Elizabeth and Angela: Europe Icons and Powerhouses

 

Elizabeth is charming people into believing that an increasingly irrelevant country is still relevant and Angela aims at making an increasingly assertive country look less so.

Both ladies are plucky, resilient and highly respected in their own respective spheres. Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom happens to be the official head of state of several larges countries, all members of the British Commonwealth. As such, she counts an estimated 2 billion subjects. As the Euro Queen, Angela Merkel heads a more modest and virtual kingdom of 334 million people. Luckily, she is also the German chancellor, a much less stressful job which carries few irritations; currently her main concern is to shorten the leash of German spies who prefer to take their instructions from the CIA rather than from her.

In spite of their age difference, Elizabeth could be Angela’s mother, they look rather alike. Both are petite, just over 1.60 m, on the plump and frumpy side and have a similar taste for wardrobe formalism and colors. Blue seems to be Elizabeth’s favorite, but she can purposely select another color according to the event she is attending. Angela is very much a color maverick, the jacket of her signature pantsuit comes in many different and sometimes unusual colors. Her low-key, no-nonsense look is part of her strategy to project a reassuring plainness to the stressed Europeans.

                              The coat is green, must be St Patrick!

For decades, Elizabeth was a globe-trotting diplomat, visiting 116 countries without a passport but with her handbag glued to her arm. At 89, she has slowed down and leaves the royal representational business to her children and glamorous grandchildren. Since the beginning of the year, Angela certainly logged more miles than any other head of government, but she doesn’t carry a handbag. Her familiar accessory is François Hollande, the French president, a useful sidekick to reinforce that Ubermacht (dominance) is no longer a German obsession.

Elizabeth and Angela share many attributes, but they belong to different worlds.

Angela’s euro family is far more boisterous and troublesome than Elizabeth’s respectful subjects. Angela is more a fire fighter than a diplomat, she is called on to put out the fires set by her neighbor’s troublesome leaders, principally the alpha male and self-appointed tsar, Vladimir Putin, and the Greek gang. In January, and in full denial mode, Greece elected a bunch of lefties with big egos, no government experience and a knack to raise freeloading to an art form. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and publicity-obsessed finance minister Yanis Varoufakis keep acting recklessly and Angela’s patience is wearing thin.

        

                                                Angela and David

Elizabeth has survived many anni horribiles in the 1980s and 90s. Her troubles were mostly close to home and even by modern family standards, her family qualified as highly dysfunctional. The Windsors can pride themselves for having raised the UK divorce rate to stratospheric levels. Fortunately for Elizabeth, things have now quieted down. Her grandchild Prince William and his wife Catherine have restored the family’s good standing.

When learning that David Cameron was back in 10 Downing Street, Angela must have felt angst-ridden: new clouds were obscuring the not-so-blue European Union (EU) sky. Cameron’s splendid, although unexpected victory, will embolden him to ask for additional favors from the EU; if rebuffed, he may take Britain out of the EU by means of a referendum. Angela could have done without another spoiled brat. Actually, Cameron’s demands are not frivolous, tougher immigration rules and less generous social hand-outs, the other EU members should be advised to adopt them as they will go a long way towards propping up their feeble economies. Between the pesky Greeks and Grexit, Vladimir the Terrible and a possible Brexit, she has her plate full. To placate these high-octane guys, Angela needs to recharge her batteries. She may feel more relaxed in the company of the rotund François Hollande whose nickname is Flanby, a custard-type pudding.

 

    

                                            He is now inside

Waking up on May 8, Elizabeth must have felt relieved: she will not have to add another prime minister (PM) to her collection of 12. During her long reign, each prime minister was granted a weekly audience. Her first PM was Winston Churchill, a father figure who had time to groom her between passionate discussions about horses. The queen’s peace of mind may be short lived because of David’s hasty campaign promises. The EU referendum is a gamble; if Britain pulls out of the EU, a domino effect can be expected with Scotland leaving the UK ship, and the survival of the British Commonwealth coming into question.

Not a cheerful prospect for the Queen, not only does she lose her kingdom but her husband, Philip Duke of Edinburgh loses his title and may have to revert to his former one of prince of Greece and Denmark. To add insult to injury, by European Gotha standards, the prince is more royal than the queen his wife! At their next weekly audience, Elizabeth may advise David on how to draft his dammed referendum to make sure that she keeps her kingdom in one piece.

Ironically, David’s victory may bring Elizabeth’s and Angela’s worlds closer as both ladies will have to show savvy to keep their kingdom whole. They have their work cut out.

The Media, the Prosecutor and the Pilot: The Quickest Air Crash Investigation of the Century!

 

The crash of a Germanwings, owned by Lufthansa in the French Alps on March 24 has caught people’s attention across the globe. Its suicidal, 27 year-old copilot (first officer) deliberately slammed the plane against a mountain killing all 149 people on board. Every day brings new tidbits which add disbelief over grief. In an op-ed, a French philosopher questioned why such a trivial news item, a fait divers in French has attracted so much attention in the media and in society. If flying itself has become routine and increasingly safe, the occasional plane crash makes for sensational news. As we know so well, the media survive financially by scaring the living daylights out of its audience.

                             

                                         What it should be

If plane crashes were mere fait divers, they wouldn’t lead to political, financial, business, commercial, labor relations and even religious arguments as they do. Consequently, the relatives of the victims are three-times wronged. In addition to the loss of loved ones, they seldom know the cause of the crash and too often, do not get fair compensation

To an indulgent bystander, events around the crash in the Alps, specifically the successive media leaks, seem to have blurred the ethical divide between yellow journalism[1], e.g. German tabloid Bild, French magazine Paris-Match and blue-chip newspapers like The New York Times and Les Echos (a French economic newspaper) etc. The truth may be that these serial leaks are intentional and that the media is ganging on the government’s air accident agencies to compel them to change the way they work for the sake of improved accountability, transparency and efficiency. This blogger strongly believes that the role of the media is to exposes the sector’s conflicts of interest which frequently corrupt investigation and lead to muddled conclusions.

Crash mysteries are primarily solved by listening to the transcript of the cockpit voice recorder and interpreting the flight data recorder, information kept in the two “black boxes” of the plane. The first box was recovered two days after the crash. The French government’s investigators were compelled to make the transcript public because the New York Times had leaked key parts of the recording.

The second black box (preserving the flight data) was later recovered and is providing information backing those of the voice recorder. After the crash of a commercial plane, the financial and commercial stakes are very high. The investigators are under tremendous pressure from governments, victims’ families, manufacturers, airlines and pilots unions. In Europe, conflicts of interest are likely because many governments are shareholders of both the plane manufacturer and the national carriers.

The time-consuming investigation of the crash of the Air France Airbus (Rio de Janeiro to Paris) in 2009 has exposed a consummate stakeholders’ meddling. It has resulted in a balancing act where each party was allocated a more or less equal portion of the blame. When a pilot’s suicide is suspected, the investigators may be confronted with religious taboos and governments’ interference. The accidents of the Indonesian and Egyptian airliners, respectively in 1997 and 1999, resulted from pilot suicide. In both instances, the governments contested the independent investigators’ conclusions.

