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is the falling price of copper playing any role here?
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Nov 26, 2014 16:17
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looking up employment by sector statistics, looks like Chile spent the last two decades moving from 20% agricultural employment to 10% employment (this is still very high, as a note) that's a lot of people to integrate into the non-subsistence-agriculture economy, especially since the economy has already moved past easy mass industrialization into services the hate for even mild social democrats in Latin America can be explained in this angle rather easily - it is no less passionate than hate for immigrants in the developed West, even when immigration flows are not actually very high and the social problems of integration not actually very onerous. People who are Not Like You are taking your jobs and your politicians are taking their side, yada yada. Take a Western country, any Western country, and tell them that the government wants to add ronya fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Nov 26, 2014 |
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Nov 26, 2014 16:49
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that's normal - poorly-integrated immigrants are prone to populist cronyism and radical politics in the West too. Ethnic city machines have been a thing. The urban poor have political priorities besides eliminating corruption. it's fair to point out that antipopulist governments in latin america have not, traditionally, been obviously less prone to cronyism. They do choose different cronies, and it's also fair to acknowledge that industrialist cronies are better for material growth than rural agitator cronies. Nonetheless wringing one's hands over corruption per se is a bit unbelievable.
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Nov 26, 2014 17:12
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and sleazy caricatures are constructed along racist lines in Western media Diversification will continue to be difficult for as long as copper is attractive to export. Chile should probably not use the general fund to store copper revenue. Furthermore, taking the goal of diversification as given, when your country still has upwards of a million people to shift from agriculture to industry, it is not the time to let environmentalists and rural farmers start screaming that the present allocation of water rights and population distribution is sacrosanct.
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Nov 27, 2014 02:37
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Ardennes posted:I always thought they were more stuck (dress and hairstyle wise) in the 1980s. I'm not sure it's separate. Wanting Chileans to be less poor is one thing. Wanting Chileans to be less poor whilst operating small farms in marginally arable scrubland is fantasy. And Chile gets the lovely end of the geographical stick, in having lots of land with barely enough water to sustain vegetation and then having an export industry that requires unbelievable amounts of water and then generates vast amounts of toxic, polluted wastewater. e: with reference to the current thread of discussion - the large informal economy serves an important purpose; it segregates the recent "immigrants" from the incumbents (in the context of the immigration metaphor on pg 1), which reduces the pain of integration. ronya fucked around with this message at 05:43 on Nov 27, 2014 |
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Nov 27, 2014 05:38
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Ardennes posted:The question is exactly how much of a debt drag of cutting water rights to the rural poor would actually benefit the economy especially if you don't have a place to put them and you let the educational system collapse. Yes - Chile should seek to move them and then pursue development. That's not really in the direct interests of either the incumbent middle class (who would resent adding even more people) or the remaining rural poor (who would join the back of the queue of people integrating into the formal economy). So it's not going to happen. We've had this discussion of speculatory ideal reforms which won't happen for lack of constituencies before, of course. Cutting worker rights would definitely heighten tension, but in the Venezuelan "problematic middle class unions" sense, I think. That is, a lot of fluidity over which income class is the oppressed worker. See also: a social democratic government battling teacher's unions.
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Nov 27, 2014 06:04
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Ardennes posted:"Pursue development" is a bit vague unless you are citing a specific case that would actually benefit the country enough to make such large relocation a useful endeavor. The specific case I had in mind was the curious push to use expensive desalination to supply copper mining, which bundles expensive electricity and expensive water all in one. A typical Western perspective is the lazy one of arguing that there shouldn't be any mining at all, but I'm sure that it is more obvious to you that it isn't tenable, Chile needs the export revenue. Your perspective is quite typical of how the guilty middle classes regard immigrants, yes (albeit internal migrants, in the Chilean case). At some level you are cognizant that for the general good there must eventually be fewer people in subsistence agriculture and therefore more migrants. At another level it's clear that adding these people will harm your material interests via unskilled competition for wages. And to top all of this off, there is no credible capacity for state-owned industries to vacuum up all these reserve labour, such that one could at least argue that 'the people', loosely defined, benefit from the explosion in reserve labour - instead there's a lot of petite bourgeoisie who will benefit (a quick lookup suggests that Chilean small businesses employ about 70% of the labour force). So there's no easy answer. Integration will gently caress over the middle class; therefore the middle class will prefer to ensure that the remaining poor remain in low-productivity industries like non-mechanized agriculture or tourism. That's the political-economy version of the middle income trap.
