Lat-Am Watch: Poll by proxy in Brazil

Serra trumps Lula in local election battle

Brazilians in 30 major cities went to the polls on Sunday to elect mayors in run-off elections, after the nationwide municipal vote on October 5. The outcome was a clear victory for one man – and he didn’t even have to take part to win.

Sao Paulo governor José Serra waves to supporters. Photo Reuters

José Serra, the governor of Sao Paulo, emerged as the favourite to succeed Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva as president in 2010, thanks to a political gamble which paid off in Sunday’s ballot. By mastering the complicated world of Brazilian local politics, where coalitions are constantly changing, Serra has come out on top of this year’s elections.

The victory of his former deputy Gilberto Kassab in the Sao Paulo city ballot on Sunday is due in large part to Serra’s handiwork, an effort that should pay off nicely in the next presidential elections. It’s also a firm kick in the teeth for Lula’s Workers Party, which invested heavily to regain a foothold in the city of 8 million voters.

José Serra is an icon of the social democrat PSDB party, which he helped found along with former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso back in 1988. He would have liked to succeed his mentor Cardoso in the presidency and ran against the trade-union leader Lula da Silva in 2002, losing in a now historic election.

Since then he has focused on Sao Paulo, winning the 2004 mayoral elections against Marta Suplicy of the PT. When the 2006 presidential elections rolled around he expected his party to let him to run again. Instead the PSDB picked Serra’s rival and then Sao Paulo governor Geraldo Alckmin to try his luck. Serra decided not to fight the nomination and chose the “consolation prize”; succeeding Alckmin in the governor’s palace, an election that was as good as won.

In hindsight, the turnout of events favoured Serra over Alckmin. For although the first round of the 2006 presidential election was undecided, the bespectacled Alckmin was no match for Lula’s massive appeal and lost by more than 20 percent in the run-off, amazingly getting less votes in the second round than in the first.

Meanwhile, Serra moved swiftly to fill his rivals post, after an easily won election in October of that year. In his stead in the Sao Paolo mayor’s office he left his deputy, the engineer and economist Gilberto Kassab of the centre-right Democratas party (DEM).

When this year’s municipal elections rolled around, Kassab made it clear he wanted to hang to his job. To do so he had to take on former mayor Mrs. Suplicy and none other than Geraldo Alckmin. Serra saw to it that at least part of the PSDB backed Kassab. He also managed to get Kassab the backing of Brazil’s largest party, the Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (PMDB).

That not only stunned Alckmin but left the PT reeling as well. Lula’s government forms a coalition with PMDB on a national level and relies heavily on the party’s national presence for support in local elections.

Still, getting Kassab elected remained a long shot. In May of this year the polls put both Alckmin and Suplicy at 30 percent of the vote each, with the incumbent mayor trailing with only 13 percent. Most expected Alckmin to win a second round against Suplicy, thereby strengthening his chances to face-off against Lula’s candidate in 2010.

However, by knocking out Alckmin in the first round, Kassab secured the backing of a large part the PSDB voters for the second round against Suplicy.

The candidate for the Democratas has introduced a number of popular measures in the world’s second largest city. Not least, the controversial decision to ban almost all outdoor advertising and severely restrict signposts, which brought him the anger of the advertising community and the jubilance of paulistas in equal measure.

So, despite president Lula and the PT putting everything they had behind Suplicy, the former mayor lost to the incumbent by 39,2 percent to 60,72 percent on Sunday.

For José Serra, that result yields huge returns for his own 2010 bid. First of all it means that Alckmin is out of the picture as a candidate. The PSDB will certainly pick the Sao Paolo governor who is backed by the city mayor as their candidate over the jobless Alckmin.

Secondly it means Serra can count on the backing of Kassab’s own party for his candidacy. To him the support of the Democratas is crucial. He hasn’t forgotten that it was an identical alliance that secured the presidency for the PSDB’s Fernando Cardoso in 1994 and 1997.

By backing a relative outsider from another party, the wily Serra has laid the foundation for his own potentially very successful candidacy in 2010. An election, need I remind you, in which president Lula is barred from running by Brazil’s Constitution.

Meanwhile, the other results in Sunday’s election have cleared up some of the haze over whom Serra might be running against. Not only is Alckmin out of the picture, but so is Suplicy who needed to win Sao Paulo to have an electoral base.

Seeing as Lula once suggested his successor might be a woman, many speculate that that only leaves his chief of staff, Dilma Roussef. However she faces opposition from within the PT, by the Sao Paulo faction and her backers in Porto Allegre just took a hit as well in these elections.