The German prosecutor in charge of the investigation has been prying open the copilot’s life by disclosing “live” his mental health problems. This openness raises a patient privacy debate and criticism came from an unexpected quarter. Psychiatrists complained that pilots with mild depression will refrain from reporting problems and seeking treatment for fear of losing their job. Most pilots love to fly and many believe that doctors will ground them at the slightest sign of stress and mental disorder. In light of the conclusion of the crash investigation, this subject will continue to pit pilots against doctors and airlines against current privacy legislation.

Viscerally protective of their turf and of the exalted position of their members in society, pilots unions, notably in Europe, are not passively watching the media circus. Although not involved in the case, a French pilots union, all the same, has filed a lawsuit over the way the investigation is being carried out. It believes that the air accident investigators did not abide by French ethical standards and thus enabled the pesky media leaks. The pilots union claimed that investigators and media are jumping to conclusions without having all the facts at their disposal. In light of the findings, the union’s action smacks of corporatism and insensitivity.

Jets are becoming computers on wings, more intelligent, highly automated with enhanced system design, and consequently fatal accidents are steadily decreasing. In the second decade of the 21^st century, secure flying is not the result of “a Darwinian improvement in pilot skills”[2] but that of aeronautic engineering improvement. The less pilots interfere with the automation, the better. Nowadays, pilot error is usually a misreading of the computer signals and subsequent incorrect action. Recent crashes have intriguingly exposed the misunderstanding between the intelligent plane and the humans seating in its cockpit. The airline industry is aware and concerned that the high level of cockpit automation is increasingly challenging the skills of its pilots and is a potential source of stress.

Pilot error may account for 50% of accidents[3]. Used to being blamed, commercial pilots suffer from an acute scapegoat syndrome. Subsequently, pilot unions are routinely fighting pro-active battles against plane manufacturers, airlines and governments. The French pilots union is notably uncompromising hence its ill-timed and tactless lawsuit.

Aeronautic engineers are working towards building drone-type commercial plane which in the 2030 horizon will not require pilots in the cockpit. With the prospect of becoming redundant and the likelihood of having had a megalomaniac, narcissist mass murderer in their midst, no surprise that the pilots unions are on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Thanks to media pressure, the investigation of the crash of the German plane has been the quickest and most transparent ever. Meanwhile, the fate of flight MH 370 continues to feed speculation and the craziest conspiracy theories in an industry prone to the wildest tales.

                               

.

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[1] It refers to the scandal-mongering and sensationalist press. The word was coined in the 1890s when newspaper publishers Joseph Pulitzer and Randolph Hearst battled for the best scoops to drive up newspaper circulation in New York City. Paul Collins’ book The Murder of the Century (2012) explores the publishers’ war around a bizarre murder.

[2] David Learmount, FlightGlobal, August 21, 2013.

[3] Percentage found in the media. Errors committed by poorly trained pilots have caused the recent deadly crashes in Asia.

Rio at 450

                                                                                  

On March 1, 2015 Rio de Janeiro celebrated its 450-year anniversary. Or was it? March 1, 1565 was only chosen fifty years ago in 1965, when Rio needed a party to cheer itself up. With the founding of Brasilia in April 1960, Rio lost its crown of Brazil’s capital, and to add insult to injury, its rival São Paulo had already celebrated its 400-year anniversary in 1954, eleven years earlier. Until 1965, the accepted founding date of the city was January 20, 1567, when the Portuguese troops definitely expelled the French settlers. By selecting March 1, 1565, local politicians and historians made the city two years older. The story is rather convoluted and interpretations are many!

The choice of March 1, 1565, is disingenuous. On that day the Portuguese troops landed near Sugar Loaf with the goal of dislodging the French colonists. It took them two years to do so. Their landing place was named São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro owes its name to the Portuguese navigators who first “discovered” the Guanabara Bay on January 1, 1502. They named it January River (Rio de Janeiro) Bay, but they did not land there. The French came in 1555 and built a settlement there.

      

            Original Carioca                                 Honorary Carioca

A French Knight of the Maltese Order, Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon, led the expedition and built a fort on an island where the domestic Santos Dumont Airport of Rio is located. The colony grew and reached 6,000 people which included many women. Villegagnon established an alliance with the local Tamoio and Tupinambá Indians who were unhappy with the Portuguese. The settlement was named France Antartique. What sets this colony apart is that it was based on a religious utopia of the time. The settlers were a mix of Catholics and Protestants. Although they were killing one another in Europe, Villegagnon wrongly believed that they could live harmoniously in the tropics. As soon as he returned to France, the colonists started arguing under the puzzled gaze of the Indians, many of whom were sharing their home.

When the Portuguese commander Estácio de Sá landed, the French settlement was already dysfunctional, its troops in disarray, and many residents had fled to live with the Indians on the mainland. Little support came from France as the pope had decided that South America should be divided between the Portuguese and the Spaniards.

In 1565, there were two enemy settlements, one French and one Portuguese, nearly facing each other! On Saint Sebastian feast day the French were finally rooted out and Sebastian became the patron saint of the Portuguese settlement. Coincidentally, like Saint Sebastian, Estácio de Sá died from an Indian arrow injury. The historic novel Brazil Red (2001) by French writer Jean-Christophe Rufin tells the story of Villegagnon’s ill-fated attempt to colonize this region of Brazil.

During the 17^th century, Sáo Sebastiáo do Rio de Janeiro grew slowly, a Portuguese backwater where the main language was Tupi Indian. Better security encouraged people to leave their stronghold on the Castelo hill to colonize the shoreline. During this period, the locals added land to the low areas, and landfills became an urban development fixture for better or worse.

The Dutch were now challenging the Portuguese colonies in Brazil as well as in Africa. In 1648, a small Portuguese armada left Rio to recapture Portuguese ports in Angola, and in Sáo Tomè and Principe. With generous funding from the people of Rio the mission succeeded in expelling the Dutch.

Rio de Janeiro finally woke from its slumber when gold was discovered in 1697 in the hinterland. This region is now known as Minas Gerais, or General Mines. Thanks to the flow of gold, the 18^th century was lively in Rio and in 1763 the city became the capital of the colony. Gold smuggling became a national sport and to deter it the Portuguese authorities set up an inefficient police force with bureaucracy and corruption setting a lasting pattern. The perception was that smuggling was benefiting England and not the needy Portuguese king.

Rio was in the limelight and both welcome and unwelcome visitors docked at the city harbor. Renè Duguay- Trouin, a French privateer, convinced the Sun King, Louis XIV of France who incidentally was broke, that Rio was the new Eldorado and could be easily ransacked. On 21 September 1711, commanding a twelve-ship-strong fleet, he entered the Bay of Guanabara hidden by a thick fog (divine help!). During an eleven-day battle, his 2600 men defeated a stronger Portuguese garrison. After capturing the hapless governor and his men, and freeing French prisoners from a previous attempt, the sack of Rio started in earnest. It lasted for two months. The terrified residents abandoned their houses and fled to the forest. On November 13, Duguay-Trouin left with an impressive and diverse booty, including tons of sugar, two hundred heads of cattle, piles of money, bags of gold, church artifacts and £4 million worth of African slaves. The slaves were promptly sold in Cayenne, the ramshackle capital of French Guyana. The ships were so heavily loaded with loot that a couple of them sank during the journey back to the French port of Saint-Malo. Rio was left reeling, but France had restored its reputation as a nation of dare devil corsairs.