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Nov 27, 2014 06:51
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Ardennes posted:No a desalination plan wouldn't make sense, and Chile needs copper exports but I think I would have to study to claims before I took a position of stripping way water rights without due process. Due process with regards to water is very much a creation of governments, as the divergent ways in which the United States merges English and pueblo water rights shows. Chile itself has experimented quite dramatically, albeit in limited areas. I'm not sure what to make of your argument. I never mentioned education spending, but since you raise the point, I will say that it is important to track whose education is being funded. The present backlash against Bachelet's plans are predictably led by middle-class parents demanding the continuation of subsidies for fee-charging middle-class schools. This is characteristic of the guilty middle class phenomenon - for as long as social democratic parties support education spending, they endorse it, but if it means cuts to their own existing subsidies, they hastily withdraw their support. Free stuff is always good. If there's not enough revenue to support free stuff, then it's someone else's fault. You say: it would be better for small businesses to simply consolidate their workers rather than hire. Certainly! Better for the incumbent workers. Not so good for the unhired. That is the point I was making. I am not saying that the entrepreneurial class should be privileged. I am saying it will be privileged, as a straightforward fait accompli from a moderate government steadily reducing the percentage of people in subsistence agriculture (and using two decades of relatively high copper prices to paper over costs of transition). In fact it has already been privileged for a while now. It will continue to do so until Chile runs out of domestic people to add to the labour pool - better hope that the copper lasts until then. wateroverfire was, you know, editorializing about the need for a more competent government. But this transition is itself thorny and Chile is doing remarkably well at balancing a screaming middle class demanding its first-world labour, environmental, and public-consultation rights with a desperate urban poor demanding entry into that middle class lifestyle. Better Bachelet than Chavez, who has demonstrated just how badly one can squander a resource windfall. Better Bachelet than Pinochet, at that. When the hated resource corporations are already wholly-owned by the state - when there are no more visible enemies within easy grasp - it is best for the middle class to not notice who its remaining material enemies are. Remember that 44% voted for Pinochet. ronya fucked around with this message at 10:27 on Nov 27, 2014 |
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Nov 27, 2014 09:57
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rscott posted:More generally I have a question that I think pertains to Latin/South America as whole. How many years or iterations of peaceful political power handovers are required for the civil services in a nation to achieve a sort of independence from patronage systems that breed corruption? The first real efforts did not occur in the United States until the late 19th century and tammany hall and the like were around until the 30s. Knocking over governments and rebuilding them every 20 or 30 years has to wreck havoc with that process and I think for that reason on its own the monroe doctrine poo poo that we're still pursuing has been so detrimental to the development of south america as a whole. Recall the circumstances in which the United States embraced Jacksonian cronyist democracy to begin with - namely a drive to bring democracy to the common man and abolish oligarchy. Tammany Hall likewise empowered ethnic minorities, most notably the Irish community. These systems did not collapse on their own, they collapsed when these constituencies began to organize politically in other ways. It's not a matter of accumulating a sufficient number of iterations, it's a matter of a formation of a bourgeois consensus over what has to be done - the idea that politics is a matter of identifying the neutral and discoverable empirically-optimal policy, rather than jousts over zero-sum competitions. In the US, progressive reform of machine patronage came with Progressivism and its distinctly northeasterner, industrial, middle-class, puritan, modernizing character. The contemporary ideology invoking policy efficiency and neutral standards as a solution to invisible cronyism/corruption is, of course, neoliberalism, both in its right-wing Thatcherite and left-wing Blairite forms. In the early 1910s US Progressivism demanded removing teacher employment from the control of ward bosses and transferring it to supposedly-neutral teacher's colleges exam qualifications; today the same impulse demands removing teaching employment from union bosses and transferring it to supposedly-neutral standards-based education reform. That's not evidence whether it is desirable, but rather that the sources of that political impulse are similar. Knocking over governments certainly doesn't help but what mainly matters is the formation of such a relative policy consensus in the national zeitgeist. One can certainly slaughter one's way there (see: East Asia). Or one can let mutual exhaustion lead to a sufficiently long inter-class détente that growth and a cynical acceptance of most of the outrages of the status quo emerges, which I think may glibly capture South America. ronya fucked around with this message at 10:58 on Nov 27, 2014 |
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Nov 27, 2014 10:55
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the timing of events suggests to me that the government hoped to use parental demands for improvements in the public schools they will be effectively forced into in its long-postponed showdown with the teacher's unions, but instead is now facing a teacher's union deftly slamming the cuts as well - not on the principle of retaining the subsidies, but on an alleged lack of consultation. Nonetheless, it brings teachers and the parents together, rather than pitting them against each other. e: vvvvvv "reduced subsidies" doesn't readily map onto "increased funding"... ronya fucked around with this message at 13:42 on Nov 27, 2014 |
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Nov 27, 2014 13:27
