Wednesday, November 6, 2019
How Venezuela could influence Argentina's IMF talks
Patrick Gillespie. Bloomberg. November 4, 2019
Argentine President-elect Alberto Fernandez's stance on Venezuela may pose another challenge to his ability to renegotiate the terms of an aid package from the International Monetary Fund.
An imposing debt load and uncertainty about his economic policies already limit Fernandez's room for a renegotiation of the record credit line, but his views on the Venezuelan regime of Nicolas Maduro are also softer than those of outgoing Mauricio Macri.
A more sympathetic approach toward Maduro could hurt Argentina's standing with President Donald Trump, who has put Venezuela among his priorities in Latin America. The U.S. holds the most influence at the IMF as its biggest shareholder and was key in the approval of the $56 billion package given to Macri last year amid a sharp currency crisis.
"Whatever policy the new government decides to do with Venezuela will have repercussions in the bilateral relationship with the U.S.," said Hector Torres, a former IMF executive director from Argentina who represented South American countries. "Argentina depends heavily on the IMF and the U.S. has a lot of interest in Venezuela right now."
During the campaign, Fernandez suggested Argentina could leave the Lima Group, an ad-hoc outfit created in 2017 by nations seeking free elections in Venezuela, and align with Mexico and Uruguay, which have taken a less confrontational approach. He's also demurred on calling Venezuela a dictatorship -- a term Macri has repeatedly used. A week after beating Macri in the election, Fernandez has yet to comment specifically on his policy for the country stricken by a deep humanitarian and economic crisis.
Fernandez's campaign didn't provide comment for this story. A U.S. State Department spokesperson for Western Hemisphere Affairs said "the crisis in Venezuela has already formed part of the discussion with the new Argentine team, and we hope to work together to help Venezuelans recover the democracy and rule of law they are being denied."
A spokesperson for the Fund said "the decision to support a country's economic program with IMF lending is a prerogative of the IMF's Executive Board which represents the 189 members of the Fund."
Mexico Visit
Fernandez may start to show his foreign policy cards in Mexico, where he makes his first international trip as president-elect in a wink to the leftists governments of the region. He'll meet on Monday with President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a leader who has tried hard to keep a distance from the Lima Group, calling for a peaceful resolution in Venezuela without labeling Maduro a dictator.
If Fernandez adopts a similar middle-ground stance, it wouldn't go well with the U.S., said Benjamin Gedan, a former White House National Security Council director for South America in the Barack Obama administration.
"It would likely provoke a negative response from the Trump administration, and potentially jeopardize U.S. support, including at the IMF," he said from Washington. "That's particularly because President Trump is a very transactional leader."
Gedan points out that Argentina's relationship with the U.S. doesn't hinge on many other issues beyond the IMF and Venezuela. That leaves Fernandez, who swears in on Dec. 10, with few alternatives to appease the U.S.
On Friday, Trump called Fernandez to congratulate him and said he asked the IMF to work with the incoming government. Fernandez told Trump he hoped they'll have a "cordial" relationship, according to a statement distributed by the president-elect press team in Argentina. The White House readout of the call made no mention of the IMF.
Economic Policies
To be sure, the IMF will negotiate with Argentina through the prism of economic policies, not foreign policy, said Claudio Loser, an Argentine who served as the Fund's western hemisphere director between 1994 and 2002. Closer ties with Venezuela would increase tensions in case Fernandez comes up with a "very undisciplined" economic program, but wouldn't be enough to derail the program, he said.
"The Argentines will have to go beyond just having closer relations with Venezuela for the IMF to withhold their help," Loser said.
Sticking to Macri's Venezuela policy isn't much easier for Fernandez. His running mate, former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, was one of Venezuela's top allies when she governed for eight years until 2015, at one point even giving Maduro the country's top honor. Maintaining Macri's confrontational policy would reflect on Fernandez's judgment as president and likely anger her noisy radical left base.
Torres, the former IMF official, says there is a chance Fernandez's strategy may embody a phrase made famous by Juan Peron, Argentina's three-time president last century and founder of the political movement Peronism: Put your left turn signal on, but then go right.
"Part of what Alberto Fernandez is doing in visiting AMLO and giving signs that the Lima Group isn't his favorite -- that's putting on the left turn signal, but he may turn the steering wheel to the right," said Torres. "I'm optimistic that Fernandez is pragmatic."