In 1768, in the course of his first journey, Capitan James Cook docked with entirely peaceful intentions, needing cleaning, repairs and food supplies. Nonetheless, the crew of HMS Endeavour got a frosty welcome and several sailors were even accused of gold and gemstone smuggling. The exasperated Cook painted a very negative portrait of the city and its leaders who he wrote were lazy, inefficient, arrogant and despotic. The city was only ten percent white, and the British officers were shocked by the apparent freedom of movement of the black people. Naturalist Joseph Bank was scandalized by the “unchastity” of the woman folk; he further wrote that there was not a single modest woman in the whole city! With notorious British Navy arrogance, he was also critical of the quality of the food supplies, saying that only pumpkins were up to British standards.

                        

                                    Imported Cariocas (by J.B. Debret)

What happened to Rio de Janeiro in 1808 is unprecedented. Thanks to Napoléon and George III of England, the city became the capital of the Portuguese kingdom. The former invaded Portugal and the latter helped the Portuguese royal family to escape to Brazil. The royals fled with the whole court and government bureaucrats, some 15 000 people. Local houses were seized to house the newcomers and Rio underwent a real estate boom with the Cariocas (the local residents who drank water from the Carioca River) scrambling to build new homes for themselves.

              

                         Upward mobility, Carioca style (By J.B. Debret)

Rio became a world class city successively attracting scientists, artists, traders and an Austrian Princess who married the heir to the throne. The new king, Don João VI, modernized and turned the city upside down. In 1822, his heir declared Brazil an empire independent from Portugal. Several golden decades followed thanks to the policies of a benevolent sovereign and his daughter and the booming coffee exports. But this period has a dark edge: until the abolition of slavery in 1888, a million new slaves were shipped from Africa to work in the coffee plantations. The empire collapsed with a coup d’etat the following year.

The 20^th century nearly destroyed Rio: the city was shaken to its foundations literally. The landfill mania returned with a vengeance, but it was associated with the razing of hills to the ground. With little respect for history, the first hill to be flattened was the Castelo hill, Rio’s original township. The new republic used France as a model and Rio endeavored to become a tropical Paris. Rio’s population grew with the influx of European immigrants and former rural black slaves. Colonial buildings were torn down and new thoroughfares were opened. A lasting urban process started with the richest layer of the population settling on the low areas, shorelines and landfills and the poorer ones moving up hill where the first slums, the favelas, took root.

In 1960, Rio lost its capital status. A president born in the hinterland who probably did not like the beach, inaugurated Brasilia as the new capital. But four years later, Cariocas undoubtedly experienced schadenfreude when Brasilia was taken over by a military dictatorship, whose grip lasted 21 years. Rio’s hedonistic reputation grew with the global success of bossa nova. Care-free Cariocas from all walks of life went to the beaches whistling a Garota de Ipanema.

           

Saint Sebastian going to the beach              Olympics Cariocas

In 1965, to boost the city moral, the mayor celebrated Rio’s 400-year anniversary with pomp and new urban revitalization projects. Meanwhile poor people continued their move to the hills, some favelas became so large that they fell prey to drug dealers who set up their own violence-based government. In 1985, democracy was restored, rough and tumble, until today. Oil discovery fuelled Rio’s economy and the income that was not wasted or stolen was put to good use to pacify the favelas and attempt to bridge the socio-economic gulf between Cariocas living in the low areas and those living on the hills. Today, twenty two percent of the Rio population live in favelas. Four hundred and fifty year-old Rio remains the face of Brazil, tolerant, welcoming, vibrant but also unequal and often cruel. But again, Cariocas will put on their best behavior to host the 2016 Olympic Games.

                              

The Queen of Patagonia

The king is long dead.

Patagonia is a vast region that occupies the southern part of South America. It covers over a million square kilometers, about the size of France, United Kingdom and Germany, or California and Texas combined. Most of Patagonia is in Argentina; Chilean Patagonia forms a 2000 kilometer-long belt along the Andes Cordillera. To the chagrin of the British government, the Falklands Islands are also geographically part of Patagonia in Argentina.

There is something mythical about this cold, windy, harsh and remote land where sheep outnumber humans ten to one. In pre-Columbian times the region was inhabited by bands of hunter-gatherers. It might not have been the land of giants, the Patagones as imagined by the 16^th century navigator Ferdinand Magellan and by other early explorers, but Patagonia’s fierce inhabitants made the region inhospitable for the Spanish colonizers.

                                           Patagonian landscape

Among the indigenous people, the Araucanians/Mapuche tribes were particularly bellicose and refused to relinquish their land to their colonial masters. This lack of co-operation delayed the economic development of Patagonia well until the end of the 19^th century. As in the North American Wild West, the colonization of Patagonia took place at the expense of its native population. Argentina launched successive military campaigns with the objective of removing the Indians manu militari to make room for European settlers considered more productive. The Conquest of the Desert (1870) as the principal military expedition is known, is an increasingly controversial subject that is now labeled genocide. However, for its apologists, the Indians were violent parasites whose main business was to ransack new settlements.

Chilean Patagonia is a narrow ribbon of land that had to be both colonized and expanded at the expense of its Argentine neighbor. The Chileans were shrewd and took a different approach. They used their fierce Mapuche Indians as proxy fighters and dispatched them well-armed over the ill-defined border to raid Argentine territory. In the end, their fate was not much better than that of their brethren on the Argentine side. These wild times provided opportunities for the adventurous and the eccentric, and this is when the king of Patagonia appeared on the scene.

Orélie-Antoine de Tounens was a French lawyer who had moved to Chile around 1850. On the pretense of improving their chances of independence, he convinced the restless Mapuche chiefs to elect him as their leader with the assumption that a European would be taken more seriously. Subsequently, in 1862, he self-proclaimed himself King Orélie-Antoine I of Araucania and Patagonia. With a stroke, he further extended his fictional kingdom all the way to the Magellan Strait. Two years later, he was jailed and shipped back to France by the Chilean government. Needless to say his kingdom was never recognized as sovereign. Tounens tried unsuccessfully three times to regain his throne. His French heirs haven’t relinquished their claim and the current pretender is actually a champagne dealer.

If the king of Patagonia was a 19^th century con artist, Queen Cristina is a very hands-on 21^st century entrepreneur who along with her late husband Nestor, built an empire in Patagonia. Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, casually known as CFK is the current president of Argentina. Her political career as well as her wealth sprung from a backwater place called El Calafate located near several spectacular Andean glaciers. Paradoxically, El Calafate grows while the glaciers recede! Benefitting from glacier tourism economy, Nestor who was nicknamed the Emperor Penguin and Cristina amassed land and business deals. Cristina fits the Ice Queen definition: good looking and charming outside and cold-blooded and heartless inside.

                     

                             Cristina                                                Florence

This is how many of her enemies think of her. For her fans (she has 1.6 million followers on Facebook) she is the reincarnation of Evita Perón. Although as president she took many pages from Evita’s populist book, CFK resents the comparison. Evita owed her popularity to her husband Juan, but CFK is a politician in her own right. She ranks 19 on Forbes list of the World’s 100 Most Powerful Women (2014). Under fire from many quarters, with a mixed bag of successes and failures her second term is not ending as smoothly as expected. Until the end, she will be defending her record, but she probably won’t be able to add an emblematic piece of real estate to her Patagonian kingdom. In spite of her brash diplomatic offensive, the Falkland Islands or Islas Malvinas islands are still firmly in British hands.

