by the El Reportero’s news services

Rodrigo Ávila

The ruling Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (Arena) has finally appointed a candidate as running mate for Rodrigo Avila in next March’s presidential elections. It made a highly controversial choice: Arturo Zablah, a wealthy businessman and former economy minister.

Zablah is a political chameleon. He tried to run for the left-wing opposition Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) in 2004, and when that came to nothing he attempted to stitch together an anti-Arena alliance last year. He has also been fiercely critical of some of the current Arena administration’s economic policies.

Tension in Mexico over energy reform

Mexico City, Oct 27 (Prensa Latina) The Mexican political scenario its still tense today with only a few hours left for the presentation to the Senate of a bill on energy reform.

This Sunday former presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador called the people to protest the approval of the initiative which will decide the future of Petroleos Mexicanos (PEMEX).

The opposition leader convoked a demonstration tomorrow at the site of the lower chamber to reject the PEMEX reform because he considers that proposal hurts national sovereignty.

Many Mexican academics warned that the reform has favorable openings for transnationals of the industry.

Analyst Carlos Payan commented that there are numerous holes in the legislation, and insisted that PEMEX is on the verge of being privatized.

Chileans vote for change

In the municipal elections on 26 October Chileans voted against incumbent mayors. This was the clearest conclusion to take from the elections which are a pointer to the general elections due at the end of 2009. Over 50 percent of the country’s 345 mayors are new to the job. The anti-incumbent swing is, therefore, bad news for the left-of-centre Concertación which has ruled Chile since the return of democracy in 1990. The ruling Concertación, however, played up the fact that it still won more council seats and mayorships than the rightwing opposition Alianza por Chile, even though it actually lost 55 mayorships. The Alianza won more mayorships and controls most of the big cities.

Bolivia’s congress approves referendum on constitution

The government of President Evo Morales this week clinched a signifi cant victory after striking a deal with the opposition to approve legislation calling for a referendum on the new constitution. Morales’ agreement to ditch the article on presidential reelection was the decisive concession. While over 100 articles were amended as a result of the negotiations in congress, the revised draft constitution retains its original spirit in terms of enshrining indigenous rights, consolidating state control over key natural resources and addressing land reform. The government victory is a setback for the political opposition, Podemos, and the regional opposition prefects.

Indigenous arrive in Cali

Tens of thousands indigenous protesters arrived in Colombia’s third largest city Cali Saturday, Oct. 25. Organizing indigenous organizations expect over 50,000 protesters to be in the capital of Valle del Cauca when they speak with Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Sunday.

Bolivian President Evo Morales, one of the prominent international figures invited to join the protesters said Friday he isn’t able to come. It’s uncertain if other international invites will be able to come.

The natives hope to be joined by other groups like labor activists, truckers and cane cutters that have been demanding improved working conditions for weeks.

Indigenous leaders will meet Uribe Sunday morning to discuss their five-point proposal to improve the situation of approximately one and a half million natives in Colombia.

­by David Bacon

The first of the 388 workers arrested in the immigration raid on the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, were deported in mid-October, Salvadorhaving spent five months in federal prison. Their crime? Giving a bad Social Security number to the company to get hired. Among them will be a young man who had his eyes covered with duct tape by a supervisor on the line, who then beat him with a meathook.

COLUMN

The Postville raid was one of the many recent immigration operations leading to criminal charges and deportations for thousands of people. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff calls this “closing the back door. “ Meanwhile, his department seeks to “open the front door” by establishing new guest-worker programs, called “close to slavery” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Something is clearly wrong with the priorities of immigration enforcement. Hungry and desperate workers go to jail and get deported. The government protects employers and seeks to turn a family-based immigration system into a managed labor supply for business. Yet national political campaigns say less and less about it.

Immigrant Latino and Asian communities feel increasinglyafraid and frustrated. Politicians want their votes, but avoid talking about the rising wave of arrests, imprisonment, and deportations.

This month national demonstrations across the nation are protesting the silence, asking candidates to speak out. Immigrant communities expect a new deal from a new administration, especially from Democrats. They want a new U.S. president to take swift and decisive action to give human rights a priority over fear, and recognize immigrants as people, not just a source of cheap labor.