But with Lula’s popularity for surpassing that of his party, it seems likely that any candidate that enjoys his endorsement will be the one best equipped to take on the experienced José Serra.

Ecuador, your global utilities provider

Paying for rainforest services is a logical step

The Yasuní rain forest reserve in Ecuador is one million hectares of the most biodiversity territory on the planet. There are less than three months left to keep it that way.

That’s because underneath the Yasuní reserve lie nearly a billion barrels worth of oil.

Photo: www.amazoniaporlavida.org

Last year, in a revolutionary approach to preserving what’s left of our planet, the Ecuadorean government proposed to keep the oil in the ground if the international community was willing to fork out half of the money Ecuador would get if it actually exploited the oil field. That amount was calculated at 350 million dollars a year for ten years.

Worryingly, the deadline for other countries to commit to saving Yasuní runs out in December with hardly any funding in sight. By the beginning of next year oil companies could be staking claims to the underground wealth of Ecuador.

That would be disastrous for the natural habitat of thousands of species of flora and fauna, not to mention the indigenous communities that live in the reserve, some of whom have no contact with the outside world.

Don’t take my word for it, though. Past experience in Ecuador has proven that oil companies aren’t exactly beneficial to the environment. The damage in pollution caused by Chevron-Texaco, which dumped 18.5 billion gallons of highly carcinogenic toxic waste into unlined pits, swamps, streams, and rivers over a 28-year period has been calculated at 16.2 billion dollars.

Oxfam calls it the “environmental crime of the century.” So understandably the communities that live in the Yasuní reserve – and sane people in general– are hoping that the exploitation can be avoided.

What makes Yasuní so special? Here’s a statistic. On one acre of this pristine rain forest there exist, on average, more tree species than in the entire United States. It’s a tropical haven, where flora and fauna took refuge during the last Ice Age, and which today hosts the world’s greatest biodiversity. It’s home to jaguars, giant otters, woolly monkeys and no fewer than 630 types of birds – including the rare harpy eagle – and 25 species of endangered mammals.

But it’s not just an unusually high species count that makes this a place worth saving. The world’s rainforests hold tight tens of billions of tonnes of carbon in vegetation and soils, and continue to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere even when the have reached the stage of old and mature ecosystems.

As they breathe they pump out some 20 billion tonnes of water into the atmosphere every day, influencing global rainfall patterns. Deforestation and drought go hand in hand.

"Rainforests are like a giant global utility right now, like a water utility or a power station, that's providing a service we're not paying for," Andrew Mitchell, director of the Global Canopy Programme, told the Guardian recently. "When you don't pay your electricity bill, you get cut off. We should recognize that these countries [such as Ecuador] shouldn't provide us with a service for free."

That’s what makes the Yasuní plan so attractive. Paying 350 million a year now, will save us billions in the future spent on carbon sequestration and water desalination.

Of course the plan has weaknesses as well. A serious drawback, according to the Yasuní Green Gold non-governmental organization, is that the government’s proposal leaves open the possibility to return the money and exploit the oil field anyway.

Another weakness is that local Yasuní bodies were not invited to participate in the proposal or in any future planning, casting doubt on how much money would be channeled into the development of much-needed local alternative economic activities.

But these issues, and others, can be hammered out in a round of negotiations. The important thing is that rich countries show willingness to embrace this innovative way of preserving our global resources.

In fact, according to the Swedish-born businessman and activist Johan Eliasch, paying other countries not to cut down their forests is the best way to fight climate change.

In a report released last week, Eliasch, who is also special advisor the British prime minister on things environmental, argues that a global carbon market could pay the tropical rainforests' owners, or people living in them to save and maintain the trees, thereby cutting emissions. He himself has bought several thousand acres of rainforest in Brazil and urges others to do the same.

Deforestation contributes about 17% of global carbon emissions, the third biggest source behind power generation and industry, and bigger than either China or the United States, says the report.

Obviously there are concerns about spending money this way. Especially in countries like Ecuador, where corruption is often out of control. Therefore such a plan needs to be executed with full oversight and involving the people whose lives are directly affected.

The time to act is now and saving the Yasuní reserve would be a magnificent first step down a new road of combating climate change.

So far though, only a few European countries have shown interest in the scheme and only Spain has officially committed. The fear is, that as the economic global downturn sets in, countries will be even less inclined to spend on the environment. But not acting now means that sooner or later we’ll be presented with a horrendous utility bill. And getting cut off is not an option.