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Ardennes posted:I didn't mean to say it was better, but it very well may happen. The question is the necessity of cutting labor protections at the same time. If rural migrants have access to education they may very well slowly but surely have access to those same rights rather than have them completely gutted when it is their turn.... There's a whole essay to be written here over whether one believes that wages and workplace conditions are predominantly shaped through labour struggle or through marginal labour productivity, of course. I don't want to pull the whole thread into this topic but I want to point out that your assertion is contingent on a worldview. Ardennes posted:As for water rights, I am fully aware the Chilean system of water rights is quite different, nevertheless it is an open question if the government needs to dramatically change those rights by fiat or a compromise can be reached that is moderately more costly but more sustainable. The government has a interest in not having to spend a ton of money to desalinate its water, nevertheless while copper is still going to be important, if mines simply become unprofitable then the need mostly vanishes until global demand returns. The government did, in fact, order mines to stop outbidding communities for water for new mines, so it already changed things by fiat. Nonetheless the mining companies seem to be taking the position that no government would have had the political capital to allow them to access the water anyway, since industry websites seem to have been steadily buzzing about the oncoming problem for a while now. Certainly nobody puts together plans for a desalination plant in months. The cost of producing copper is very much dependent on energy and water costs, so it's not separable from profitability. It's very much a case of incrementally trading off degrees of marginally-surviving communities and marginal ecosystems for marginally more foreign exchange - it is fundamentally a political decision, not a question of pure environmental econ. There's no "this is sustainable and this is not" bright line.
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Nov 27, 2014 13:37
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Yup. I agree, esp on political liability. Hence why I initially said:quote:Yes - Chile should seek to move them and then pursue development. That's not really in the direct interests of either the incumbent middle class (who would resent adding even more people) or the remaining rural poor (who would join the back of the queue of people integrating into the formal economy). So it's not going to happen. Digging an increasingly expensive copper was always going to be limited, but the Chinese copper boom has been valuable in stabilizing things post-Pinochet, I think. It is easier to form compromises when there is prosperity and some revenue to grease arguments.
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Nov 27, 2014 14:00
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to my knowledge, economic discourse in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile are all prone toward a continental ideological framework that is pretty alien to most of the Anglosphere it is hard to understand the propensity of Argentinean intellectuals to pin the Paraguayan War on Britain a full century after the war otherwise to invoke the Chicago school is, I think, potentially misleading. There was no neoliberal ideological revolution in Latin America - notice that rhetorically promising the radical transformation of economic relationships is still a winning strategy. There was a shift toward neoliberal policies by functionaries and bureaucrats, a tendency for center-left parties to emulate Rogernomic/Blairite/Rubinite perspectives in practice, but popular economic thinking is an unrecognizable mix of wild conspiracism and continental econ, both on the Latin American right and left. You get more assertions about power, institutions, foreign relations, class identity, etc and less claims to superior theoretical or analytical models of the world. fast forward a few struggling center-left or centrist governments and I think you get modern Turkey, not Britain - that is, perennial accusations/invocations of a nebulous deep state that seems to continually foil left-wing plans or promise safety to the right-wing (where in practice 'it' doesn't remain a coherent entity capable of delivering either), rather than disenchantment with economic agitation and a shift to cultural identity politics.
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Mar 17, 2015 10:34
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Yes, exactly: Latin America remains more focused over where one obtained their training than the ideological framework being expounded. That's exactly what I meant by "you get more assertions about power, institutions, foreign relations, class identity, etc and less claims to superior theoretical or analytical models of the world". Neoliberal economists disagree about magnitudes within what is, essentially, the same ideological model. They get a bit hyperbolic in rhetoric but in the end Larry Summers chairs the NEC and Christina Romer the CEA. In Latin America there's no agreement over ideological precepts at all so you get an apparently genuine belief that the opposite side are puppets of the imperialists/capitalists/both or plotting kleptocratic populism. It's always hidden loyalties and class identity. Policy itself is nonetheless dramatically neoliberalized; I am more inclined to blame exchange-crisis-imposed external constraints rather than palace power struggles, myself, but that's not really central. The impact of interest is that policy has quietly drifted away from the shape of debate. This is why you have a bizarre debate over abstruse central bank degrees of official autonomy as a kind of a proxy war over whether the (already de facto autonomous) central bank failed to meet its mandate and who, if not, is to blame for excessive inflation. It's the mirror image of frothier Republicans trying to audit the Fed as a substitute for cultural anxieties. In all cases, neoliberal fetters generally impose binding constraints whilst the politicians bicker about irrelevancies, but in Latin America the politicians claim the mantle of higher truths on economic ideology and people are actually interested in abstract policy levers as tools of class war that may be used for or against them, just as they were prior to the neoliberal revolution in the West. But they still can't escape those constraints, so the alleged levers either don't actually exist any more (e.g., for grand import substitution projects that CEPAL revivalists keep salivating about) or exact such crippling penalties for their use that they're not touched.
