by the El Reportero’s news services
Hugo Chávez
On live TV on Jan. 27, President Hugo Chávez threatened Pedro Rodríguez, the executive president of BBVA Banco Provincial, the country’s third largest bank by assets, with expropriation if the bank didn’t help deliver on low income housing projects. The bank later issued a statement vowing to work with the government. Chávez, who is seeking re-election in 2012, has made housing his main priority for 2011, after the recent floods emergency displaced over 25,000 families.
The government is under pressure for failing, despite repeated promises by the president over the past decade, to tackle the country’s acute housing deficit. Chávez blames private construction firms and past governments, but the government’s average new build of 34,000 units a year in the last five years is down by more than a third on the previous government.
Dilma – echoes of Piñera?
The ground literally shook under President Sebastián Piñera’s inauguration in Valparaíso on March 11, 2010, as central and southern Chile was rocked by strong aftershocks in the aftermath of one of country’s worst ever earthquakes less than fortnight earlier on Feb. 27.
The heavens certainly opened over Dilma Rousseff’s historic inauguration as Brazil’s first woman president on Jan. 1, but that was nothing compared tothe torrential rains that deluged parts of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro a few week later. Like Piñera, Dilma was thrown a huge curve ball in the shape of an unprecedented natural disaster in her first weeks in office.
As in Chile, Brazil’s disaster preparedness and emergency relief planning was found wanting, prompting citizen anger and criticism from as far away as the United Nations (UN).
But like the businessman Piñera, the technocrat Dilma reacted with a cool and calm head, promising to unleash “the great organisational capacity of Brazil’s federal government” to see to it that some 5.0m (mostly low income) Brazilians are moved out of designated ‘at risk’ areas in coming years. Dilma has thus set the bar high for her new administration. She might do well to cast an eye towards Chile, where after a year marked by the trauma of the earthquake and then the glory of the operation to rescue 33 trapped miners, Piñera is now the least popular Chilean president since the return to democracy in 1990. Morales struggles with Bolivian reconciliation bid President Evo Morales marked the start of his sixth year in power and his second as Bolivia’s first ‘plurinational’ President with a call for “reconciliation” and “strategic alliances” in his annual state-of-the nation address. His popularity is at an all-time low due to the gasolinazo (his failed attempt at scrapping state fuel subsidies). Food prices are also soaring. The appeal is directed not only at traditional opposition sectors such as the Santa Cruz agricultural lobby – currently demanding measures to boost production – but also at Morales’ support base, which proved key to his recent defeat. Sandra Torres de Colombia – a First Lady “like no other”? Upon taking office in January 2008, President Alvaro Colom declared that his wife, Sandra Torres, would be a First Lady “like no other”.
The full meaning of this is becoming apparent amid mounting speculation that, despite some constitutional doubts, she will stand as the presidential candidate for the ruling centre-left Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza (UNE) in the September 2011 general elections. Her possible candidacy is also significant in the context of the emerging regional tendency where leaders faced with constitutional barriers to their immediate re-election, have entertained the idea of promoting their wives’ election as a means of preserving power and influence beyond their mandates. Latin News.