Brazilian president's son suggests using dictatorship-era tactics on leftist foes
Tom Phillips. The Guardian. November 4, 2019
Voices from across Brazil’s political spectrum have condemned the son of the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, after he suggested hardline dictatorship-era tactics might be needed to crush his father’s leftist foes.
Eduardo Bolsonaro made the incendiary remarks – which many observers suspect were a deliberate distraction from renewed media speculation over the family’s links to organized crime – during a softball YouTube interview broadcast on Thursday.
In the interview the 35-year-old congressman claimed – without offering evidence – that the recent wave of Latin American protests and the left’s return to power in Argentina were part of a Cuba-funded conspiracy to bring “revolution” to Latin America.
“If the left radicalizes to this extent [in Brazil] we will need to respond, and that response could come via a new AI-5,” said Bolsonaro, who is the regional representative of Steve Bannon’s far-right group “The Movement”.
That was a reference to one of the most traumatic events in recent Brazilian history – December 1968’s Institutional Act Number Five (AI-5) - when Brazil’s military rulers moved to extinguish growing political unrest by indefinitely outlawing freedom of expression and assembly and closing congress.
“The AI-5 was an instrument intended to intimidate people … It allowed the dictatorship to repress all opposition and dissent,” the historians Lilia Schwarz and Heloisa M Starling wrote in their recent “biography” of Brazil.
As a new era of suppression began and dissidents fled into exile, one newspaper tried to skirt the censors with a now famous front page weather forecast that announced: “Stormy weather. Suffocating temperature. Air unbreathable. The country is being swept by strong winds.”
“AI-5 was such a symbolic moment because it signalled the intensification of the military movement’s authoritarianism,” Schwarz said.
In a country still grappling with the legacy of those grim days of authoritarian rule, Bolsonaro’s provocation – for which he later offered a partial apology – sparked outrage, from left to right.
“Declarations such as those of Eduardo Bolsonaro are repugnant,” the speaker of Brazil’s lower house, Rodrigo Maia, tweeted.
“The AI-5 … suspended rights and introduced censorship: an authoritarian’s dream. The dream of the [Bolsonaro] clan,” tweeted Joice Hasselmann, a disaffected Bolsonaro ally. “We cannot allow this serious attack on democracy.”
Leftwing politicians vowed to seek the politician’s removal from office. “Eduardo is a spoiled brat bawling his authoritarian desires … We will not stand for it,” tweeted the progressive senator Randolfe Rodrigues, summoning Brazilians to a day of “anti-authoritarian” protests next Tuesday.
Schwarz called Bolsonaro’s remarks a Trumpian bid to distract from compromising media reports that undermined the Bolsonaro family’s “moral standing”.
“It’s a bit like Donald Trump’s tendency: every time you feel a scandal drawing near … you do something to draw attention away from that matter and put it somewhere else,” she said.
Foreign observers were also aghast. “I never thought I would … hear such nonsense out of Brazil,” one veteran ambassador told the Brazilian journalist Jamil Chade.
The controversy caps an anarchic week in Brazilian politics.
In the early hours of Wednesday Brazil’s president launched a furious tirade against the “putrid” press from a hotel room in Saudi Arabia. That outburst came after Brazil’s top broadcaster revealed the investigation into the 2018 assassination of the leftist politician Marielle Franco suggested the suspects had met at Bolsonaro’s compound before the attack.
‘Guardian’ of the Amazon Killed in Brazil by Illegal Loggers
Manuela Andreoni and Letícia Casado. New York Times. November 4, 2019
In the months before an Indigenous leader was killed with a gunshot in the face in the Amazon reserve he had spent much of his life protecting, at least two efforts were made to warn Brazil’s government of the risks posed by illegal loggers in the region.
In April, members of the Guajajara Indigenous group went to the capital, Brasília, to plead for protection from loggers invading their land in the state of Maranhão. In August, the state’s head of human rights wrote to the federal police to say loggers were threatening the Guajajara in the Araribóia Indigenous Land.
But those warnings didn’t help Paulo Paulino Guajajara during a hunting trip with a friend in the Araribóia reserve on Friday, when they were ambushed by a group of five loggers working illegally in the area.
Laércio Guajajara, the friend, who was wounded has been released from the hospital. A logger was reported missing.
