Chavez raises Venezuelan minimum wage 25 percent

Chavez raises Venezuelan minimum wage 25 percent


By CHRISTOPHER TOOTHAKER, Associated Press Writer
Fri Jan 15, 11:38 pm ET

CARACAS, Venezuela – President Hugo Chavez announced a 25-percent increase in Venezuela's minimum wage Friday to try to blunt the effects of soaring inflation, and defended his handling of an energy crisis and other domestic problems.
Chavez challenged opponents' predictions that his popularity could take a dive due to measures such as last week's currency devaluation and rolling blackouts imposed by the government.
"They say the country is collapsing ... that Chavez is going to fall," he said in his annual state-of-the-nation address to the National Assembly. "They are going to be disappointed."
Chavez's opponents are looking to capitalize on a range of vulnerabilities as they try to regain control of the National Assembly in September elections: energy shortages, 25-percent inflation, a banking scandal involving businessmen with ties to the government, rampant crime and heaps of trash lining potholed city streets.
"They say everything is Chavez's fault. But with so much repetition, which is what they do, some people end up believing them," he said. "There's a government here that knows what it's doing."
Chavez isn't easily thrown off balance by adversity, and "El Comandante" seemed very much at ease as he greeted hundreds of spirited supporters outside the assembly upon his arrival.
He briefly strummed on a harp, joining a musical group playing "joropo," folk music from the sun-baked central plains where the president was born and raised.
Chavez said the minimum wage will increase 10 percent in March and 15 percent in September, bringing it to nearly 1,200 bolivars, or $521 at a new preferential exchange rate set last week for priority goods such as food. Inflation is widely expected to surge higher this year after last week's devaluation.
Chavez's government also began power outages of up to four hours a day throughout the country this week. But a day after the measures took effect, Chavez suspended the outages in the capital of Caracas, saying the rationing plan was riddled with mistakes.
Critics say Chavez backtracked in response to widespread anger among the city's estimated 6 million residents. Venezuelans have also been coping with water rationing, and the government turned to power outages to prevent an electricity collapse. Drought has drained water to near-critical levels behind Guri Dam, which supplies most of Venezuela's electricity.
"We're used to living with problems in Venezuela, but now they are accumulating and reaching intolerable levels, and everything indicates that they are going to get worse," opposition politician Ramon Muchacho said in a telephone interview after Chavez's speech.
"Even though I recognize the president as an excellent campaigner," Muchacho said, "I'm sure the opposition can capitalize on this and regain political ground that it's lost."
Pollster Luis Vicente Leon said the blackouts and the devaluation are likely to have a negative impact on Chavez's popularity, although the president could possibly boost his standing with heavy government spending ahead of congressional elections in September.
Leon said Chavez's popularity stood slightly below 50 percent in a December poll by his Caracas-based polling firm, Datanalisis. The energy crisis and inflation seem to be forcing Chavez into damage-control mode and will likely press him to try to minimize his own responsibility in the problems and find scapegoats, Leon said.
Chavez has repeatedly won re-election during his 11-year presidency, but the panorama ahead of the elections "isn't an easy or agreeable situation" for him, Leon said. "It's a much more complicated situation."

After Honduras: Obama's Latin American Policy Looks Like Bush's

In the December 3, 2009 TIME article "After Honduras: Obama's Latin American Policy Looks Like Bush's," Tim Padgett reports that the U.S. continues its empty promises and double standards in its relationships with Latin America.

After months of delay, Arturo Valenzuela was finally confirmed as Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs last month. But for a job with such a long title, he may find it's short on clout these days. Ostensibly, Valenzuela is President Obama's new point man on Latin America; in reality, that job looks to be under the control of Republicans in Congress and conservatives inside Obama's own diplomatic corps. In fact, when it comes to U.S. policy in Latin America — as events this week in Honduras suggest — it's often hard to tell if George W. Bush isn't still President.

Granted, Latin America is on Obama's back burner as he tackles Afghanistan. But next year he plans to tackle immigration reform — an issue, like drug trafficking and free trade, that's heavily related to how well the U.S. helps Latin America build more equitble democratic institutions (the region has the world's worst gap between rich and poor). Yet as he ends his first year in office, Obama seems to have ceded Latin America strategy to right-wing Cold Warriors whose thinking — including the idea that coups are still an acceptable means of regime change — is no more equipped to help bring the region into the 21st century than the ideology of left-wing Marxists is.

