Most of South America takes an ugly turn

It's hard to say exactly what is happening in Venezuela because there is so much disinformation about it. I seriously doubt that things are nearly as bad there as we are being told by the U.S. media.
However, there is no doubt at all that Venezuela is in very bad straits.

What's being largely ignored is that Venezuela is by far not the worst story out of the South American continent.
The scariest development is in Brazil.

The frontrunner in Brazil's presidential election - far-right former army captain Jair Bolsonaro - gave a fiery and confrontational speech to supporters on Sunday in which he said he would purge the country of left-wing "criminals".

"We are the majority. We are the real Brazil. Together, we will build a new nation," he said. "These red criminals will be banished from our homeland."
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Bolsonaro - an outspoken advocate of the military dictatorship, who has previously spoken in favour of torture and extrajudicial police killings and has a history of making disparaging remarks about women, the LGBT community and other minority groups - currently leads opinion polls and is expected to win a comfortable victory during the October 28 presidential runoff against the Workers' Party's Fernando Haddad.

You may have heard about the political disaster in Brazil, but you probably haven't heard about the neoliberal economic meltdown in Argentina.

In June, the International Monetary Fund granted a $50 billion credit line to Argentina — the largest in the fund’s history — to help the country prop up its finances. It was not enough to stop the run on the peso, as investors kept taking their money out of the country.

On Aug. 30, the country’s Central Bank raised its benchmark interest rate to 60 percent to try to make the peso more attractive to investors — a rate it has maintained. That, in turn, has had a serious impact on the ability of small domestic businesses to get credit at affordable rates. Some credit cards are charging more than 100 percent annual interest on deferred payments.
...The administration has announced austerity measures, including halving the number of government ministries and imposing a tax on exports. It aims to eliminate its fiscal deficit next year. To boost market confidence and stabilize the economy, it renegotiated the agreement with the IMF this month, increasing the loan to $57.1 billion and gaining accelerated access to the funds.

Inflation is running at around 40% in Argentina and malnutrition is growing.
Neoliberal Argentine President Mauricio Macri's approval rating is below 27%, but he'll probably get re-elected because the political establishment in Argentina is repeating the Brazilian script by tying up the leftist opposition in criminal scandals.
Argentina's economy will see a 2.8% contraction this year. Next year’s growth is expected to be around zero percent.
In response to the IMF-imposed austerity, the people are starting to rebel.

Police in Argentina police fired rubber bullets, teargas and water cannon at protesters who marched Wednesday in front of Congress against the government's 2019 budget bill, which contains steep spending cuts aimed at erasing the country's fiscal deficit.

Thousands of activists led by teachers, social organizations and leftist groups opposed to President Mauricio Macri's austerity measures gathered in front of Congress.

Small groups of protesters threw rocks, sticks and trash at police who shot rubber bullets and used metal barriers to control the crowd.

Last year Colombia came to a historic peace agreement, putting an end to a 52-year long civil war.
The public then immediately elected a right-wing government that ran on opposing and overturning the peace agreement. So far the civil war hasn't restarted.

In comparison, the neoliberal centrist Chile is a bright spot, with a growing economy and a stable political system.
Underneath that story is the fact that Chile is one of the most unequal societies in the world, and the working poor are unhappy.

Currently, 90.75 percent of Chile's retirees receive pensions of less than 154.304 pesos per month US$233, almost half of the minimum wage established in the country.

Half a thousand people protested Wednesday against the private pension system in Chile, in a demonstration that ended with at least twelve detainees after a confrontation with the police.
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In 2016 that organization began protests across the country against the current private pension system, based on the individual capitalization of contributions must be delivered to private companies (AFPs, Pension Fund Administrators) and tax in 1981 by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

In middle of all of this unrest is Bolivia, one of the last countries that went leftist a decade ago and remained socialist.

Bolivia’s economy grew 4.61 percent in the first half of 2018 compared with the same period last year, driven by the agriculture sector, the government said on Wednesday.

That was higher than the 3.94 percent growth the country registered in the first half of last year.

Agriculture, construction, the finance sector and commerce all registered the highest performance in the year-on-year period, with growth rates above 5 percent.

Bolivian President Evo Morales, who's been on the CIA's regime change list for a decade, made news recently for berating President Trump in front of the entire world.

