“ALGO HICIMOS MAL”

Presidente de la República

Trinidad y Tobago

18 de abril del 2009

NACION.COM/opinión - enlace

Tengo la impresión de que cada vez que los países caribeños y latinoamericanos se reúnen con el presidente de los Estados Unidos de América, es para pedirle cosas o para reclamarle cosas. Casi siempre, es para culpar a Estados Unidos de nuestros males pasados, presentes y futuros. No creo que eso sea del todo justo.

No podemos olvidar que América Latina tuvo universidades antes de que Estados Unidos creara Harvard y William & Mary, que son las primeras universidades de ese país. No podemos olvidar que en este continente, como en el mundo entero, por lo menos hasta 1750 todos los americanos eran más o menos iguales: todos eran pobres.

Cuando aparece la Revolución Industrial en Inglaterra, otros países se montan en ese vagón: Alemania, Francia, Estados Unidos, Canadá, Australia, Nueva Zelanda… y así la Revolución Industrial pasó por América Latina como un cometa, y no nos dimos cuenta. Ciertamente perdimos la oportunidad.

También hay una diferencia muy grande. Leyendo la historia de América Latina, comparada con la historia de Estados Unidos, uno comprende que Latinoamérica no tuvo un John Winthrop español, ni portugués, que viniera con la Biblia en su mano dispuesto a construir “una Ciudad sobre una Colina”, una ciudad que brillara, como fue la pretensión de los peregrinos que llegaron a Estados Unidos.

Hace 50 años, México era más rico que Portugal. En 1950, un país como Brasil tenía un ingreso per cápita más elevado que el de Corea del Sur. Hace 60 años, Honduras tenía más riqueza per cápita que Singapur, y hoy Singapur –en cuestión de 35 ó 40 años– es un país con $40.000 de ingreso anual por habitante. Bueno, algo hicimos mal los latinoamericanos.

¿Qué hicimos mal? No puedo enumerar todas las cosas que hemos hecho mal. Para comenzar, tenemos una escolaridad de 7 años. Esa es la escolaridad promedio de América Latina y no es el caso de la mayoría de los países asiáticos. Ciertamente no es el caso de países como Estados Unidos y Canadá, con la mejor educación del mundo, similar a la de los europeos. De cada 10 estudiantes que ingresan a la secundaria en América Latina, en algunos países solo uno termina esa secundaria. Hay países que tienen una mortalidad infantil de 50 niños por cada mil, cuando el promedio en los países asiáticos más avanzados es de 8, 9 ó 10.

Nosotros tenemos países donde la carga tributaria es del 12% del producto interno bruto, y no es responsabilidad de nadie, excepto la nuestra, que no le cobremos dinero a la gente más rica de nuestros países. Nadie tiene la culpa de eso, excepto nosotros mismos.

En 1950, cada ciudadano norteamericano era cuatro veces más rico que un ciudadano latinoamericano. Hoy en día, un ciudadano norteamericano es 10, 15 ó 20 veces más rico que un latinoamericano. Eso no es culpa de Estados Unidos, es culpa nuestra.

En mi intervención de esta mañana, me referí a un hecho que para mí es grotesco, y que lo único que demuestra es que el sistema de valores del siglo XX, que parece ser el que estamos poniendo en práctica también en el siglo XXI, es un sistema de valores equivocado. Porque no puede ser que el mundo rico dedique 100.000 millones de dólares para aliviar la pobreza del 80% de la población del mundo –en un planeta que tiene 2.500 millones de seres humanos con un ingreso de $2 por día– y que gaste 13 veces más ($1.300.000.000.000) en armas y soldados.

Como lo dije esta mañana, no puede ser que América Latina se gaste $50.000 millones en armas y soldados. Yo me pregunto: ¿quién es el enemigo nuestro? El enemigo nuestro, presidente Correa, de esa desigualdad que usted apunta con mucha razón, es la falta de educación; es el analfabetismo; es que no gastamos en la salud de nuestro pueblo; que no creamos la infraestructura necesaria, los caminos, las carreteras, los puertos, los aeropuertos; que no estamos dedicando los recursos necesarios para detener la degradación del medio ambiente; es la desigualdad que tenemos, que realmente nos avergüenza; es producto, entre muchas cosas, por supuesto, de que no estamos educando a nuestros hijos y a nuestras hijas.

