In February Mr. Sánchez de Lozada was forced to escape from a bullet-riddled presidential palace in a heavily armed motorcade. At the time, nearly 30 people died during a protest against his plans for a payroll tax to close government deficits and meet I.M.F. demands.

His government, just seven months old, is now badly hobbled and its indigenous opponents are energized, foreshadowing what some political analysts say will be the eventual rise to power of an Indian government, Latin America's first in centuries. "After 500 years, the Quechua and Aymara are preparing to recover political power," said Mr. Morales, the leader of the opposition Movement Toward Socialism.

Many of Bolivia's indigenous people see hope in the populist message of Mr. Morales and that of Felipe Quispe, a former rebel who is known here as El Mallku, or the condor.

Mr. Morales, who finished second in presidential elections last year, leads a congressional delegation with 22 Indians among its 35 members. Those allied with him do not control Congress, but they are nearly half of its 157 members and have demonstrated that they can organize potent, economically disastrous street protests.

In their view, Bolivia must take back state companies sold into private hands, end food imports, and reject Washington's efforts for a hemisphere-wide free-trade treaty.

In essence, the idea is to end the vestiges of a modern, free-market-oriented state and return to an agricultural society, with a smattering of mining, that would "regain the philosophy of the Andean soul," as Hernán Vargas, a member of Mr. Morales's congressional delegation, put it.

"The indigenous are looking to take political power, to govern ourselves, not to be governed by whites who have robbed and stolen our natural resources," said Mr. Quispe, who leads a confederation of rural workers.

The idea that Latin America must make a sharp break from American-inspired market orthodoxy percolates among several indigenous movements in the Andes. Mr. Chávez in Venezuela has used similar appeals recently, as have all but one of the five main presidential aspirants in Argentina.

The message is poison to the region's elites, and to the United States, since the indigenous movements oppose Washington's policies to try to end coca growing in Bolivia. Mr. Morales, in fact, began his political career as head of the coca growers' union.

Critics say the nontraditional leaders fail to take note of Bolivia's dependence on foreign loans and trade, as well as the importance of foreign investment in developing the country's most important industry, mining.

"Taking power is fine," Bolivia's president, Mr. Sánchez de Lozada, said in an interview. "But what do you do when you are in power? I do not know how long the economic engine will last exporting just dried potatoes."

<a href=news.pacificnews.org>Commentary, Andrew Reding, Pacific News Center, Mar 21, 2003

Though France took the heat for its promised veto of the U.S. war resolution on Iraq, in fact Latin America was the resolution's defeater. As the rift between Washington and Latin America widens, America's isolation from its neighbors and NAFTA partners is taking its toll.

Much has been made of the split that has developed within the European Union over whether to join Washington in its war with Iraq. Almost unnoticed, though, is the rift that has developed in the Americas, leaving the United States virtually isolated in its own hemisphere.

To put it bluntly, France never got a chance to cast its Security Council veto because opposition from the United States' closest economic partners in Latin America ensured that the resolution could not pass. France may be the scapegoat, but Latin America was the resolution's undertaker.

Both of America's NAFTA partners -- Canada and Mexico -- have broken with Washington over Iraq. Elsewhere in Latin America, the only sizable nation whose leadership backs Washington is Colombia -- a war-torn nation that is the third-highest recipient of U.S. foreign aid after Israel and Egypt.

Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, whose proposed compromise resolution was labeled a "non-starter" in Washington, says he will not back the military effort in any way. His natural resources minister openly criticized President George W. Bush, saying, "I think he's let not only Americans, but the world, down by not being a statesman."

As recently as last November, President Bush said that "the United States has no more important relationship in the world than the one we have with Mexico." Bush's first presidential visit abroad was to Mexico, and Mexican president Vicente Fox was the first foreign leader to be feted with a state dinner at the Bush White House.

That relationship has now soured. President Fox was disappointed with the White House's unwillingness to pursue immigration reform following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. By May 2002, Fox was telling the Council of the Americas in New York, "There can be no privileged U.S.-Mexico relationship without actual progress on substantive issues...and there will be no substantive progress without comprehensively addressing the issue of migration."

In January, Mexican foreign minister Jorge G. Castañeda quit in frustration after failing to secure concessions on migration by aligning Mexico more closely with Washington on foreign policy issues, such as human rights in Cuba.

In the past month, however, Bush unexpectedly found himself needing to ask a special favor of Fox. Mexico had won a two-year seat on the United Nations Security Council in October 2001. Its support was now crucial to passage of the Bush-Blair resolution authorizing use of force against Iraq.

But Fox declined to provide that support, ultimately forcing abandonment of the resolution. It is not hard to see why. Public opinion in Mexico is overwhelmingly opposed to war with Iraq, and Fox's conservative National Action Party faces difficult parliamentary elections in July. Absent a major concession from Washington such as a deal on immigration, a yes vote would have been political suicide at home.

The other Latin American country with a seat on the Security Council -- Chile -- likewise said no. It did so even though it is the only other Latin American country to have concluded negotiations for a free trade agreement with the United States.

With the exception of Colombia, all the other major countries of the region -- Argentina, Peru, Venezuela and giant Brazil -- opposed the resolution. Besides Colombia, only the Central American nations of Nicaragua and El Salvador lined up with Washington.

This is not the first time the Bush administration has found itself isolated in Latin America. When the White House briefly gave its blessing to the abortive military coup against Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez last April, Mexico led 19 Latin American nations in condemning the coup. Only tiny El Salvador lined up with the United States.

Frustrated in its attempt to develop a new relationship with the "colossus of the north," Mexico is again turning southward, reassuming its traditional leadership role in Latin America, and cultivating ties with the European Union. Short of a major change of attitude in Washington, Latin America will pursue its own path toward economic integration, with rising hostility to the United States.

"Anti-Americanism" has been signaled as a primary source of concern in the post-Sept. 11 environment. With anti-Americanism on the rise throughout the Americas, one thing is certain: Washington's indifference to the concerns of its continental neighbors is beginning to compromise its own interests.

PNS Associate Editor Andrew Reding (areding@earthlink.net) is a senior fellow of the World Policy Institute in New York.