For this blogger, the true queen of Patagonia is a 19^th century British traveler, writer, political activist, war correspondent and feminist. Lady Florence Caroline Dixie was the daughter of a Scottish marquis.  Although born into wealth and privilege, at a very young age she rebelled against social conventions, such as maternal domesticity. At 21, having fulfilled her Victorian family contract, she left her brood in England and travelled with her husband to Patagonia. She had selected Patagonia because it was an “outlandish place”. An excellent horsewoman and a good shot she enjoyed game hunting and eating. In 1879, her party reached Punta Arenas and in Puerto Natales a hotel is named after her. After spending six months in Patagonia, she returned to Britain where she wrote Riding across Patagonia, an account of her adventure. She brought back with her a puma pet (she had killed his aggressive mother). The puma took an immoderate liking for British deer, and had to be sent to a zoo. She routinely shared her Patagonia observations with Charles Darwin and was not always in agreement with him.

She became a war correspondent in South Africa and later wrote a feminist novel. She founded the British Ladies’ Football Club. She supported women’s rights and animal welfare, as well as the right of self-determination for Irish and native South African people. Familiar with the moors of Scotland, free-spirited Florence may not have found the Patagonian pampas so outlandish after all, except for the puma. Florence and Cristina are miles apart but both are tough and are their own women.

 

Travel Digests

Thursday, February 12. At 2.40 am this morning, I left the shabby Rio de Janeiro Galeão airport to fly to Santiago where I arrived at 9 am after a stop-over at the swank Buenos Aires airport. Compared to Rio, all other airports seem swank!  Aerolinea Argentinas flights were on time and my suitcase arrived with me.  A happy start for someone who has a limited trust in state-owned airlines! I recollect that AA was re-nationalized by Nestor Kirchner the former president of Argentina. 

The airline returned the favor, its inflight magazine Alta dedicated several pages to Cristina's populist social programs.  In the magazine, the Falkland Islands or Islas Malvinas are also included with the Argentina territory along with its slice of Antartica.  May-be the French should re-claim les Malouines (their original name) as the islands were French until 1766!

Santiago is provincial compared to Rio.  I visited a few museums near the hotel and had an early night.  More city investigation tomorrow. It is my forth visit. My tour starts tomorrow night with a welcome cocktail and dinner.  Some fellow tour participants have already arrived, mostly senior couples from the U.S.

Friday, February 13. After a hearty breakfast, I walked towards the Santiago Zoo.  Unlike Rio but like Paris, Santiago streets are littered with dog poos.  Santiago is known for its stray dogs, who are fat and lazy.  Do-gooders feed them but goodwill stops at the bowl...So walk carefully.

I boarded the funicular San Cristobal towards the Metropolitan Park on a hillside.  My first stop was the zoo where I wanted to see up-close animals I probably won't be able to spot in their Patagonian habitat.  This zoo is not a sad place, its residents were either frolicking or napping.  I saw many guanacos, a kind of vicuña on steroids.  They are big and look at you with aplomb.  Nearly wiped out in the wild, they are making a come-back, and the vicuñas are no longer endangered.  

I watched a bunch of Humboldt penguins who strut their stuff in front of the cheering kids. Also in residence are ñandus or rhea, a smallish emu.  Rhea are vain, always grooming themselves.  The emus don't seem to take much care of their look, a scruffy looking lot!

The highlight of my wildlife adventure was a group of Patagonian maras.  I never saw them before.  They look like a composite: a dog body with a head of a hare (see pic).  In fact they are rodents, a smaller and skinner version of our Brazilian capybara. 

                         

                                            Patagonian maras

My favorite was a couple of zorros gris, the Chilean grey fox.  Cute and curious, they came to sniff their admirers.  They are fox/dog hybrids and roam the Andes. After so many exotics, I had ceviche for lunch.

Saturday, February 14. A travel day: Punta Arenas (latitude 53 degrees) a 4 hr. flight from Santiago . Already penguin territory. Fifty shades of yellow...the color of the grass and the earth. The city is located on the margin of the Magellan Strait, (53th parallel S).  Although close to the northern tip of Antartica (66 degrees) P.A. has the same latitude as Brussels except that it is much colder and windy.  Patagonia is notorious for its summer wind during the tourist season.  Wind is the key annoying factor. From Punta Arenas we rode a bus to Puerto Natales some 200 kms to the northwest, near Torres del Paine National Park.  The ride could have been really boring except for the abundant wildlife we spotted on both sides of the road: Guanacos, rheas and water fowls competing for pasture with sheep and cows. In Patagonia, sheep continue to outnumber people by a 10 to one ratio.

                                 Torres del Paine: Guanacos

It is a water fowl paradise. There are three different species of swans, several types of geese and ducks, etc.  And I can spot them all from my bedroom window! We are accommodated in a spectacular hotel named The Singular.

Sunday, February 15. This morning we had to abort our cruise to the Balmaceda Glacier.  Pity because it is receding, so we should rush to see it.  Our speed boats were too small to fight the high surf of the fiord.  Plan B was a shorter cruise in quieter waters with a long trek on a windy hillside.

So far, the highlight of this trip is neither the scenery nor the attractions but our 5- star- hotel The Singular Patagonia, in Puerto Natales.  It was built four years ago inside a national historic monument, the Frigorificos Bories, a cold storage plant built in 1906.  It started as a slaughter house for sheep at the end of the 19^th century.  In the early days, the sheep were processed into canned food until boilers and compressors were imported from Scotland.  Coincidentally, this Scottish company manufactured the boilers of HSM Titanic. The produced steam was used to generate cold air for the freezers. The cold storage chambers have been replaced by 57 luxurious guest rooms.  The hotel is also a museum.  For a non-meat eater like me, it hard to reconcile the pampering and the gruesome: Between 150.000 and 250.000 sheep were slaughtered annually.

                                   Hotel The Singular Puerto Natales

Monday, February 16. So far the weather has collaborated, mostly sunny, temperature above average: 12-15 degrees, and wind within seasonal range. Torres del Paine National Park, UNESCO Heritage Site is the high point of Chilean Patagonia.  The park deserves more than our one-day bus tour: that is the drawback of organized tours for senior travelers! As expected the notorious Patagonian wind didn't let up and a 100 km/hr. gust often made our walking hazardous. The torres (towers) and cuernos (horns) are strikingly beautiful and change color during the day.  The mountains are surrounded by lagoons of various shades of blue and green.

                                               Torres del Paine

n addition to its scenic appeal, the park is a sanctuary for endangered species. Its "Big Five" are puma (mountain lion), grey fox, guanaco, condor and lesser rhea (South American ostrich).  If we didn't spot the first two, we saw plenty of the other animals. The guanaco as already described in my first digest is a vicuña on steroids.  On a picture it is hard to tell them apart.  Guanacos and rheas have odd sexual habits. I very much pity madam guanaco who spends most of her adult life (up to 20 yrs.) pregnant.  Pregnancy lasts for nearly 12 months and one month after delivering the tiny chulengo, the female is in heat and subjected to male attention and copulation. These baby machines live in large herds under the protection of an alpha male.  His lot is not very enviable either.  When he doesn't service his ladies, he has to fight marauding horny males.  So he spends much of his life in hot pursuit of his females' potential suitors. He also has to watch for puma, the top predator.