Agenda for the Next President

In its first 100 days, a new administration could take these simple steps to benefit immigrants and working families:

• Stop Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from seeking serious Federal criminal charges, with incarceration in privately run prisons, for lacking papers or for bad Social Security numbers.
• Stop raiding workplaces, especially where workers are trying to organize unions or enforce wage and hour laws. This would help all workers, not just immigrants, to raise low wages.
• Double the paltry 742 federal inspectors responsible for all U.S. wage and hour violations and focus on industries where immigrants are concentrated. The National Labor Relations Board could target employers who use immigration threats to violate union rights.
• Halt community sweeps, where agents use warrants for one or two people to detain and deport dozens of others. End the government’s campaign to repeal local sanctuary ordinances and drag local law enforcement into immigration raids.
• Allow all workers to apply for a Social Security number and pay legally into the system that benefits everyone. Social Security numbers should be used for their true purpose – paying retirement and disability benefi ts – not to fi re immigrants from their jobs and send them to prison.
• Reestablish worker protections ended under Bush on existing guest worker programs, force employers to hire domestically fi rst, and decertify any contractor guilty of labor violations.
• Restore human rights in border communities, stop construction of the border wall between the U.S. and Mexico, and disband the Operation Streamline federal court, where scores of young borders are sent to prison in chains every day.

Alternatives

After the first 100 days, Democrats will have to decide what reforms to bring before Congress, and when. Some would delay action for a year or more. But the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and dozens of trade groups won’t sit on their hands. They’ve been pushing for years for big guest-worker programs, more raids and enforcement, and a weak legalization program. But many immigrant and labor rights activists advocate three steps toward an alternative, more progressive reform:

1. A moratorium on raids, while protecting human and labor rights, in the fi rst 100 days.
2. A law to give green-card visas to the undocumented and clear up the backlog of people already waiting for them. If visas are more easily available abroad, people won’t have to cross the border without them. That law could also create jobs in unemployed communities, repeal employer sanctions laws that make work a crime for immigrants, and encourage labor law reform to protect workers’ rights. Guest-worker programs with a record of abuse should be ended, as they were in 1964.
3. A new approach to trade policy and renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), so they stop causing poverty and uprooting communities, making migration peoples’ only alternative for survival. Reject new trade agreements with countries like Colombia, which will cause job loss in the U.S. and spread low wages, labor violations, and displacement abroad. U.S. tax dollars, instead of being spent on the Iraq War, could expand rural credit, education and health care in Mexico and other countries, easing the pressure behind migration.

There’s common ground here among immigrants, communities of color, unions, churches, civil rights organizations, and working families. Legalization and immigrant rights, tied to guaranteeing jobs for all working families, can bring people together. All workers, including immigrants, need the right to organize and enforce labor standards, the same goal sought by unions in the Employee Free Choice Act. Changing trade policy will benefit working-class communities in the U.S. while helping families of immigrants back home from Oaxaca to El Salvador.

The diverse communities who need these reforms can and will find ways to seek them together. In fact, if Barack Obama wins the presidency and a larger Democratic majority takes hold in Congress, they will owe their victory to this coalition.

After the election, this same coalition will need jobs and rights. But immigrant workers are going to jail now. The wave of raids continues to divide families, even as candidates hold rallies and ask for votes. In Los Angeles’ Placita Olvera, activists have begun a hunger strike to stop the deportations. Marches and demonstrations are making the same point from coast to coast.Promises of change aren’t enough. For candidates who want working-class votes, the fi rst step is to speak out.

Silence on Immigration David Bacon | October 23, 2008 Foreign Policy In Focus http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5620.

by the El Reportero news services

Cristina Fernández

The government of President Cristina Fernández announced Oct. 21 that it will send a bill to Congress to nationalize Argentina’s 10 private pension funds. The nationalization will give the government control over some $US30bn currently managed by private funds, around half of which is invested in Argentine government bonds.

The government says that the decision was made to safeguard pensions against the global economic downturn. It may well, however, be motivated by a less noble concern: Fernández’s increasingly cash-strapped government is desperate for money to service its debts next year, when its financing needs are set to almost double.

The news was met with horror by foreign investors, dealing a crushing blow to already shaky market confidence in Argentina, and has given the opposition another reason over which to unite against the Kirchners. An opposition daily, La Nación, went so far today (22 October) as to describe the decision as “legalized robbery”.