Lat-Am Watch: Ghosts return to haunt Peru

García assailed by familiar troubles from the past

Peru’s image of recent years was one of relative stability and soaring economic growth. The painstaking reforms put in place by president Alejandro Toledo (2001-2006) placed the export economy in a slipstream culminating in some of the best macroeconomic figures for Latin America last year. Meanwhile, the government claimed that the serious social divides were finally being breached.

New PM Yehude Simon takes office today. Photo Andina.

To many, the times when the Andean nation was plagued by rampant corruption, unabated terrorism and a roller-coaster economy seemed to have been put to rest once and for all with the election of the new & improved Alán García to the presidency in 2006 and more symbolically, with the trial of former autocrat Alberto Fujimori.

But in the past few weeks a whole parade of ghosts have come back to haunt Peru, leading to the resignation of García’s entire cabinet last week Friday.

What ignited the recent turmoil is an unfolding corruption scandal involving the state-run oil company Petroperu, the state oil licensing company Perupetro (bear with me) and a small Norwegian oil outfit called Discover Petroleum.

A taped telephone conversation broadcast on October 5 by the investigative reporters of El Cuarto Poder provided damning evidence to show that Alberto Quimper, the head of Perupetro, and Rómulo León Alegría, a prominent member of García's Partido Aprista Peruano, were guilty of influence peddling. They allegedly accepted bribes to ensure that Discover Petroleum won five of the seven oil exploration licenses it applied for in an auction in September.

(What is it about Scandinavian businesses and corruption scandals overseas? Last year Saab was accused of graft to boost jet fighter sales in the Czech Republic, then Skanska doled out millions in “commissions” here in Argentina (whatever happened to that case?) and now these Norwegians. When in Rome, I suppose…)

That scandal first forced out Mines and Energy Minister Juan Valdivia, along with Quimper and the head of Perupetro César Gutiérrez, which handled the auctions. After increasing pressure from the public and the opposition, prime minister Jorge del Castillo, a close ally of president García, stepped down and with him the entire cabinet. On Saturday Del Castillo was replaced by a left-wing independent Yehude Simon, with a reputation for crusading against sleaze.

It seems fair to suppose that García pushed for the rapid resignations. He’s eager to prove he is doing all he can to stem corruption, given that his last stint in office (1985-1990) was constantly plagued by accusations of graft. Nonetheless, his dismal approval ratings mean that the public isn’t about to cut him any slack. The day after the airing of the damning tapes, the streets of Lima swelled with protesters sensitive to decades of pocket-lining politicians.

In fact protestors have been on the streets for a number of other reasons which pre-date the television show and which make up the tinderbox that fuelled the general outcry over this latest scandal.

In July there was a general strike followed by mineworkers protest, followed by Amazonian Indians in August, angered over multinational companies encroaching on their lands. Then came a strike by 20,000 medical professionals in September who demanded the resignation of the then health minister. In November teachers plan another massive rally.

High inflation - although a regional affliction - and the perception that the commodities boom is not ‘trickling down’ has further undermined the popularity of Alán Garcia, whose rating stands at 19 percent, half of what it was in December 2007.

With the return of civil unrest and corrupt politicians a third misfortune has come back to instil fear in the lives of ordinary Peruvians. Last week Thursday 15 people were killed in a bomb attack by the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) terrorist group. The attack is the deadliest in years by an organization all but extinguished back in 1992.

Over the past year Sendero Luminiso has picked up where it left off, claiming a stake in the burgeoning drug-trade and ruthlessly killing peasant farmers and security officials in the Apurimac-Ene River Valley zone. Peru is now the world’s second largest cocaine producer after Colombia.

All of this makes the choice of Yehude Simon for prime minister an interesting one, which reflects a definite change of tack in García’s presidency. Simon’s left-wing credentials make him a much more palpable candidate for the angered unions and demonstrators. His appointment of a left-leaning surgeon to the post of health minister should go down well with the doctors. The fact that he’s not from the corruption-smeared APRA-party is another endorsement.

Garcia’s motivation for fielding him probably has a lot to do with trying to take the wind out of the sails of his political nemesis Ollanta Humala. The radical nationalist and former military officer who enjoys enormous popular support among the rural poor came in a close second in the elections.

The other major opposition force, the right wing Unidad Nacional led by Lourdes Flores, would normally have nothing to do with Humalla. However, the recent scandal saw both groups aligned as they clamoured for the cabinet’s resignation.

By appointing Simon, García hopes to regain some congressional support. If he manages to do just that, it’ll be the first step in a long uphill struggle for the three years that remain of his presidency.

(This column is dedicated to Michael Bond. Yesterday was exactly 50 years ago that he introduced the world to that Wellington-boots sporting bear named Paddington, who of course hails from Darkest Peru)