The murder is one of a string of losses for Brazil’s indigenous communities, as miners and loggers make more and bolder incursions into Indigenous territories and other protected areas. Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, has said that Brazil’s Indigenous reserves should be opened up to commercial exploration.
“The Brazilian government is not following its constitutional duty of protecting them,” said Gilberto Vieira, an associate secretary at Brazil’s Indigenous Missionary Council, which is connected to the Catholic Church.
In June, several dozen illegal miners had invaded the Wajapi Indigenous community, in the Brazilian Amazon, and stabbed and killed one of its leaders.
Mr. Guajajara, 26, left one child. He and Laércio Guajajara were members of the forest guardians, a group the Guajajara created to defend themselves and their land against miners, loggers and others interested in illegally taking resources from the reserve.
In a searing statement lamenting Mr. Guajajara’s death, the association of Brazilian Indigenous peoples said the Bolsonaro administration had “Indigenous blood” on its hands.
“The increased violence in indigenous territories is a direct reflection of their hate speech, as well as their measures against Indigenous peoples in Brazil,” they said in a statement posted on their website on Saturday. “Our lands are being invaded, our leaders murdered, attacked and criminalized, and the Brazilian state is abandoning Indigenous peoples to their fate with the ongoing dismantling of environmental and indigenous policies.”
Brazil’s minister of justice, Sérgio Moro, promised a thorough investigation of Mr. Guajajara’s death by the country’s federal police.
“We will spare no efforts to take those responsible for this serious crime to justice,” he said in a tweet.
The Indigenous Missionary Council had warned in a report published on Sept. 24 that the number of invasions of Indigenous lands by loggers, miners and land grabbers was rising. They documented 160 incursions through September of this year, compared to 109 during the whole of 2018.
The Guajajara people of the state of Maranhão knew they were in danger.
“All indigenous lands in Maranhão are under threat of invasion,” Indigenous leader Rosilene Guajajara said in an interview in April, when several of her community went to Brasília to ask the federal government for protection.
In September, Mr. Moro was warned by the government of Maranhão state of threats to Indigenous land near Araribóia, where Mr. Guajajara was killed, but no measures were taken to protect it or those living there, state officials said.
“In the face of the evident difficulty of federal government bodies to protect Indigenous lands, we will try to help,” Maranhão’s leftist governor, Flávio Dino, wrote on Twitter as he announced a statewide task force to protect Indigenous people.
The murder of Mr. Guajajara comes at a time when a spike in rainforest fires in the Brazilian Amazon drew a global outcry. As deforestation increases, the forest is approaching a tipping point at which it would begin to self-destruct, instead of self-sustain, which could frustrate worldwide efforts to fight climate change.
While a task force that included Brazilian military was able to reduce the number of fires in October to a record low, research shows Indigenous people are some of the most important agents of environmental protection in the forest.
Paulo Moutinho, a senior scientist at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute, said that historically Indigenous lands have some of the lowest deforestation levels among conservation units in Brazil.
“If we want to preserve the great benefits the Amazon forest offers us, it is fundamental that we recognize these peoples’ right to land,” he said. “They are providing an invaluable service.”
NYC Opens $500 Million Decoy Subway Station To Catch Turnstile Jumpers
https://www.theonion.com/nyc-opens-500-million-decoy-subway-station-to-catch-tu-1839644052?utm
NEW YORK—In a new effort by the MTA and law enforcement to crack down on fare evasion, New York City reportedly opened a $500 million decoy subway station this week to catch turnstile jumpers.
“This sprawling, state-of-the-art station will have all the sights and sounds of a regular terminal, including turnstiles that will not accept MetroCards regardless of their available balance, increasing the likelihood of attempts to avoid payment,” said MTA project manager Greg Langdon, adding that the act of fare evasion would cause the floor to open up, sending the commuter down a chute connected to a windowless underground holding cell.
“From the outside, there will be signage indicating that the very realistic station serves every train in the system. Upon entry, the station’s 500 security cameras will automatically capture high-definition photographs and videos of travellers and send them directly to the nearest precinct to be referenced against arrest records. A mix of plainclothes police and SWAT officers will also be on hand to help detain and interrogate anyone trying to ride for free. We hope to completely eliminate fare dodgers by adding decoy stations throughout the city.”
At press time, Langdon added that to cover costs for this pilot program, the MTA would be closing 472 stations.