­by Robert Heuer

For those who are jittery about the growth and influence of the U.S. Hispanic Argentina population, there’s a lesson to be learned from the experience of one U.S. institution.

Major league baseball long ago stopped freaking out about its own “Latino takeover.”

It discovered Latinos are not a threat that should be fenced out. The pathway leading to baseball’s transformation is truly international. Spanish-speaking ballplayers have become a dominant force in the game as baseball has been setting attendance records and generating lucrative TV deals.

Baseball’s future is decidedly multicultural. Fears about allowing too many foreigners on the diamond are very much part of its past. A century-long Latin American connection is the cornerstone of MLB’s strategy to tap talent and fans worldwide.

Cubans began playing major league ball in 1911. At first, obviously-white guys were the only ones allowed, then sort-of white guys and, since1947, ballplayers reflecting the island nation’s full spectrum of racial hues. That pipeline closed after Fidel Castro seized power in 1959.

With Cuba off-limits, various teams found cheap talent elsewhere in the Caribbean.

This trend did not sit well with Minnesota Twins manager Cookie Lavagetto.

Claiming the “national” game was in jeopardy’ he told a reporter in 1961: “How will you ever fill the stands for the World Series if you have nine Yankees from Venezuela playing nine Giants from Puerto Rico?”

Latinos accounted for 7 percent of major league rosters that year. Twenty years later the numbers had climbed to 11 percent. Latinos were hardly taking oven but the prospect worried others in baseball.

Pittsburgh Pirate scout Howie Haak was another insider willing to say so. This scouting legend got his start !n Latin America in the 1950s on orders from Pirates general manager Branch Rickey to find the next Roberto Clemente.

Noting the game’s best young players were African American and Latino, Haak told a Pittsburgh reporter in 1982 that the Pirates probably should trade for a few whites.

Haak’s offhand remark made headlines nationwide. Baseball management’s heated denial fueled speculation !n the press about some magic percentage of white players needed on the fi eld to fi ll the ballpark.

In a recent interview, Philadelphia Phillies’ general manager Pat Gillich said Haah stated a fear then widely held inside baseball. With many of the best U S.-born athletes pursuing football and basketball careers, baseball was forced to seek talent outside of the U.S. despite uncertainty as to how its white fan base would react to changing demographics.

Gillich credits Hash with opening his eyes to prospecting opportunities overseas. In the 1960s, Gillich launched his baseball management career by developing Latin American scouting operations for Houston and then Toronto. In the early 1980s, the Blue Jays and Dodgers were at the forefront of a major league acceleration to secure players from around the world.

On opening day 2008, players from 16 foreign countries and territories fi lled nearly one-third of MLB’s rosters and nearly half of its minor league feeder system.

Dominican major leaguers totaled 86, Venezuelans 52, Puerto Ricans 29 and Japanese 16.

Clearly, ethnicity is no longer a concern. After all, eight of 17 players that fans voted onto starting lineups for this summer’s All Star game were either Latino or Japanese.

“Americans are a lot less prejudiced than they used to be,” Gillich explained. With the talent search now global in scope, Gillick sees the greatest promise in China and Cuba. And he considers nearby Mexico City on the short list for future expansion.

Meanwhile, MLB’s international business arm expands the enterprise’s appeal through special events, broadcasting, licensing and sponsorship initiatives. Many corporations see baseball as a vehicle to sell consumer products through out the planet.

An MLB spokesman said 2008 game broadcasts were retransmitted in 13 languages to more than 200 countries. Next March, teams from 16 countries will take part in MLB’s second World Baseball Classic.

The plan is to hold the tournament every four years thereaffer, including an expansion of the participant fi eld in 2013.

Baseball’s internationalization could lead to reinstatement in the 2016 Olympic Games. The Olympic committee dropped baseball from the 2012 schedule because professionals don’t participate. (National Basketball Association players can compete because summer Olympics take place during the off-season; the National Hockey League takes a two-week hiatus so its players can participate in the winter Olympics).

MLB is receptive to scheduling a vacation in August 2016 for the Olympics, allowing players to represent their homelands.

According to a 2007 ESPN sports poll, 63.1 percent of U.S. Hispanics are MLB fans. Seventeen of its 30 teams broadcast at least partial schedules in Spanish.

(Robert Heuerr of Evanston, IIL, is a public policy consultant. He has covered baseball’ Latinos for Hispanic Link since 1983.)