Uno va a una universidad latinoamericana y todavía parece que estamos en los sesenta, setenta u ochenta. Parece que se nos olvidó que el 9 de noviembre de 1989 pasó algo muy importante, al caer el Muro de Berlín, y que el mundo cambió. Tenemos que aceptar que este es un mundo distinto, y en eso francamente pienso que todos los académicos, que toda la gente de pensamiento, que todos los economistas, que todos los historiadores, casi que coinciden en que el siglo XXI es el siglo de los asiáticos, no de los latinoamericanos. Y yo, lamentablemente, coincido con ellos. Porque mientras nosotros seguimos discutiendo sobre ideologías, seguimos discutiendo sobre todos los “ismos” (¿cuál es el mejor? capitalismo, socialismo, comunismo, liberalismo, neoliberalismo, socialcristianismo…), los asiáticos encontraron un “ismo” muy realista para el siglo XXI y el final del siglo XX, que es el pragmatismo . Para solo citar un ejemplo, recordemos que cuando Deng Xiaoping visitó Singapur y Corea del Sur, después de haberse dado cuenta de que sus propios vecinos se estaban enriqueciendo de una manera muy acelerada, regresó a Pekín y dijo a los viejos camaradas maoístas que lo habían acompañado en la Larga Marcha: “Bueno, la verdad, queridos camaradas, es que mí no me importa si el gato es blanco o negro, lo único que me interesa es que cace ratones” . Y si hubiera estado vivo Mao, se hubiera muerto de nuevo cuando dijo que “ la verdad es que enriquecerse es glorioso ”. Y mientras los chinos hacen esto, y desde el 79 a hoy crecen a un 11%, 12% o 13%, y han sacado a 300 millones de habitantes de la pobreza, nosotros seguimos discutiendo sobre ideologías que tuvimos que haber enterrado hace mucho tiempo atrás.

La buena noticia es que esto lo logró Deng Xioping cuando tenía 74 años. Viendo alrededor, queridos Presidentes, no veo a nadie que esté cerca de los 74 años. Por eso solo les pido que no esperemos a cumplirlos para hacer los cambios que tenemos que hacer.

Muchas gracias.

The New Republic  - link

Published: April 29, 2009

by Alvaro Vargas Llosa,  

WASHINGTON–Most Americans seem to reject the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba. According to a Washington Post/ABC poll, 57 percent of Americans now oppose the policy. A survey by Bendixen & Associates shows that only 42 percent of Cuban-Americans continue to back it.    

I have been conflicted on this issue for years. Until not long ago, I favored the embargo. As an advocate for free trade, I would normally have called such a measure an unacceptable restriction on the freedom of people to trade with whomever they pleased. But I thought that trading with a regime that had killed, jailed, exiled or muzzled countless of its citizens for decades was not a worthy objective, as it would also preserve that dictatorship. Any transaction with Cuba would also benefit the government. After all, the authorities were already skimming 20 percent of the remittances from Cuban-Americans and 90 percent of the salary paid to Cubans by non-American foreign investors.    

Eventually, I admitted to myself that there was an intolerable inconsistency in my thinking. No democracy based on liberty should tell its citizens what country to visit or whom to trade with, regardless of the government under which they live. Even though the Castro brothers, Fidel and Raul, would obtain a political victory in the very short run, the embargo could no longer be justified.

But this is not the reasoning coming from the most vocal critics of U.S. sanctions these days. Many of them fail to even mention the fraud that is a system which bases its legitimacy on the renunciation of capitalism and at the same time implores capitalism to come to its rescue. There is also an endearing hypocrisy among those who decry the embargo but devote hardly any time to denouncing the island’s half-century tyranny under the Castros.    

Another risible subterfuge attributes the catastrophe that is Cuba’s economy on Washington’s decision to cut off economic relations in 1962 after a wave of expropriations against American interests. The amnesiacs conveniently forget that in 1958, Cuba’s socioeconomic condition was similar to Spain’s and Portugal’s and the standard of living of its citizens was behind only those of Argentines and Uruguayans in Latin America. Many of the critics also seem to suffer what French writer Jean-Francois Revel used to call “moral hemiplegia”–a tendency to seefault only on one side of the political spectrum: I never heard Cuba’s champions complain about sanctions against right-wing dictatorships.