That's been most apparent in Honduras, where the country's congress this week refused to reinstate democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya, a leftist who was ousted in a June 28 military coup. The Obama Administration condemned Zelaya's overthrow as an affront to Latin America's fledgling democracies. But conservatives led by GOP South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint — who blocked Valenzuela's confirmation to protest Obama's stance — and Bush Administration holdovers such as the U.S.'s ambassador to the Organization of American States, Lewis Amselem (who was finally replaced this week), pushed Obama into brokering a deal in which the U.S. effectively condoned yet another armed putsch in the region. In an about-face, Obama recognized last Sunday's presidential election in Honduras, even though almost every other government in the world didn't because they consider the current regime there illegitimate. (The incoming Honduran president will be Porfirio Lobo, a wealthy cattle rancher.)

U.S. officials had been optimistic that even if the Honduran Congress refused to restore Zelaya before last Sunday's election, it would at least vote after the election to let him finish the remaining two months of his term. It would be a good-faith sign that the country was returning to constitutional order. Instead the legislators, emboldened by the success of the coup, poked both Obama and constitutional order in the eye again this week. Coup-happy forces in other Latin American countries can only feel emboldened as well.

The Honduras debacle is just the latest example of Obama's actions failing his words in Latin America. He wowed the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad last spring with soaring pledges to drop Washington's heavy-handed double standards in the region. He won kudos for acknowledging that the drug war is as much about U.S. consumption as it is about Latin corruption. But the cheers have since turned to chagrin on numerous fronts. Obama is loath to offend supporters of the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba; yet even Latin leaders who scorn the Castros shake their heads at Obama's insistence on retaining that utterly failed and globally rebuked policy — a position he holds despite polls that show a majority of Cuban-Americans now favor letting U.S. citizens travel to the communist island, and which suggest they're also weary of the 47-year-old embargo.

In South America, meanwhile, Obama has turned what should have been a routine transfer of U.S. anti-drug operations into a diplomatic row. By not consulting the continent's leaders about U.S. plans to use Colombian military bases not just for drug interdiction but also counter-insurgency work, which could theoretically spill over Colombia's borders, he needlessly revived deep-seated fears of yanqui military interventionism south of the border and raised the hackles of U.S. allies like Brazil and Chile. It was the kind of dismissive display that Bush was best known for in Latin America — and a gift to the anti-U.S. Latin left, whose leader, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, is galvanizing his political base at home in a difficult economy by hollering about an imminent U.S. invasion.

One of the U.S.'s more tiresome habits in Latin America is over-emphasizing elections as a political panacea. A transparent vote is of course a good thing — but for too long the U.S. has given Latin countries the impression that it's the only thing, muffling the harder message that real democracy is what happens after elections. Critics may call Chávez an authoritarian Castro wannabe. Yet he's remained in power for 10 years, and may well last another 10, in part because he's exploited Washington's election obsession. He's been cleanly voted in three times and that's helped him retain a democratic legitimacy despite his hegemonic power inside Venezuela. Valenzuela insists that the recent Honduran election doesn't whitewash the coup; but Amselem recently told the OAS he thought it would. Now, by recognizing its results, after earlier warning that he wouldn't, Obama has essentially accepted Amselem's dubious principle.

Valenzuela, one of the U.S.'s most esteemed experts on Latin America, was "disappointed" by the Honduran Congress' decision not to let Zelaya finish out his term. "The status quo," he said, "remains unacceptable." But it's a status quo Obama let the Cold Warriors keep intact — and it's now up to Valenzuela to wrest Latin America policy back from them.

The Latin American Studies Association (LASA)

The Latin American Studies Association (LASA) is "the largest professional Association in the world for individuals and institutions engaged in the study of Latin America. With over 6,000 members, forty-five percent of whom reside outside the United States, LASA is the one Association that brings together experts on Latin America from all disciplines and diverse occupational endeavors, across the globe.

LASA's mission is to foster intellectual discussion, research, and teaching on Latin America, the Caribbean, and its people throughout the Americas, promote the interests of its diverse membership, and encourage civic engagement through network building and public debate.

Every eighteen months, specialists on Latin America gather at the LASA International Congress. Featuring over 900 sessions, including plenary sessions and informal meetings, the Congress is the world's premier forum for expert discussion on Latin America and the Caribbean. The next International Congress will be held in Toronto, Canada, October 6-9, 2010.

LASA members enjoy a wide variety of benefits as noted on the "Membership Information" link. Membership is available to individuals and institutions sharing the Association's commitment to the field of Latin American studies.

The Association advances the Latin Americanist community in numerous other ways. It provides access to the Latin American Research Review, the premier U.S.-based journal in Latin American studies; it publishes the LASA Forum, a quarterly newsletter; it alerts members to professional opportunities; it recognizes scholarly achievement and it represents Latin Americanists' interests and views before the U.S. government and at times to governments elsewhere."