Rhea's sexual life is even odder. The male is more serial lover than polygamist, and his ladies are promiscuous. He likes rough sex and jumps on the female during copulation. He builds a simple nest on the ground where his females lay their eggs.  The job done, the girls move away in search of new adventures.  The poor guys incubates the eggs (up to six). To ensure that his eggs are not all eaten by Mister Fox, he builds a decoy nest with the help of a subordinate male.  Some eggs are sacrificed.  After hatching, daddy takes care of the chicks. 

Condors are like petit bourgeois, they mate for life and share domestic chores.

   

                                 Torres del Paine Los Cuernos.

Tuesday, February 16. We had a quiet day, visited the Mylodon cave, and I went horse-back riding. The Mylodon is a 30 m high Pleistocene ground sloth which has been extinct for thousands of years. Anyway, its discovery generated a scientific stampede, so frantic that not a single bone remains in Chile.  Bruce Chatwin mentioned the pre-historic beast in his book In Patagonia.  Some imaginative individuals are still looking for the Mylodon in Patagonia.

During my ride, I didn't bump into the Mylodon, but spotted a couple of Patagonian parakeets, odd to find cold climate parrots, and several condors flying over us.  We were in puma territory, but cats, big and small usually nap during the day.

Wednesday, February 17. We crossed the border between Argentina and Chile in a desolate spot: Rio Don Guillermo, north of Puerto Natales. Once again, the Chilean professionalism was on display: In no time, immigration officers electronically checked our passports, whereas their Argentine counterpart processed them the old fashioned way literally in the dark, as there is no electricity in the morning!  Our guide said that the lack of technology was a blessing in disguise because the clearance was faster!

Tonight, we are staying in Casa Los Sauces, a 5 star resort in El Calafate, Santa Cruz Province (pic below).  It belongs to Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, the current Argentine president. The resort is a modest token of her wealth.  Nestor Kirchner, her late husband and former president ruled the province for several years.  Both made a fortune and went on a land grab.  My room is old fashioned with many touches of feminine kitsch, not surprising, since one of Cristina's hobbies is interior decoration.  I miss The Singular even knowing that, in its previous life, it was a former slaughterhouse. 

In El Calafate, we visited the well documented museum of Glaciers and drank vodka in an ice bar with the futile hope of stopping the shrinking of the Patagonian glaciers.  Except for Perito Moreno and another glacier, they are all receding up to 150 meters per year.  Perito Moreno Glacier doesn't recede because its accumulation area (from snow fall) is far larger than its front where it breaks into the lake.

Patagonia is a desolate and inhospitable land where people got easily lost.  Geographic names such as Dead End Road, Last Hope Pass, Desolate Island, etc., coined by those who survived left evidence of their resilience.

Thursday, February 18. Sunny days, little wind and daylight temperatures around 15 degrees C. We will sail up country to check the receding Upsala Glacier.  We had our Titanic experience.  We sailed upstream to the front of the Upsala Glacier.  Since it recedes appr. 200 m per year, before melting many icebergs are floating downstream over a 5 km long distance.  Our captain knew the routine and being a more skillful version of Costa Concordia Capitan Schettino, he let us touch the biggest iceberg without sinking.

      

                                             Upsala Glacier

When on land, we trekked to a look-out to see the whole glacier network.  Awesome scenery. (Above pic)

Friday, February 19. This is my last Patagonia digest. "Ice Escapades" ended our trip to Patagonia. We were bussed to Perito Moreno Glacier, the poster boy of global warming deniers. Contrary to the majority of Patagonia glaciers, Perito Moreno is in equilibrium.  Its snow accumulation area exceeds the loses from ablation (melting, evaporation etc.).  The glacier also enjoys a unique micro-climate.

                                           Perito Moreno Glacier

El Calafate is a boom town thanks to glacier tourism. The city has grown so much that it has now opened an Evita Peron museum like in bigger cities. Evita's cult has reached Patagonia!  Actually, she is everywhere, posters and even banknotes.  She now graces the 100 pesos note (value: $US 11.60 at official exchange rate and $ 7.70 at black market).  She is taking the place of the 19th  century General Julio Argentino Roca, the previous face on the note.  Roca led the Conquest of the Desert; in the process he killed thousands of native Patagonian people.  The choice of Evita can be interpreted as an ethical improvement.

            

                            !00 Pesos Note with Evita Peron

Argentina is badly managed by Cristina Fernandez the current president of Argentina, and a somehow reincarnation of Evita. Inflation is estimated at 40 % year, so the parallel exchange rate is available everywhere, except in Cristina’s hotels.  Shops, restaurants and hotels invite you to pay in US dollars, and each offers a different exchange rate. 

Cristina does a much better job as a hotelière, she is the owner of the hotel where we are staying.  To keep the guests safe, she didn't hire security guards. Instead, she employs, at no cost, a flock of birds, not geese like the Romans did, although geese are plentiful in El Calafate, but southern lapwings. These birds live in large groups and do not sleep at night; when disturbed by intruders they fly-off making very loud noises.  Legend has it that General San Martin, the Argentine hero of Independence kept a patrol of clipped winged southern lapwings as sentinels when fighting the Spanish forces. 

A closing quote: Patagonia is famous for its fierce winds.  In his book In Patagonia, Chatwin wrote that wind was "striping men to the raw, and made Antoine de Saint-Exupery's plane fly backward instead of forward."

Je Suis Charlette

 

Dress Code Diplomacy or Provocation?

On January 17, President Obama and his wife Michelle paid a visit to King Salman, the new King of Saudi Arabia. On official pictures, Michelle stands next to the king with her head uncovered. As a result, Twitter went tweeting and chirping: Michelle was praised for having made a bold statement on behalf of women. Although interpreted as a mild provocation and a disapproval of Muslin women dress code, the unveiled first lady made no statement. She simply followed a decade-long, protocol-prescribed dress code. Female heads of state, first ladies, top politicians, and royals do not cover up in the company of the king. In the Kingdom, some women are more equal than others! On the head-covering country ranking, Saudi Arabia is more relaxed than Iran which requires any female visitor to cover up. Since the Western powers embargo on Iran, few Westerners (except tourists) have been going to the country. Lady Ashton, the former top EU diplomat who became well known for her wardrobe diplomacy when negotiating with her Iranian counterpart, never stepped foot in Iran.

  

     Michelle and King Salman                     A “photoshopped” Lady Ashton (right)

 

Double Standards

For this blogger, the American media is skillful at double standards, it praises Michelle’s trifling provocation but lambasts European countries, France in particular which ban the niqab (a veil which covers the face excepting the eyes) in public places. One opinion article published in the New York Times on January 22 When Women Become Terrorists was particularly ludicrous. Its author claims that Hayat Boumeddiene, the common law wife of the infamous Amedy Coulibaly, the terrorist who murdered four people in a kosher supermarket in Paris on January 9, radicalized herself after losing her supermarket cashier job for wearing the niqab at work[1]. Her human rights had been violated by French law!