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Mar 17, 2015 17:27
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joepinetree posted:Of course ideological framework matters. You either are setting up a strawman (it is obvious and noncontroversial that the regular person on the street doesn't have a strong opinion on Friedman's paper on the predictive power of neoclassical economics) or you are reducing all political debate to the usual mudslinging you find online. There is a long and continuous debate between orthodox and heterodox economists that is not at all reducible to beliefs about hidden loyalties or class identity. Now, of course class and economic position play a role in choosing a side. Hmm. I see I was unclear, sorry. Another try: - there is such a debate. In the Anglosphere it's largely limited to the pages of niche publications and sometimes the JEP. In Latin America, unusually, it's actually something that is visible to the public eye and maintained in the popular zeitgeist. That is really remarkable! - despite this unusual feature, the ensuing battles over economic ideology have remarkably little impact on policy formation in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, etc. This is very much not the mid 20th century - leaky exchange controls are hardly in the same ballpark as license rajs or across-the-board price controls or state-managed nationalization. This applies in both political directions - left-wing programmes despised by the Latin American right, like conditional means-tested cash transfers tied to recipient adherence to antipoverty programmes, are moves out of a neoliberal third-way textbook. And yet the Latin American right will pretend that it is Stalinism and the Latin American left will pretend that it is the very incarnation of socialism on earth. Rhetorically it seems as if the Cold War is still raging, when in practice foreign observers readily recognize it as center-left in a way that would be unremarkable elsewhere. - as you point out, laymen everywhere are laymen; they don't have deep awareness of philosophical disputes. This doesn't stop them from having strong opinions on the appropriate conclusions or affiliations to adopt, though! To pick a non-controversial example, people can identify as Calvinist or Anglican without having particular opinion or even interest in the Vestiarian Crisis. Again, the interesting point is that politically-relevant identities do line up on a nominally orthodox-heterodox economics axis in Latin America. - if you are familiar with how the monetarist-Keynesian debates of the 70s and 80s shook out in the West, you may be aware that the Keynesians largely went extinct in both government and the academy and the neoliberal left emerged from left-wing monetarists across the 1980s and 1990s (this emergence paralleling the monetarists emerging from right-wing cost-push Keynesians in the 1970s). The flavour of the orthodox-heterodox debate in Latin America, at least to me as a foreign observer, feels highly reminiscent of those old debates prior to the new consensus: a narrow debate over abstract technicalities in the academy mirrored by a viciously hostile battle in the wider society aligning along class and party lines. bagual posted:It isn't really nebulous though? It's basically the opaque and oligarchic as gently caress Judiciary establishment, which works by a weird mix of appointment and state bureaucracy with little to no oversight in theory, in reality varies by state from "literal oligarch mafia" in political fiefdoms such as Maranhão, where the Sarney family has a familial hegemony on politics, to "state nobility" in Rio de Janeiro, all due to it's astounding degree of continuity and institutional inertia through brazilian history and it's close association with the upper military establishment. From what i know Turkey's situation is similar, but I'm not informed enough to be sure. Anyway, they are entrenched, turn a blind eye to most corruption at high levels and act as political justice when convenient. It's a mostly unaccountable and very hard to change part of the brazilian state and political system. Yes, that's what "nebulous" means: opaque, de facto structure hard to characterize, hard to trace the boundaries or shape of. "Nebulous" doesn't mean "non-existent". There's a lot of dynastic privilege extraction without explicit mechanisms of inherited title. Nonetheless it's not a command hierarchy. You can't hope to arrest its leaders, if only you could identify them, in order to arrogate its apparent powers onto a revolutionary legislature. ronya fucked around with this message at 07:41 on Mar 18, 2015 |
