China´s Chernobyl Moment By Mariano A. Caucino China´s attitude towards COVID-19 is the focus of international concern due to the pandemic global development. The Communist regime is blamed for its reckless stance in hiding the disease or having delayed reporting the virus to the Word Health Organization (WHO). President Xi Jinping warned the public on…
These are extremely good news in the realm of economic redeployment post covid19. Because these will be the wealth creators and the job providers for the generation that will take command of the US economy and those of emerging markets although the strength, degree and quality of the process in emerging markets will largely depend on their leadership quality.
The harsh reality is that Maduro is a stubborn dictator like his mentors from Havana. In my view, he is not likely to abandon the reins of power. So far, popular uprisings, U.S. and international sanctions, coronavirus, and criminalization of the leadership have not brought about the downfall of the regime.
Therefore, it is also important to consider other options.
The COVID-19 global crisis has placed China in the center of world´s attention. A number of accusations against Beijing hold that the Chinese Communist regime hide or delayed information of the facts related to the pandemic.The rise of China provoked some debates as to whether the 21st Century would belong to her. Western powers as Spain, Portugal, France, the British Empire and the United States of America led the world in the last five hundred years. Would China become the World´s leader in this next century? In today’s world, the United States remains the only nation on earth able to practice the three spheres of power: military authority, economic capacity and soft power. However, the exercise of that power is conditioned by the present historical circumstances. It is highly probable that the nation that will develop the vaccine against COVID-19 will acquire international prestige and soft power comparable to the Man on the Moon achievement. That discovery will have geopolitical consequences. Since the Opium Wars in the mid-19th century, China blames the West for her sense of failure. At the same time, China charges the United States with striving to prevent her claimed own harmonious and peaceful development. There might be a final paradox. Asia might be the world´s first region to recover from the severe recession that will affect the whole globe. The COVID-19 drama will represent the fateful irony of having started and ended in the same place.
Thus even in this moment when the US public sentiment is in favor of isolationism, the US had to intervene in the region to enforce rule of law or the land of the free will soon be surrounded by a collection of territories that could be described as modern Port Royals or safe havens for bandits. In terms of infrastructure hospitals and clinics have not seen innovation enter their halls since WWII. As a result there was not a system in place to deal with a pandemic let alone the facilities or the staff for treatment of patients. In terms of quenching the pandemic curve, to this day the only countries that have succeeded are those that opportunely identified those people carrying contagion and isolated them sternly. Fortunately enough it seems like many states in the US and countries in Latin America are seeking the advise of Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland ad New Zealand to face this catastrophic turn of events. These nations will most probably explain the United States how to better deploy the software and hardware it created in modernizing health care and effectively battle this 21st century nemesis. These nations will also teach Latin America what not to do in this crisis and how to extract the best value of their limited infrastructure.
The Coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has paralyzed the world forcing governments to subject their peoples to confinement in order to control the emergency. This measure is taking the planet’s nearly 600 million people to poverty. The COVID-19 pandemic has altered, and in some cases superseded, our social behavioral models. It has fractured the people’s routine, and compels everyone to new behaviors such as the “social distancing”. With prolonged quarantines and confinements, there is no way to compensate the informally employed for lost income, nor is there a way to provide them the means for survival, which takes those who are most negatively impacted to sooner than later to have cause for rejection and non-compliance with control measures, creating scenarios to activate destabilization of governments and attempt against freedom, human rights and democracy. This is why it becomes urgent to include the political element in crisis management, so that leaders and governments from throughout the world activate, as soon as possible, the mechanisms to forsake quarantines and confinements. To push a change of social relations’ paradigms and activate the society at-large with measures that prevent the spread of the disease but that do not strangle the citizenry, condemning them to misery and disregard.
On April 4th, Rafael Callejas, former president of Honduras, died in Atlanta. He had been in the U.S. for the last five years as a consequence of the U.S. prosecution of FIFA leaders worldwide. President Callejas was the president of the Honduran Football Association and a member of FIFA’s Television and Marketing Committee. In 2016 President Callejas pleaded guilty in a U.S. court to charges of racketeering and wire fraud. At the moment of his death, he was living in Atlanta where he was being treated for leukemia. And perhaps the greatest punishment was separation from Norma Gaborit — his wife, muse and love of his life. They were twin souls. His heart broke when he realized that he would not be able to see her again given that the U.S. denied an entry a visa for her to come and support him through his leukemia treatment. When accused of corruption he presented himself to justice and was acquitted on every charge. Callejas took responsibility for his felonies and faced justice. In short, he was a great leader and gentleman who regrettably succumbed to the cult of easy money which is widespread in Latin America. He takes with him a political virtue. These virtues have always been important but today in the times of covid19 are essential to secure the survival of humanity.
One possible interpretation of the COVID-19 global drama might be that this terrible pandemic is a sort of answer from Nature in the face of human inability to prevent and reduce environmental damage. It was at the beginning of 1968 when a group of scientists, businessmen, academics and diplomats were invited by the Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei and the Scottish scientist Alexander King to a meeting in the Accademia dei Lincei, in a sixteenth century palazzo of Villa Farmesina, in the Italian capital. This became known as the Club of Rome. The Club of Rome’s became famous four years later when its report on “The Limits to Growth” (1972) was published. Controversially, the report pointed out that the temperature of the Planet would rise approximately two degrees Celsius by 2052 and that between 2008 and 2020 the world would achieve its maximum production level according to the available natural resources. The Club of Rome warned about global alterations that would affect the whole of humankind. At the time, some of its warnings were dismissed as outlandish. In recent years, a huge debate came back concerning primarily Climate Change and Global Warming. Many believe that the COVID -19 challenge may provoke deep changes to humankind in the years to come. The founders of the Club of Rome might have been solitary prophets, rebellious crusaders that tried to make humankind aware of the inevitable path to suicide, or no more than neo-Malthusian amateurs recycling old and rejected theories. These are questions and worries emerging in these fateful days, dominated by anxieties and uncertainties.
The “mechanism to fight Transnational Organized Crime more efficiently” established jurisdiction in the United States’ justice system, thus formalizing the concept that “Castrochavism” is organized crime and not politics. This is about the rule of law. This is what the accusations of criminal wrongdoing filed in United States’ district courts. The “narco-terrorist conspiracy” involving the production and trafficking of cocaine was undertaken by this criminal group who controlled the de-facto political power under the label of “21st Century Socialism”, today known as “Castrochavism”. In columns, books, and conferences I have asserted -and today I insist- in that criminals who hold or held power in countries with Castrochavism dictatorships do not enjoy any type of immunity or privilege, nor are they protected by any concept of sovereignty, non-intervention, nor territoriality, because they are an “organized criminal group” (Article 2 of the Palermo Convention) who commit “serious crimes of a transnational nature” (Art. 2, Subparagraph 2). This is not a political matter, neither is it a matter of international affairs. This is a matter of justice, of transnational crime.
“The question is whether it is necessary to adopt the Chinese formula and shut the whole country down,” Could not we strike a kind of Nash balance in public policy-making and create incentives for people to work harder and to protect themselves from the virus without suspending economic activity? In the West those of us that live in fully operational democracies need to advocate balance in our public policies so that lockdowns serve the purpose of planting the pillars for a strong rebound. And this could be achieved if Americans get the much heralded cash aid wrapped in distance learning courses that teach them robotics, coding and software writing. But just giving the public cash — without using the opportunity to offer retraining — could worsen their predicament as many economic activities are going to use the lockdown period to deepen their digitalization. This means less traditional jobs and more digital valuable jobs.
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