                         

                        Hayat and Amedy before. Hayat (?) after

Now, Boumeddiene is a suspect on the run, assumed to have joined the jihadist ranks in Syria. The op-ed further reported that many European female jihadists in Syria had left Europe because they could not wear the burqua in public (veiled head to toes). Not only this blogger finds the op-ed naïve, misleading and misinformed but wonders why European governments should address these women’s dress code grievance, particularly when legislation banning such exotic outfits is the result of a democratic process? Too many American journalists have disparaged European governments for banning the head-scarfs in government buildings (not in public places as many wrongly wrote), and jumped to the conclusion that Muslim women feel cast away in their adoptive country.

Religious Hypocrisy

How many niqab-wearing-supermarket cashiers have you come across in America or in Muslim countries? Certainly very few (possibly widows). In conservative societies, women are prevented from working outside the home. To convince Muslim women to veil themselves, many Islamic preachers have equated western clothing with sexual servitude, sexual object versus content of character. The Islamic rational is that men lust for sexual objects, so to keep them on the virtuous trail, woman must dress modestly and hide their skin as much as possible. According to the same rhetoric, women who dress modestly, i.e. covering themselves, command respect.

                          

                                       Ladies wearing a Niqab

Unfortunately in many Muslin countries, the reality for women is very different. Sexually frustrated men easily forget Islamic precepts as the famous Egyptian film Cairo 678 (2010) made obvious. It depicts the fate of three women facing sexual harassment, one of whom is routinely groped in the overcrowded bus 678 in the poor suburbs of the capital. Without respect nor appreciation, women take their fate in their own hands literally and one resorts to stabbing with needles the harasser’s groin.

Islamic Fashion Statement

About ten percent of the French population of 64 million is of Muslim stock, and a growing number of women dress according to Islamic teachings. Head-scarf-wearing supermarket cashiers are becoming increasingly common in France. In a fashion-conscious country, even Islamic clothing displays a certain elegance. The head-scarf style follows subtle trends lost on the untrained eyes. But what visitors to France do not fail to notice is that many head-scarf wearing ladies are cultural hybrids. As long as they cover their head, they feel that they can dress the way they like, miniskirt excepted! In the streets of France, the current uniform is a tight tunic over a pair of skinny jeans or leggings which enhance body attributes. Modesty seems to stop at the neck!

The young Muslim women wear their head-scarfs like a badge of honor to stress their difference. The non-Muslim 90% considered it exotic, then provocative and now plainly antagonistic. The Islamic head-scarf is the lightning rod of the religious freedom versus secular rules argument, and it has contributed to the alienation of the minority from the majority.

                 

 

Islamic Furies

Fortunately, Boumeddiene has few followers in France. Intelligence indicates that the majority of the females who join the ranks of the self-styled Islamic State in Syria and Iraq come from Britain. Paradoxically, in the United Kingdom these women can wear whatever Islamic garb they want and find jobs easily unlike their French sisters. Many are looking for a jihadist husband and end up doing their dirty work, such as cleaning, cooking, running and policing the camps of women prisoners and sex slaves, the Islamist version of the sadistic Hitler’s Furies. Some experts believe that a larger number of female jihadists now have more sinister ambitions. According to reports these British women are moving into more intellectual activities such as jihadist recruiters, social media propagandists, and even inciting the murder of hostages.

Governments and Media: Incestuous Screw-up

Western politicians and journalists like to believe that indoctrination is the main cause of radicalization. This hypothesis has the advantage of shifting the blame on others for the failed government policies, and allows the journalists to cozy up with the politicians. Obviously there is not a single storyline. These young people are angry with personal grievances and sometimes they are politically frustrated, bored and misfits in their community. They often feel persecuted as a group or undervalued in a society which at the same time offers few jobs through which one can measure one’s worth and too much social protection which frustrates self-achievement. They wish to move with their buddies (herd mentality) out of the family cocoon with its patriarchal oppression to find themselves trapped into the social safety net.

                       

Jihad is an exciting video game and IS makes upbeat videos to hook young people. Embarrassed by the presumably high number of their citizens fighting with IS, Western European governments are desperate to stop the flow to Syria. With a near-zero credibility with their youth, these governments should change tactics and let other entities do the anti-jihad propaganda. Blocking travel will backfire as would-be jihadists are rebels by nature. Women can be advised that they are swapping the hum drum, and boredom of their Western life for the boring, degrading and grubby jihadi routine. It is useless to mother these youngsters, the diehards will sneak through anyway, and so let them go, making clear that jihad is a one way ticket. They are foolish cannon fodder in the intractable Sunni Shia conflict, a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States against Iran.

Afterword

Subsequent to the murder of the eight cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo on January 7, during a television interview the Mayor of Rotterdam, a Muslim born in Morocco advised his co-religionists to “sod off” if they don’t like the way of life of their adoptive country. He was right on the dot, other Muslim clerics could emulate him. Some American journalists should be advised to visit Europe in order to file more accurate reports. Many newspapers (pretender-defender New York Times included) did not reproduce the cartoon on the cover page of the survival issue of Charlie Hebdo. Too much ramble on, better stop.

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[1] One of the Kouachi brothers, the Charlie Hebdo murderers was fired from his government job for refusing to interact with female co-workers.

The Heart of Darkness: The Sequel

 

The Heart of Darkness is the title of a short novel written by Joseph Conrad in 1899. The novel was written upon Conrad’s return from an assignment as a riverboat captain in Belgian Congo. The novel is about abuse, greed, and moral corruption to the point of madness. Conrad’s story exemplified the most evil and brutal aspects of imperialism and colonialism. In 2014, this dismal scenario remains unchanged. Slavery, child soldiers, (neo) colonialism, resource-led imperialism and conflicts are wrecking the life of the Congolese people. The recently released investigative documentary Virunga shot in 2013 in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), also known as Congo makes the chaos of the movie Apocalypse Now look bland. As a matter of fact, Apocalypse’s director, Francis Ford Coppola, used The Heart of Darkness as an inspiration for his 1979 film.

Congo is too rich for its own good. The country suffers from the so called “resource curse”, the paradox of plenty. Plunder started early: in the 15^th century, when Portuguese explorers and traders discovered the Kingdom of Kongo with its impressive natural wealth. Soon the Europeans embarked on lucrative human trade which, for nearly four centuries, supplied some 4 million slaves to the New World. Chaos ruled until 1885 when colonial law and order was forcefully imposed by the King of Belgium. Through proxies, King Leopold ruthlessly ruled a country the size of Western Europe as his personal farm. The transatlantic slave trade had stopped but slavery became a domestic institution to provide expandable and inexhaustive human labor for the ever increasing pillage of natural resources. Rubber, ivory, exotic wood, and precious minerals had advantageously replaced human cargo.

Independence came in 1960, chaotic and bloody. The tenets of the resource curse, imperialism and greed, were here to stay but under a new guise. Tyranny was home grown and imperialism was led by the western mining industry which enriched the ruling elite and impoverished the masses. The dictator left the scene nearly two decades ago but DRC has not overcome its past trauma. Very much to the contrary, the country is increasingly sliding towards being a failed state, corrupt, violent, lawless and disease-prone. Congo has the dubious privilege of being the cradle of both HIV/AIDs and Ebola.