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Mar 18, 2015 07:18
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joepinetree posted:This is not true at all. I will once again point to a large and established literature on the topic (Kogut and MacPherson's articles on economists, Fourcade and Babb's "The Rebirth of the Liberal Creed: Paths to Neoliberalism in Four Countries," Jeffrey Chwieroth''s articles, Dezalay and Garth's book). If you'd rather have examples, it wasn't an accident that the US created the Chile Project to influence Chilean economists starting in the 1950s, it was not a coincidence that Chilean economic policy under Pinochet started to change drastically after 1975 (and not 1973) when Sergio de Castro became minister and General Leigh (much more Keynesian) started to lose support, it is not a coincidence that Chile was far more aggressive in its pursuit of neoclassical inspired policies than other countries (see the privatization of their social security program), despite the fact that the Chilean dictatorship was politically and ideologically allied with the Brazilian, Argentinean, etc. ones. errr. I'm not denying that policy ideology has changed. All your remarks here are true, but I see you're still not getting what I'm saying - I'm saying that it's changed in a way that is essentially unrelated to the direction which the surrounding political debate has taken. Policy has moved in the same center-left neoliberal/third-way direction that it has in the rest of the Western world, especially from the 1990s onward. However, the battling camps in Latin America don't seem to include any center-left neoliberals. The left maintains a rhetorical adherence to assorted heterodoxies. The right regards the distributive programs as illegitimate patronage rather than legitimate neoliberal ways to achieve social goals. Hence: the debate has had, and continues to have, remarkably little impact on actually-existing policy formation. So you have means-tested cash transfer schemes, elaborate public-private partnerships structured along contractual rather than managerial lines, etc., and both left and right pretend that it isn't textbook third-way neoliberalism.
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Mar 18, 2015 14:21
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icantfindaname posted:Labour under Corbae, various other insurgent leftist parties in Europe such as Die Linke in Germany, Melenchon's party in France, etc * both Labour under Jam Man (and John IRON DISCIPLINE McDonnell) and Die Linke are shady atm (and does Die Linke qualify as a major party anyway? its vote share is in the ballpark of UK Lib Dems). Even Die Linke - never mind Corbae's Labour - have a rhetoric of radical economic transformation that is quite distant from the relatively tepid policies Melenchon's Left Party certainly doesn't qualify as a major party
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Aug 17, 2016 10:15
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icantfindaname posted:what do you mean by shady? that they're not Full Communist enough, or something else? they're deliberately and consciously confabulatory on ideological direction; in the context of a question as to which major parties are Good, that should be a concern as for the Plano Real, the conventional wisdom is that it was tremendously successful at its main goal, which was to stabilize inflation the relative success and moderation of the pink tide has more to do with the end of the Cold War making militant radicalism from either side less rewarding and more difficult - high-stakes militancy is harder without US or Soviet backing - and the main trigger being the macroeconomic instability of the 1990s (remember those? Asian financial crisis, Russian default? Chaos in Mexico, Brazilian devaluation, riots in Argentina?). This is why there is a generation of populist, moderate-left governments with relatively rigid attitudes toward debt and currency policy these governments endured amidst a decade-long boom in resource exports, largely due to China, and are now struggling for the same resource-related reasons. domestic malaises like endemic corruption and an enduring faith in personality politics - well, those are hardly new, are they?