Sometimes, sanctions work, sometimes they don’t. A study by Gary Hufbauer, Jeffrey Schott, Kimberly Elliot and Barbara Oegg titled “Economic Sanctions Reconsidered” analyzes dozens of cases of sanctions since World War I. In about a third of them, they worked either because they helped to topple the regime (South Africa) or because they forced the dictator to make major concessions (Libya). Archbishop Desmond Tutu told me a few months ago in San Francisco that he was convinced that international

sanctions were crucial in defeating apartheid in his home country. In the cases in which the embargo worked, the sanctions were applied by many countries and the affected regimes were already severely discredited or weakened.

In the cases in which sanctions have not worked–Saddam Hussein between 1990 and 2003, and North Korea today–the dictatorships were able to isolate themselves from the effects and concentrate them on the population. In some countries, a certain sense of pride helped defend the government against foreign sanctions–which is why the measures applied by the Soviet Union against Yugoslavia in 1948, China in 1960 and Albania in 1961 were largely useless.

In the case of Cuba, the Castro regime has been able to whip up a nationalist sentiment against the U.S. embargo. More significantly, it has managed to offset much of the effects over the years in large part because the Soviets subsidized the island for three decades, because the regime welcomed Canadian, Mexican and European capital after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and because Venezuela is its new patron.    

But these arguments against the U.S. embargo are mostly practical. Ultimately, the argument against the sanctions is a moral one. It is not acceptable for a government to abolish individual choice in matters of trade and travel. The only acceptable form of economic embargo is when citizens, not governments, decide not to do business with a dictatorship, be that of Burma, Zimbabwe or Cuba.

Alvaro Vargas Llosa is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and the editor of “Lessons from the Poor.”

May 01, 2009

By Vaclav Klaus

RealClearPolitics - link

PRAGUE — I am surprised at how so many people nowadays in Europe, the United States and elsewhere have come to support policies underpinned by hysteria over global warming, particularly cap-and-trade legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and subsidies for “green” energy sources.

I am convinced that this is a misguided strategy — not only because of the uncertainty about the dangers that global warming might pose, but also because of the certainty of the damage that these proposed policies aimed at mitigation will impose.

I was invited to address this issue at a recent conference in Santa Barbara, Calif. My audience included business leaders who hoped to profit from cap-and-trade policies, subsidies for renewable energy and “green” jobs. My advice to them was to not get caught up in the hysteria.

Europe is several years ahead of the US in implementing policies intended to mitigate global warming. All of the European Union’s member countries have ratified the Kyoto Protocol and adopted a wide range of policies to lower their emissions and meet their Kyoto targets.

These policies include a cap-and-trade initiative known as the Emissions Trading Scheme, steep fuel taxes and ambitious programs to build windmills and other renewable energy projects. These policies were undertaken at a time when the EU economy was doing well and — one hopes — with full knowledge that they would have significant costs.

With the global financial crisis and the sudden economic downturn, two things are becoming clear. First, it will be difficult to afford these expensive new sources of energy. Second, energy rationing policies, like cap-and-trade, will be a permanent drag on economic activity. Ironically, emissions have not decreased as a result of these policies, but are doing so now as the world economy moves into recession.

This is not a surprise to someone like me, having been actively involved in my country’s transition from communism to a free society and market economy. The old, outmoded heavy industries that were the pride of our Communist regime were shut down — practically overnight — because they could not survive the opening of the economy. The result was a dramatic decline in CO2 emissions.

The secret behind the cut in emissions was economic decline. As the economies of the Czech Republic and other Central and Eastern European countries were rebuilt and began to grow again, emissions have naturally started to increase. It should be clear to everyone that there is a very strong correlation between economic growth and energy use.

So I am amazed to see people going along with the currently fashionable political argument that policies like cap-and-trade, government mandates and subsidies for renewable energy can actually benefit an economy. It is claimed that the government, working together with business, will create “a new energy economy,” that the businesses involved will profit and that everyone will be better off.

This is a fantasy. Cap-and-trade can only work by raising energy prices. Consumers who are forced to pay higher prices for energy will have less money to spend on other things. While the individual companies that provide the higher-priced “green” energy may do well, the net economic effect will be negative.

It is necessary to look at the bigger picture. Profits can be made when energy is rationed or subsidized, but only within an economy operating at lower, or even negative, growth rates. This means that over the longer term, everyone will be competing for a piece of a pie that is smaller than it would have been without energy rationing.