The world is getting wetter, yet water may become less available for North America and Eurasia
Plants will demand more water
in the future making less water available for people
November 4, 2019
Dartmouth College
With climate change, plants of
the future will consume more water than in the present day, leading to less
water available for people living in North America and Eurasia, according to a
new study. The research suggests a drier future despite anticipated precipitation
increases for places like the United States and Europe, populous regions
already facing water stresses.
With climate change, plants of
the future will consume more water than in the present day, leading to less
water available for people living in North America and Eurasia, according to a
Dartmouth-led study in Nature Geoscience. The research suggests a drier
future despite anticipated precipitation increases for places like the United
States and Europe, populous regions already facing water stresses.
The study challenges an
expectation in climate science that plants will make the world wetter in the
future. Scientists have long thought that as carbon dioxide concentrations
increase in the atmosphere, plants will reduce their water consumption, leaving
more freshwater available in our soils and streams. This is because as more
carbon dioxide accumulates in our atmosphere plants can photosynthesize the
same amount while partly closing the pores (stomata) on their leaves. Closed
stomata means less plant water loss to the atmosphere, increasing water in the land.
The new findings reveal that this story of plants making the land wetter is
limited to the tropics and the extremely high latitudes, where freshwater
availability is already high and competing demands on it are low. For much of
the mid-latitudes, the study finds, projected plant responses to climate change
will not make the land wetter but drier, which has massive implications for
millions of people.
"Approximately 60 percent
of the global water flux from the land to the atmosphere goes through plants, called
transpiration. Plants are like the atmosphere's straw, dominating how water
flows from the land to the atmosphere. So vegetation is a massive determinant
of what water is left on land for people," explained lead author Justin S.
Mankin, an assistant professor of geography at Dartmouth and adjunct research
scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. "The
question we're asking here is, how do the combined effects of carbon dioxide
and warming change the size of that straw?"
Using climate models, the
study examines how freshwater availability may be affected by projected changes
in the way precipitation is divided among plants, rivers and soils. For the
study, the research team used a novel accounting of this precipitation partitioning,
developed earlier by Mankin and colleagues to calculate the future runoff loss
to future vegetation in a warmer, carbon dioxide-enriched climate.
The new study's findings
revealed how the interaction of three key effects of climate change's impacts
on plants will reduce regional freshwater availability. First, as carbon
dioxide increases in the atmosphere, plants require less water to
photosynthesize, wetting the land. Yet, second, as the planet warms, growing
seasons become longer and warmer: plants have more time to grow and consume
water, drying the land. Finally, as carbon dioxide concentrations increase,
plants are likely to grow more, as photosynthesis becomes amplified. For some
regions, these latter two impacts, extended growing seasons and amplified
photosynthesis, will outpace the closing stomata, meaning more vegetation will
consume more water for a longer amount of time, drying the land. As a result,
for much of the mid-latitudes, plants will leave less water in soils and
streams, even if there is additional rainfall and vegetation is more efficient
with its water usage. The result also underscores the importance of improving
how climate models represent ecosystems and their response to climate change.
The world relies on freshwater
for human consumption, agriculture, hydropower, and industry. Yet, for many
places, there's a fundamental disconnect between when precipitation falls and
when people use this water, as is the case with California, which gets more
than half of its precipitation in the winter, but peak demands are in the
summer. "Throughout the world, we engineer solutions to move water from
point A to point B to overcome this spatiotemporal disconnect between water
supply and its demand. Allocating water is politically contentious,
capital-intensive and requires really long-term planning, all of which affects
some of the most vulnerable populations. Our research shows that we can't
expect plants to be a universal panacea for future water availability. So,
being able to assess clearly where and why we should anticipate water
availability changes to occur in the future is crucial to ensuring that we can
be prepared," added Mankin.
Researchers from
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, Richard Seager, Jason
E. Smerdon, Benjamin I. Cook, who is also affiliated with NASA Goddard
Institute for Space Studies, and A. Park Williams, contributed to this study.
Story Source:
Materials provided by Dartmouth College. Note:
Content may be edited for style and length.
Journal Reference:
Justin S. Mankin, Richard
Seager, Jason E. Smerdon, Benjamin I. Cook & A. Park Williams. Mid-latitude
freshwater availability reduced by projected vegetation responses to climate
change. Nature Geoscience, 2019 DOI: 10.1038/s41561-019-0480-x
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