Honduras, Venezuela and Cocaine

The situation in Honduras, where Manuel Zelaya, the president elected in 2005 was ousted a month ago by the country’s military forces in a Supreme Court-approved coup, may appear confusing. But it does not have to be so.

A clear explanation of what happened can be found here. The deposed president called a national referendum by presidential decree last month to change Hondura’s constitution. Some of these changes would have removed limits to the number of times the president can be re-elected (if you’re thinking of Chávez, you’re not mistaken). However, under the existing constitution, only the Supreme Electoral Tribunal has the authority to call referenda; and whoever tries to change the constitution is subject to losing all his or her constitutional powers. The Supreme Court and Attorney General called the referendum unconstitutional and proceeded to remove Mr. Zelaya from office with the assistance of the armed forces.

This is not what’s interesting. What I wanted to know was why Mr. Chávez was so involved in restoring Mr. Zelaya to the presidency—after a few weeks in exile, a defiant Mr. Zelaya crossed the Nicaraguan border into Honduras for a few hours accompanied by Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s foreign minister.

One possible answer of Venezuela’s interest in Nicaragua is drugs. The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report this month describing Venezuela as a major corridor for Colombian cocaine. In 2004, about 70 tons of cocaine crossed Venezuela and that number has quadrupled by 2009—a quarter of Colombia’s cocaine is now said to pass through Venezuela. Not to mention that Chávez’ Venezuela has been accused repeatedly with collaborating with the FARC in Colombia, and the main source of income of this terrorist organization comes from drug trafficking.

Where does Honduras come in? The Central American country is a major corridor for cocaine into Mexico. With increased air and sea monitoring, land-based routes are becoming increasingly important.

Venezuela is already collaborating with Nicaragua, which borders south of Honduras and is likewise an important drug transit hub. Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua's president and good buddy of Chavez's is one of the handful Latin American leftist rulers (next to Correa in Ecuador and Morales in Bolivia) accused of doing more than their fair share to strangle the democracies that brought them to power. They have all created constitutional assemblies to rewrite their countries’ constitutions, in a very similar way Zelaya wanted to do it.

I don’t know all things, and that’s OK. I don’t need to know all things because common sense speaks for itself. Here you have a group of leaders being accused of similar charges against democracy and human rights; there’s evidence that these men collaborate with the FARC; they all advocate anti-American sentiments and have conveniently stopped collaborating with the US on drug seizures. We’re not that dumb to ignore the ties that link all these men together, and the reasons behind their almost obsessive cooperation.

How can Venezuela continue to subsidize and literally buy out its people if oil prices are low? In a country where the only effective industry is oil and where the government buys its legitimacy with free money and gifts, how do you stay in power if you budgeted 2009 with oil selling at $120, when in fact it’s selling at half that? Cutting the budget is simply not enough! Not to mention that the more people are disgruntled, the more expensive their taste becomes.

SWAP your Clothes and Stick it to the Fashion Industry

Did you know that the average British woman spends £1,000 a year on clothes but only wears 30% of them? That's already pretty surprising, but worse is why.

We're all looking for cheap clothes and bargains. The cheaper the clothes the better. But many of us haven't stopped to think about the consequences and ramifications of cheap clothing. Have you ever wondered why WalMart can sell you a shirt for $11.67? This post may illuminate you. Posing as textile retailers, researchers found a place in Bangladesh that was offering to make their shirt for $4.70, including the price spent on fabric, accessories, laundry, and labor. The most expensive item was the fabric at $1.35 per square yard. Only 22 cents would be directed towards labor costs (compared to the 20 cents needed for the industrial laundry!) The real price in Bangladesh was of course lower, because they were making a profit of about $1. It is unthinkable that WalMart's profit is almost 300% on this shirt, even though it is so cheap for us.

In a production cost breakdown diagram, Hemtex, a leading home textile chain in Scandinavia, shows how little of their costs go towards wages and labor in China: a meager 4%! They spend 75% on raw materials, 10% on taxes, and 11% on machines. (You can click on the diagram image on top of this post.)