This does not auger well either for growth or for working our way out of today’s crisis.

Václav Klaus is president of the Czech Republic, which holds the presidency of the Council of Ministers of the European Union until June 2009. He is the author of “Blue Planet in Green Shackles — What Is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?”

By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, May 1, 2009 

Washington Post - link

Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent’s life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy. Even John McCain, the most admirable and estimable torture opponent, says openly that in such circumstances, “You do what you have to do.” And then take the responsibility.

Some people, however, believe you never torture. Ever. They are akin to conscientious objectors who will never fight in any war under any circumstances, and for whom we correctly show respect by exempting them from war duty. But we would never make one of them Centcom commander. Private principles are fine, but you don’t entrust such a person with the military decisions upon which hinges the safety of the nation. It is similarly imprudent to have a person who would abjure torture in all circumstances making national security decisions upon which depends the protection of 300 million countrymen.

The second exception to the no-torture rule is the extraction of information from a high-value enemy in possession of high-value information likely to save lives. This case lacks the black-and-white clarity of the ticking time bomb scenario. We know less about the length of the fuse or the nature of the next attack. But we do know the danger is great. (One of the “torture memos” noted that the CIA had warned that terrorist “chatter” had reached pre-9/11 levels.) We know we must act but have no idea where or how — and we can’t know that until we have information. Catch-22.

Under those circumstances, you do what you have to do. And that includes waterboarding. (To call some of the other “enhanced interrogation” techniques — face slap, sleep interruption, a caterpillar in a small space — torture is to empty the word of any meaning.)

Did it work? The current evidence is fairly compelling. George Tenet said that the “enhanced interrogation” program alone yielded more information than everything gotten from “the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency put together.”

Michael Hayden, CIA director after waterboarding had been discontinued, writes (with former attorney general Michael Mukasey) that “as late as 2006 . . . fully half of the government’s knowledge about the structure and activities of al-Qaeda came from those interrogations.” Even Dennis Blair, Obama’s director of national intelligence, concurs that these interrogations yielded “high value information.” So much for the lazy, mindless assertion that torture never works.

Could we not, as the president repeatedly asserted in his Wednesday news conference, have obtained the information by less morally poisonous means? Perhaps if we’d spoken softly and sincerely to Khalid Sheik Mohammed, we could equally have obtained “high-value information.”

There are two problems with the “good cop” technique. KSM, the mastermind of 9/11 who knew more about more plots than anyone else, did not seem very inclined to respond to polite inquiries about future plans. The man who boasted of personally beheading Daniel Pearl with a butcher knife answered questions about plots with “soon you will know” — meaning, when you count the bodies in the morgue and find horribly disfigured burn victims in hospitals, you will know then what we are planning now.

The other problem is one of timing. The good cop routine can take weeks or months or years. We didn’t have that luxury in the aftermath of 9/11 when waterboarding, for example, was in use. We’d been caught totally blind. We knew there were more plots out there, and we knew almost nothing about them. We needed to find out fast. We found out a lot.

“We have people walking around in this country that are alive today because this process happened,” asserts Blair’s predecessor, Mike McConnell. Of course, the morality of torture hinges on whether at the time the information was important enough, the danger great enough and our blindness about the enemy’s plans severe enough to justify an exception to the moral injunction against torture.

Judging by Nancy Pelosi and other members of Congress who were informed at the time, the answer seems to be yes. In December 2007, after a report in The Post that she had knowledge of these procedures and did not object, she admitted that she’d been “briefed on interrogation techniques the administration was considering using in the future.”

Today Pelosi protests “we were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any other of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used.” She imagines that this distinction between past and present, Clintonian in its parsing, is exonerating.

On the contrary. It is self-indicting. If you are told about torture that has already occurred, you might justify silence on the grounds that what’s done is done and you are simply being used in a post-facto exercise to cover the CIA’s rear end. The time to protest torture, if you really are as outraged as you now pretend to be, is when the CIA tells you what it is planning to do “in the future.”

But Pelosi did nothing. No protest. No move to cut off funding. No letter to the president or the CIA chief or anyone else saying “Don’t do it.”

On the contrary, notes Porter Goss, then chairman of the House intelligence committee: The members briefed on these techniques did not just refrain from objecting, “on a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission against al-Qaeda.”