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Aug 18, 2016 09:14
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in the intervening period between the 1979 coup d'etat and the 1989 peace agreement, the opposition had grown from being rump Somoza loyalists to including moderates and centrists disenchanted with Ortega's hardline policies - ethnic cleansing, purges, conscription, Soviet alignment, etc (which were probably less murderous than the Contras, but you know, this is not a competition) in 1989 Ortega's own coalition was rapidly weakening. it was no longer 1984. the promise of Soviet sponsorship to support an anti-American foreign policy was obviously not working out. likewise, following the Iran scandal, the Americans had lost interest; this mutual de-escalation is why the right endorsed a former coup junta as their own candidate in 1990 the mutuality of the de-escalation is reflected in the fact that 1) he would go on to lose at the ballot box in 1990, and 2) having lost, he was not then purged by a victorious right-wing but instead remained in opposition in the legislature, and would indeed be eventually re-elected in 2006 on a platform with much less Marxism and a lot more social conservatism peace agreements are easier to support when both sides find themselves too exhausted to maintain hardline positions, and both sides know it. this is not similar to how FARC was weakened in Colombia and so the absence of middle-class endorsement should not be surprising. There is the middle-class narrative that the UP was justifiably smashed for refusing to honestly renounce violence, the El Caguan peace process dying under the FARC re-arming, and then FARC itself eventually collapsing under sustained military assault - this is not a narrative that leads to a consensus of peace at any price
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Oct 15, 2016 07:24
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Ardennes posted:Ultimately, the issue in Latin America seems to be more of an issue of leadership and ability to compromise. There doesn't seem to be any half way positions either implement price controls you can't afford or freeze the budget for 20 years. I think it's instructive to compare how East Asia managed that consensus (especially given that it did not always start off with such stability, e.g., South Korea under Rhee was much more dysfunctional than it was under Park after the 1961 coup d'etat). Glibly - the landlord class had been publicly discredited due to wartime collaboration, and yet the appeal of leftism was rigidly circumscribed due to geopolitical proximity to visibly murderous communist regimes. Against this backdrop, nominally socialist governments could undertake dramatic land reforms to buy a mandate for sweeping industrial change, but without raising the spectre that land reform is a prelude to total purges of anticommunist allies. The promise of the "pink tide" was supposed to be that Latin America, no longer a battleground for the US State Department and Gromyko's best, would be able to sustain such moderation. This was arguably working about as well as could have been hoped, taking the vagaries of each country as given - the region cannot really be blamed for the Chinese slowdown, and all governments would face difficulties in such situations. Maybe, given a decade, it could have stabilized. Maybe. The difficulties of such moderation is vividly demonstrated by Andres Velasco being burnt in effigy for running a surplus in 2006, then being celebrated for having a surplus to run down in 2008. ronya fucked around with this message at 08:32 on Oct 19, 2016 |
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Oct 19, 2016 08:29
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icantfindaname posted:What do people think of AMLO in Mexico? I read this article on him and it was good I'll be honest, I am astonished you read that blog. It writes things like this. The twitter thread you link to goes to and fro but it covers pretty familiar ground and winds back to pointing fingers at political institutions and dysfunction (always fertile ground for economists since, once one winds here, one's guess is as good as anybody's) "but what if... neoliberalism is bad" is certainly an odd way to read it; neoliberalism is almost totally orthogonal to the tired tussle between ISI and ELI and middle-income traps
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Mar 19, 2018 17:52
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well, "left-wing" is one thing. Kenneth Arrow was socialist. It's more ideological... temperament, shall I say. I took your choice of bedtime reading to be more of the sort where the phrase "wage repression" might make the writer break out in hives icantfindaname posted:If the comparison is between pre-1980s and post-1980s Mexico then neoliberalism seems very relevant, no? not really. kinda. sort of. To clarify: conventionally the Mexican lost decade started in the late 1970s and the neoliberal turn happened in the late 1980s. A typically left-wing reading then pivots to say, well, the seeds were sown in the 1950s and 1960s, et cetera, the 1970s as brutal reaction and overthrow of foolish socialist moderates that should have radically transformed society when they had the chance!! that foretold its own destruction, etc etc which can be sustained as an intellectual framework but that 1) gives up on the 1980s as a clear pivot and 2) clearly isn't what a graph of a spectacular ^-shape is trying to suggest
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Mar 19, 2018 18:23
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Question for those paying more attention to the regional news: 1. Who is now governing the country? I see in the news both the President and the Vice-President resigned. Who is the acting head-of-state? 2. Are the new elections announced 15 hours previously still going to go ahead?
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Nov 11, 2019 08:35
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For those familiar with the region - how representative is this narrative of events?quote:Nobody expected Arce—a technocrat, not a caudillo—to win more than 50 percent of the votes. To achieve this, he had to make some final plays that positioned him more as the first post-Evo president than as Morales’s successor. The first was having the capacity to criticize Morales’s administration and question the conditions under which “the first Indigneous president” governed. Arce has promised a youthful government, with new faces. The second move was getting the idea out of voters’ minds that the MAS would be assuming power forever. Arce has promised to govern for only five years and to “put the process of change back in motion.” And the third play was to eradicate the idea that [the return of] the MAS would mean political persecution and revanchism. Arce has promised to not persecute the police nor the military officials involved in Morales’s ouster.
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Oct 28, 2020 12:01
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my vague understanding is that as long the price of nat gas is in the dumpster, the new govt can't afford not to poke around for subsidies to cut - the peak Pink Tide years of welfare-spending-without-expropriation enabled by high petrol and copper prices are over regardless if structural reform is in the cards, the next question is what reform there might be a mandate for
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Oct 28, 2020 13:56
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