by the El Reportero news services
Hugo Chávez
President Hugo Chávez narrowly lost both parts of the referendum to reform the constitution on 2 December.
The result does not mean that Chávez’s grip on the country’s institutions has been weakened.
No opposition leader called on Chávez to make good on his threat “to go” if he was defeated in the referendum.
Paradoxically, Chávez’s influence in Latin America may even have been strengthened because his ready admission of his defeat (before all the ballots had been counted) underlines his democratic credentials and demolishes the rightwing claim that free elections are not possible in Venezuela.
Calderón rethinks relations with Gordillo
MEXICO – President Felipe Calderón’s private secretary, César Nava, said on 24 November that the government is rethinking its relations with Elba Esther Gordillo, the hugely influential leader of the teachers’ union and leader of the Partido Nueva Alianza.
Felipe Calderón
The statement, by one of Calderón’s chief advisers, has huge implications. Gordillo sees herself as one of the country’s power brokers: she claimed that she tilted the 2006 election Calderón’s way. This year, however, her importance in elections has been less meaningful.
Draft constitution “approved” in Bolivia amid bloodshed
Against a backdrop of violence which saw at least four dead and 130 injured, on November 24, delegates from the ruling Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) pushed a draft of the new constitution through the constituent assembly.
Jurisdiction ruling in Nicaragua-Colombia will be Dec 13
Whether it has jurisdiction to decide a border dispute between Nicaragua and Colombia over a tiny group of Caribbean islands, will be decided on Dec. 13. The U.N.’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) will rule on December 13.
Nicaragua petitioned the ICJ, the United Nations’ highest tribunal based in The Hague, to grant it sovereignty over the archipelago and end the row that Colombia says started nearly 200 years ago and was settled nearly 80 years ago.
“The judgment will deal solely with the preliminary objections raised by Colombia regarding the jurisdiction of the court,” the ICJ said in a statement.
The two nations, separated by Panama and Costa Rica, lay claim to the isolated Caribbean Islands San Andres and Providencia off Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast, as well as several keys and some 50,000 sq km of fishing waters.
According to a Reuter’s report, Colombia told the court in June border disputes were inevitable after the fall of the Spanish Empire in the Americas and the one in question was “definitively settled” in 1928, when Nicaragua and Colombia signed a treaty granting Colombia sovereignty over the islands.
But Nicaragua’s Sandinista government in the 1980s annulled the accord and argued it was signed while Nicaragua was under U.S. military occupation.
Many Nicaraguans consider the treaty a U.S. payoff to Colombia for arranging the independence of Panama from Colombia in order to build the Panama Canal.
