South American Nations Form Regional Defense Council

James Suggett - Venezuelanalysis.com
03/12/2009

Mérida- Defense ministers from Venezuela and eleven other South American nations formed the South American Defense Council Tuesday at a summit in Chile. The council will be a diplomatic forum to diffuse regional conflicts, increase transparency in military expenditures, and to promote military cooperation for the fulfillment of regional security needs.

The declaration also establishes a commitment by each member nation to respect the territorial sovereignty of other member nations, and to the protection of democratic systems of government.

The new defense council is an arm of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), a political integration organization that began informally in 2004 and was formally constituted last May. Its member countries are Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Surinam y Guyana.

The United States is not included in the defense council, but the council discussed the possibility of the U.S. participating as an observer if the U.S. changes its policy toward Cuba.

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Dispatches from El Salvador: Elections

San Salvador - CB-MLK
Jorge Marin
03/13/2009

We arrived at San Salvador on Tuesday. It is a very warm and modern city. We had our training for observers of the electoral process yesterday. I am sorry to say that the possibility of fraud is high. The selling of votes happens, where people turn in their ballots to the buyer, rather than depositing it in the ballot box and then the chain of pre-dispose votes begins. The next voter already goes in to vote with a ballot which he/she uses to vote and their own ballots are turned in to the buyer, and so on. It is up to us to make sure that every voter deposits a ballot in the ballot box.

The two parties, FMLN and ARENA, have been defending and attacking each other on the media. ARENA using the power of the government in their favor to make public some of the campaign donations to Funes (FMLN) from busisness interest. Funes has defended himself well. The polls we were shown, that were concluded on March 10th, shows the FMLN with 8% ahead of ARENA. People are showing their colors without feeling intimidated in the capital.
So far so good...

Washington's Lost Credibility on Human Rights

Mark Weisbrot - THE GUARDIAN
03/11/2009

The U.S. State Department's annual human rights report got an unusual amount of criticism this year. This time the center-left coalition government of Chile was notable in joining other countries such as Bolivia, Venezuela, and China - who have had more rocky relations with Washington - in questioning the "moral authority" of the U.S. government's judging other countries' human rights practices.

In the past, Washington was able to position itself as an important judge of human rights practices despite being complicit or directly participating in some of the worst, large-scale human rights atrocities of the post-World War II era - in Vietnam, Indonesia, Central America, and other places. This makes no sense from a strictly logical point of view, but it could persist primarily because the United States was judged not on how it treated persons outside its borders but within them. Internally, the United States has had a relatively well-developed system of the rule of law, trial by jury, an independent judiciary and other constitutional guarantees (although these did not extend to African-Americans in most of the Southern United States prior to the 1960s civil rights reforms). Washington was able to contrast these conditions with those of its main adversary during the Cold War - the Soviet Union. The powerful influence of the United States over the international media helped ensure that this was the primary framework under which human rights were presented to most of the world.

U.S.-based human rights organizations will undoubtedly see the erosion of Washington's credibility on these issues as a loss - and understandably so, since the United States is still a powerful country, and they hope to use this power to pressure other countries on human rights issues. But they too should be careful to avoid the kind of politicization that has earned notoriety for the State Department's annual report - which clearly discriminates between allies and "adversary" countries in its evaluations.

The case of the recent Human Rights Watch report on Venezuela illustrates the dangers of this spillover of the politicization of human rights from the U.S. government to Washington-based non-governmental organizations (NGO's). More than 100 scholars and academics wrote a letter complaining about the report, arguing that it did not meet "minimal standards of scholarship, impartiality, accuracy, or credibility." For example, the report alleges that the Venezuelan government discriminates against political opponents in the provision of government services; but as evidence for this charge it provides only one alleged incident involving one person, in programs that serve many millions of Venezuelans. Human Rights Watch responded with a defense of its report, but the exchange of letters indicates that HRW would have been better off acknowledging the report's errors and prejudice, and taking corrective measures.

Full article here