The resource curse has become a catch phrase for bad governance. The mix of resource abundance and poor governance is a lethal combination in resource-rich Congo. This land of plenty enriches its greedy leaders and armed rebellion, covetous neighbors and the rapacious foreign industry. It causes never-ending conflicts and human suffering. It is very much a Catch 22 situation. Bad governance and conflicts destroy the domestic economic fabric therefore for financial and political survival the government increasingly depends on the growth of resources extraction, legal or illegal. The export-led extraction industry can operate in an offshore mode, unaffected by the surrounding unrest. On the other side, the warlords follow the same strategy. They boost wildcat mining and market its output to finance and prolong ethnic conflicts predominantly in the eastern part of the country. If natural resources were not so plentiful and easily mined, DRC would certainly be more peaceful and developed.

 

               

                                 Mineral Occurrences in DRC

Mining revenues are hard to assess as the government’s book keeping is notoriously opaque and sloppy, to the point that millions of dollars often go missing. In 2013, $US 88 million disappeared somewhere between the tax agency and the treasury. In 2012, mining and oil made about twenty percent of the country gross domestic product and ninety five percent of its exports (eitii data[1]). To make matters worse, natural resources, except for diamonds are mostly occurring near Congo’s eastern and south-eastern borders with less than friendly neighbors. In the aftermath of the Rwanda genocide (1994), the fleeing Hutu militias the “génocidaires”, spilled over the border and created havoc on the local communities. Since then, Congo’s eastern part, the state of Kivu has been particularly volatile and lawless. To carry on fighting, the intruders press-ganged child soldiers and took to mining.

          

                         Socially Responsible Mining: Kivu Style.

The province of North Kivu is well endowed with gold, tin and coltan (short for columbo-tantalite) a valuable mineral used in cell phones, laptops and other electronic devices.. All three are extracted with pick and shovel by wild-cat miners. Coltan is very much in demand. The conflicts are clearly mineral resources-fed. From a tribal-based origin, the armed groups morphed into rag tag gangs similar to the South American drug gangs. They control the mines, market their loot, protect their commercial networks and sell the proceeds in neighboring Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda which overnight became exporters of minerals they never produced! To achieve their commercial goals, the warlords commonly resort to forced labor: children are used as mine laborers, women are exploited as sexual slaves and indiscriminately raped.

The most nefarious warlords are wanted at the International Criminal Court (ICC) to face charges of crime against humanity. One is actually on trial in The Hague and two others are in jail in Uganda and Rwanda. The fighting has abated lately, but North Kivu remains a very unsafe region. As long as valuable minerals can be mined with pick and shovel benefitting both the armed groups and the senior leaders of Uganda and Rwanda, these partners in crime will have little incentive to foster peace in the region. In spite of the current precarious peace agreement, conflicts can resume anytime.

Before becoming infamous for the proliferation of criminal armed groups, 25 so far and still counting, North Kivu was renowned for the natural beauty of the lush Albertine Rift Valley, its active volcanoes, lakes with bountiful fish and rich fauna. With a view to preserving this natural wonderland, in 1925, King Albert I of Belgium established the 7800 square kilometers (3000 sq. miles) Virunga National Park, the oldest park in Africa. In 1979, it was the first African park to be granted UNESCO World Heritage site status[2]. The park’s most celebrated denizens are the endangered mountain gorillas. The gorillas, which were only discovered in 1902 have seen their numbers dramatically decline during the past three decades through indiscriminate hunting, poaching, disease, habitat destruction and as collateral victims of the local conflicts. During this troubled period, some areas of the park even fell under the control of militias who organized game tours for their own financial benefit. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) estimates that the population has rebounded to 880 individuals in the Virunga mountain range which also includes the Uganda and Rwanda national parks. Some 480 gorillas live in the Congolese park.

                      

                                                 Baby Gorilla

For the Congolese people Virunga National Park (VNP) is very much a colonial relic of little value. Since very few tourists visit the park, its land could be put to a more productive use[3]. VNR and its rangers survive thanks to meager funding from the government and grants from foreign organizations, including WWF. It is telling that Emmanuel de Mérode, its current administrator nominated by the DRC government is a Belgian prince but not related to the infamous Leopold. He was probably selected because he was perceived as less accessible to bribery. De Mérode has a long list of enemies and on April 15, 2015 he was ambushed by gunmen and nearly killed. He is now back at work. In the past twenty years, 140 park rangers were slain.

                           

                                       Virunga National Park Resident.

With financial support from rich and committed donors, de Mérode plans to make Virunga self-sustaining by developing economic projects able to benefit the local community, as well as to raise its sense of ownership to buy into the park’s long term development. Time is running out as powerful interests want to open the park to oil exploration, activities totally anathema to foreign conservationists but attractive to the destitute locals. For reasons probably too questionable to outline here, the president of DRC is offering contracts to the oil and mining industry like candies. A “buccaneer” British Company, SOCO International, was granted a sizeable exploration claim within the Virunga National Park. It caused a well-publicized uproar in Europe and the United States of America. The actor Leonardo DiCaprio and Netflix joined forces to produce the documentary Virunga which was released in November 2014.[4] This moving and eye-opening nature documentary aims at publicizing the park’s struggle to survive and to shame SOCO. On November 16, 2014 The New York Times took the opportunity to release a two-page long article titled “Oil Dispute Takes a Page from Congo’s Bloody Past”[5]. SOCO seems to have understood the message and indicated that it was pulling out (ethical decision or falling oil price?).

The DRC government might have wanted to emulate Uganda which has let Total, the French oil company explore in the Murchinson Park. In this blogger’s opinion, the government broke its own rules and underestimated the unparalleled prestige of Virunga; in addition it made two business blunders. Instead of choosing a British firm, it should have selected a Chinese company as less sensitive to western opprobrium (it still can do that!). The central government’s control over the area seems nominal at best. If oil were to be found, it would certainly benefit the scattered armed groups further energizing their warring power. For its part, faced with adversaries like the British Prince William and his friend the former soccer star David Beckham, SOCO might have overestimated its business clout. Its partner, Total has indicated that it will not operate in Virunga. Security of tenure is a flexibly respected concept in corrupt DRC. The president may have to step down in 2016 as required by the constitution. In a country with a reputation of denouncing contracts signed by past governments, it is not a very secure situation for any company.

                

                                         Drilling in the Park 

        Uganda Murchinson National Park: Oil Development Stakeholder

This blogger’s recommendations:  The president of SOCO should be advised to read or re-read Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. David Beckham should invite an African soccer player to join him to defend the pristine beauty of the Virunga National Park and its residents.

PS: All pics were “snitched” from the web.

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[1] Extractive Industries Transparency International Initiative.

[2] http://virunga.org

[3] Even the iconic Yellowstone National Park in the USA has its detractors. They think that tapping its geothermal energy will be a more lucrative undertaking than tourism!

[4] http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/80009431?mqso=81003095&locale=es-BR&gclid=CNyw2p_1n8ICFaHm7AodFFgAkw

[5] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/world/oil-dispute-takes-a-page-from-congos-bloody-past.html?_r=0

The Amazon of the Planalto.

 

The Amazon is a mythical race of fierce female warriors famous for their bravery and male-like strength. Sixteenth century explorers gave the name Amazonas to a vast South American region after they claimed to have met women warriors.

