Articles and opinion columns by Latin American analysts who take an unwavering stand for freedom, including members and directors of the IID.
The global crisis unleashed by the Coronavirus pandemic is used to benefit transnational organized crime by the dictatorships from Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. They take advantage of the pandemic to strengthen their de-facto regimes, conspire to topple democracies, and profit from international aid, the human trafficking of enslaved physicians and the increase of narcotics’ trafficking. Democracies -with successes and failures- responded within the framework of; respecting human rights, the rule of law, freedom of the press, the obligation of accountability and transparency, while dictatorships did so using their system of oppression, repression, and the commission of more crime to meet their one and only objective which is to keep themselves indefinitely in power with impunity.
Headlines tell us that many heads of state in our hemisphere have faced significant cabinet resignations to the point that analysts have dubbed those nations as revolving door syndrome countries — from the US, to Brazil, to Argentina, to Peru — as good news for the maturity of democracy. This was precisely the observation made by Alexis de Tocqueville on the strength of democracy in the United States “ The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.”
Alberto Fernandez and Cristina Kirchner’s government is openly practicing “human trafficking and slavery” with the over 200 Cuban physicians it indicated it will deploy to Argentina with the alibi of “providing medical care in the peak of the Coronavirus pandemic.
In his work on political democracy, Considerations on Representative Government, John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) presents an eloquent exposition for the value of democratic participation by all citizens. Mill thought it hurtful that “…the constitution of the country should declare ignorance to be entitled to as much political power as knowledge.” Still, he believed that democracy could overcome even the incompetent participation of uninformed citizens. But, here is where democratic theory gets thorny and controversial.
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.