More support, mind you. Which makes the current spectacle of self-righteous condemnation not just cowardly but hollow. It is one thing to have disagreed at the time and said so. It is utterly contemptible, however, to have been silent then and to rise now “on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009″ (the words are Blair’s) to excoriate those who kept us safe these harrowing last eight years.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

May 1, 2009

By Jonah Goldberg

National Review OnLine

In his press conference Wednesday night, President Obama offered a nice little sermonette on “shortcuts.”

Asked about his decision to release the “torture memos” and ban waterboarding, Obama said: “I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, ‘We don’t torture,’ when . . . all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat. . . . Churchill understood, you start taking shortcuts, over time, that corrodes what’s best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.”

It’s a nice, honorable statement. But there’s not much evidence it’s true.

It’s unconfirmed, but the article Obama referred to is probably a combination of a 2006 op-ed by Ben Macintyre in the Times of London and a recent blog post about it by The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan. Macintyre focused on British Col. Robin “Tin Eye” Stephens, the wartime commander of Camp 020 whose motto was “never strike a man,” a code he didn’t always succeed in enforcing. But even many of Stephens’s preferred techniques - sleep deprivation, psychological cruelty, etc. - are routinely denounced as “torture” by Bush administration critics like Sullivan.

Macintyre doesn’t mention Churchill. That’s all Sullivan, who writes: “Churchill nonetheless knew that embracing torture was the equivalent of surrender to the barbarism he was fighting.”

Typically, Sullivan’s emotions are getting ahead of his facts. Churchill’s preference for humane treatment of German POWs under the Geneva Conventions had more to do with ensuring reciprocity from enemy armies. Al-Qaeda isn’t a signatory and isn’t interested in such reciprocity.

One reason Churchill might have eschewed putting the screws to detainees in 1942 is that he already knew what they could tell him about the bombings. The Allies knew where the airbases were and had cracked German codes years before.

Regardless, Churchill and Great Britain didn’t quite take the firm stand against “torture” that Obama and Sullivan suggest. During the war, the Brits ran an interrogation center, “the Cage,” in one of London’s fanciest neighborhoods, where they worked over 3,573 captured Germans, sometimes brutally. The Free French movement, headquartered in London, savagely beat detainees under the nose of British authorities. From 1945 to 1947, Colonel Stephens himself ran the Bad Nenndorf prison near Hanover, Germany, where Soviet and Nazi prisoners were treated far more brutally than those at Guantanamo Bay. Stephens was court-martialed, and cleared, for some of the alleged atrocities.

Of course, none of this remotely made Britain “equivalent” to Nazi Germany.

Regardless of the debatable facts, the real problem is this idea that “taking shortcuts” erodes the character of a people. One hears this constantly, but it is almost invariably asserted rather than demonstrated.

First, this argument assumes society knows about the shortcuts. After all, if the shortcut in question is kept a secret, then it’s hard to see how the “character of a people” will be corroded (or that such methods will be used as a “recruiting tool”). Alas, the idea that the government should be able to do things in secret to fight a war is out of vogue today.

The more significant shortcuts are the public ones people can’t ignore. Churchill ordered the firebombing of Dresden just twelve weeks before the end of World War II. No one knows for sure how many civilians were burned alive, but tens of thousands surely were, in no small part to deliver a psychological blow to the Germans. If Churchill could have waterboarded a prisoner to avoid that - or stop the Holocaust - would one shortcut have been preferable to the other? Why? Or why not? Obama gives no sense he has an answer to such questions. You can ask the same questions about the shortcuts that flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Did these shortcuts erode the character of the American and British people? If so, how? And what does it say about the “greatest generation” Barack Obama invokes relentlessly? And, again, what of the shortcuts we don’t know about?

Churchill was a heroic leader. He did right as best he could in a bloody mess of a war. But he made countless horrible-but-correct decisions in the process. For instance, he refused to warn residents of Coventry that the Nazis were going to bomb, lest he betray the secret that he was listening to Nazi cable traffic. After the war, he advocated the shortcut of summary executions of Nazi officials.

It might seem otherwise, but I’m not making the case for what some people see as torture. I’m simply noting that war is always about shortcuts - all are horrible; some are necessary. If Obama doesn’t understand that, let’s hope he never has to learn it.

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