                                 

                                               Amazon

The Palácio do Planalto is the heart of Brasilia the capital of Brazil, and where the president works. Dilma Vana Rousseff (age 66), the current president, is a woman who displayed Amazon-like attributes to win her re-election on October 26, 2014. She had a bumpy road to victory; she was reelected by only three percent, the slimmest margin ever in a Brazilian election.

Brazilians are known by their first names or nicknames, presidents included, so for both her admirers and opponents she is Dilma. Dilma is the first female President of Brazil. Before being elected president in 2010, she had never held an elected position. She was a party bureaucrat when Lula (a nickname), the president at the time plucked her from his cabinet to run as his successor. Hugely popular, Lula was barred by the Constitution from running a third time. With Lula’s endorsement Dilma was comfortably elected in spite of her lack of political savvy. For many Brazilians, Dilma was just a “seat warmer” until Lula could run again. Lula was frequently portrayed as a Svengali rather than a benevolent mentor. Whether or not she was a “straw man” or figurehead, Lula let her run for a second term. Now, rumor has it that Lula is scheming to run again in four years when Dilma steps down.

The seat warmer ploy is a time-honored tradition in Latin America. In this patriarchal society, it usually involves wives, daughters, and even mistresses. Thank God political foes have never hinted that Dilma was Lula’s mistress! Argentina has de facto institutionalized the tactic: its populist Peronist party spearheaded the spousal reelection movement, starting with Isabel Perón, President Juan Perón’s second wife. Sometimes the wife achieved greater popularity than the husband. In Nicaragua, Violetta Chamorro’s legacy is far more impressive than that of her assassinated husband. In this area, Guatemala outdid its neighbor: to be able to run, a former president’s wife tried to get around constitutional obstacles by divorcing her loving husband.

Dilma’s Worker’s Party (PT in Portuguese) had anticipated a smooth re-election campaign. But when her poll ratings started to fall, PT circled the wagons and ad nauseum hurled mudslinging campaign ads. Lula got into action too, and delivered countless toxic stump speeches to demonize Dilma’s center-right opponent Aécio (surname Neves da Cunha). During their several grueling television debates, Dilma was cut down to size by the younger and more telegenic Aécio, who proved to be a tough and articulate political animal. To her credit, Dilma survived the punishing marathon campaign and won. Her narrow victory owes as much to the social achievements of PT government as to the high rate of rejection of Aécio’s party. Dilma won because, on the one hand the majority of Brazilians were afraid of losing their social benefits, and on the other the desire for change expressed by the million protestors in June 2013 was not sufficiently politically articulated.

 

                                   

                                             Dilma and Aecio

Dilma is twice a survivor. In the 1970s, she survived the military dictatorship’s jails where she was reportedly tortured and she had lymphoma cancer in 2009 which was cured in 2010. While a student she was part of an urban Marxist guerrilla group and spent many years as a fugitive in the underground. Her guerrilla experience has left a lasting mark on her personality. She admits to keeping wads of cash in the Palácio da Alvorada, the official residence of the president, and it was reported that she sleeps with her shoes on!

Like many Brazilian officials with higher political ambitions, she went through a public and drastic image makeover. It involved plastic surgery, dental treatment, a new hairstyle allegedly inspired from that of New York City designer Caroline Herrera, and a power-woman’s wardrobe. Too bad for her, Michelle Bachelet of Chile and Angela Merkel of Germany all seem to be sharing the same uninspired tailor. The makeover was intended to soften her persona born out of her years as a Marxist guerrillera. It did not quite work out: the leopard cannot change its spots so easily.

      

                      Before                                                         After

For many, Dilma is Brazilian version of the Iron Lady of the United Kingdom. For this blogger she is more Iron than Lady. She comes across as stiff, authoritarian, uncharismatic, controlling, rude, and uncaring. She is said to run her cabinet like a boot camp. She does not loosen up even when surrounded by her adoring fans. In a country renowned for its congeniality, she is seen as a loner. Dilma leaves no one indifferent. For PT sympathizers and the impoverished northerners she is an icon, the Madonna of the poor, uniquely gifted to make Brazil advance toward social justice. However, for the 51 million who did not vote for her, she is like the cartoon character Cruella de Vil, a hypocrite who protects a criminal organization.

Early in 2014, it became known that PT and its political associates had set up a juicy kickback scheme and siphoned millions of dollars out of Petrobras, the state-own energy company. Although at the beginning of Dilma’s mandate she fired several ministers for corruption, she was unable or unwilling to clean the PT’s Augean stables. Brazilian politicians are notoriously known for their political conviction deficit and rent-seeking ingenuity. Dilma became hostage of an institutionalized sleaze system. She lacks Lula’s trademark jogo de cintura, (flexibility), networking and deft political footwork, all critical attributes necessary to deal with the unruly political class. She became isolated; the Congress routinely obstructed policies sponsored by her government, and legislative gridlock ensued.

After 12 years in government, Dilma’s PT party is rotten to the core. During the campaign, she asserted being unaware of the creative bribery schemes embroiling the party and its allies. As a woman, has she been systematically marginalized by PT grandees? Kept outside the loop? Dumbness or passive corruption, either options, are damning for Dilma.

Brazil politics is a man’s world, a macho preserve, and even with Lula’s endorsement Dilma was regarded as an anomaly. There were very few women in Congress to back her up. As a matter of fact, in the course of one year, Brazil fell from the 62nd position to 71st out of 142 nations in the 2014 World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report, (GGG). GGG “benchmarks national gender gaps on economic, political, educational and health based criteria”. At the beginning of her first term Dilma genuinely recruited several women to join her government. At the end, most of them were let go as they were regarded as too light weight for confront the bigwigs in Congress. Brazil will continue to fall in the GGG ranking. In 2014, Dilma has even fewer women politicians to choose from. She promised political reforms but cannot get things moving unless she mollifies the many politicians who backed her up during the campaign. The horse trading game has not yet started: her 39 ministerial posts may not be enough to satisfy the yapping politicos.

In her acceptance speech, fist raised, she promised to change her ways and be a better president. One can doubt this, unless she goes through a complete managerial makeover. During the last four years she grossly mismanaged and micromanaged the economy, and now the country is in much worse shape than when Lula handed it to her. Many blame her political shortcomings on her guerrilla past. Her underground experience certainly left a mark on her personality, however this blogger believes that there are additional reasons. One is that she did not have to go through the grueling process of climbing the election ladder from local elections to the top job, which is a steep learning curve. She was handpicked to run for president, leap-frogging the intermediary steps. Furthermore, Dilma’s politics reflect that she remains a Marxist at heart. She has been unable to actualize her convictions to meet the 21^st century challenges. Her role models may still be Lenin and Stalin who were not paragons of flexibility and conciliation. Both lacked jogo de cintura.

Last but not least, jogo de cintura and jeitinho politico (the political knack) do not come naturally to a woman born outside the patriarchal families who sit on top of the political heap. So far, she has displayed little skill to navigate socially and out maneuver the pack of political patres familias who make up half of the Brazilian Congress.

Her next cabinet will be made up of 39 ministers all picked up from the alpha politicians. Because she cannot run again, this blogger expects a permanent power struggle between these people as they jockey for poll position. Since Dilma lacks both female wile and Abraham Lincoln’s political genius to make a team of rivals collaborate, she will have to freshen up her guerrilla skills, and even get that old Kalashnikov out of the closet.