While representatives of some of the nations present at the meeting offered critical comments about Trump’s foreign policy — and in particular, his decision to pull out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement with Iran — Morales went further, linking Trump’s actions to a broader U.S. history of intervention in countries such as Iran.

“In 1953, the United States financed, planned and implemented a coup d’etat against a democratically elected government,” he said, referring to Iran. “After that, for many decades the United States supported an authoritarian government that allowed the profits from oil companies to line the pockets of transnational countries.

“This situation endured until the revolution of 1979,” Morales added. “And now that Iran has retaken control of its own resources, it is once again the victim of a U.S. siege.”

The Bolivian leader also said that the United States was responsible for the “most egregious acts of aggression committed during the 21st century,” including the military invasion of Iraq, the military intervention in Libya and the civil war in Syria. Morales also criticized Trump for threatening Venezuela and for its opposition to the International Criminal Court.

Morales’s harsh words drew surprise from some observers, as Trump is not frequently challenged by world leaders so directly.
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But while some experts on the United Nations had expressed concerns that Trump would respond angrily to criticism at the Security Council meeting this week, he offered little visible reaction after Morales spoke. Though Secretary of State Mike Pompeo looked toward the Bolivian leader, sometimes appearing to smirk, Trump mostly stared down at his papers.

When Morales had finished speaking, he simply responded: “Thank you, Mr. President.”

Under Morales, Bolivia has been a fierce critic of U.S. foreign policy. In 2008, it expelled the U.S. ambassador and threw out American departments such as the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Looks like we are going to have to bring "freedom" to Bolivia soon.

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I fear for the well being of all Bolivian citizens. I am sure regime change, er, I mean, democracy will be arriving soon. Need to find the perfect dictatorial puppet first.

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Bollox Ref's picture

I understand why the foreign minister was chuntering on about the 'squirrel' that is the Falklands the other day.

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Gëzuar!!
from a reasonably stable genius.

snoopydawg's picture

I just don't. Bolsonaro is saying that he is going to screw people over and yet they are going to vote for him anyway. Plus he's going to destroy the rain forest and apparently that's no big deal.

McConnell is saying he's coming for social security and I'm betting people will vote for republicans anyway. Not just the younger people don't think it's going to be there for them, but people who are on it or close to being on it. Why?

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

@snoopydawg

Bolsonaro is saying that he is going to screw people over and yet they are going to vote for him anyway.

The way he's talking, Bolsonaro intends to kill people.
Bolsonaro's only complaint about the military dictatorship was that it didn't kill enough people. Literally.

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Bollox Ref's picture

@snoopydawg

Haven't been happy since the abolition of slavery in the late 19th C. The elderly, educated, ascetic emperor, Dom Pedro II was shown the door. He wasn't unhappy to leave.

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Gëzuar!!
from a reasonably stable genius.

earthling1's picture

the people of Venezuela opting for a hard line militarist dictator-in-waiting like Bolsanaro, until I recall what happened here in 2016.
I cry for Venezuela.

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Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.

Amanda Matthews's picture

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has said former President Barack Obama can “go to hell,” called President Donald Trump a "bigot" and talked about personally executing people — yet he boasts a nearly 80 percent approval rating in his country, according to a recent poll.

Duterte — whose nicknames include "Duterte Harry" and “The Punisher," both references to ultra-violent fictional vigilantes — has been condemned by human rights organizations for his contentious war on drugs and crime, which has claimed the lives of thousands of people.

Yet the Asian leader remains incredibly popular among his supporters and is a key player in U.S. relations in the region.

*

Duterte's reputation for promoting violence in the name of public safety — even boasting about having "personally" killed suspected criminals — has earned him intense condemnation from human rights groups across the globe.

As recently as December, Duterte said he would go around "looking for a confrontation so I could kill" while he was mayor.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/rodrigo-duterte-what-you-need-know-ab...

We’ll end up supporting Bolsonaro. Since the School of the Americas got the boot our PTB have had to struggle to get back into Central and South America. First country with a terrorist government that the US backed down there was Honduras. That was a Clinton/Obama operation straight out of Henry Kissinger’s playbook.

Those damn peons, peasants, and pissants need to be put back in their place.

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I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa

@Amanda Matthews
Honduras and El Salvador still have the corrupt, right-wing murderers in charge.
Nicaragua is the Venezuela of Central America, in several ways.

But Guatemala and Mexico , while both having huge problems, might be taking turns for the better.

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