What this means to the workers in underdeveloped countries is that they earn "as little as two-tenths of one percent" of the price tag on a shirt, not to mention the incredible damage that the massive textile industry is inflicting on the environment.

The logic here is that since we don't wear what we buy, we buy more, hoping we will wear that, but of course we won't, and we'll just buy more. This senseless mass production pollutes the environment through the wasted energy used to operate the entire textile process (wet processing, humidification, weaving, spinning, bleaching, dying, steaming...) In addition to that, each step leaves potential environmental hazards. "The manufacture of polyester and other synthetic fabrics is an energy-intensive process requiring large amounts of crude oil and releasing emissions including volatile organic compounds, particulate matter, and acid gases such as hydrogen chloride, all of which can cause or aggravate respiratory disease. Volatile monomers, solvents, and other by-products of polyester production are emitted in the wastewater from polyester manufacturing plants. The EPA, under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, considers many textile manufacturing facilities to be hazardous waste generators."

And to top it all off, according to the EPA Office of Solid Waste, "Americans throw away more than 68 pounds of clothing and textiles per person per year, and clothing and other textiles represent about 4% of the municipal solid waste."

That's why I like the SWAP Team so much. They help you get rid of those clothes that are still in good shape but that you just don't want to wear anymore. It's simple: You exchange those clothes for somebody else's not-used clothes, and what is not exchanged is donated. Their next SWAP event will take place in September. Check out this article on today's Gazette, their website, and their Facebook page for more information. A truly simple, effortless solution to a big problem!

Temporarily Out of Order

I've been consumed by the series Lost! We can't stop watching it. We're now at season 3, somewhere in the middle, and though these people have been on that island for 3 months, they still don't know anything, because, it seems, everyone's favorite line is either, "You don't need to know" or "It won't change anything if you know"!

I gotta give it to the writers; great business plan!

Can Chávez be Understood?

When Hugo Chávez was elected for the first time a decade ago, he only had to contend with a popular former Miss Universe, Irene Sáez. He won big.

I understand why he won. I remember going to private primary school in Caracas and my school mates would flat out denigrate and insult the 'niches' (or 'poor and uncultivated'). I don't want to put myself above anyone, but I do remember how uncomfortable I'd feel listening and seeing the insults and mockery.

It was time, I believe, for this sub-culture to have a voice.

However, and this is really important, I never liked Chávez. History should teach us to learn from the past. He's a former soldier who attempted to overthrow a government, however legitimate these reasons might have been; he didn't come out as aggressively as he does today (he needed to appeal to the middle class he's now destroyed), but it was clear he was confrontational. Every time he was either re-elected or won a referendum of some sort (there have been quite a few elections and referendums since he took over), his speech became more and more aggressive.

It's indeed unfortunate, highly deplorable, that the voice that Venezuela's unprivileged strata so much needed had to be a man who, from the beginning, sought to destroy the country. But then I ask myself, why didn't anyone else appear before Chávez? Unfortunately (and this might be one of the very few political patterns that repeat themselves worth of serious study) those who are certain of their forceful means will take over before those who don't know how they'll manage to accomplish the same task through peaceful means.

And this is proof that military force is never for peaceful purposes. And nobody has the right to use force against their own people. The irony is that Chávez claims that one of the reasons he attempted to overthrow the government in 1992 in the first place after the 1989 Caracazo was because he couldn't follow his orders to go against his own people. Well, Mr. Chávez shouldn't be doing that today.

Or are power and Gucci suits to nice to give up?

Blogs are to the West what Participatory Politics was to Ancient Athens

I've been working on a research project on the use of online information and knowledge sharing tools by genealogists. You may have guessed it, there's really not a lot of research out there on the information seeking behavior of this group, much less on the online tools they use. But there's still some.

Yet as I tried looking for a study that would differentiate between information and knowledge sharing, of course, I found nothing. It makes sense though.

Say email, for example. It could be both. An email may contain information or knowledge; the same with an online forum. Wikis are more difficult to place. They contain a combination of individual "knowledges" that form a greater one.

But I found blogs the most interesting. I find good information for competitive intelligence projects in blogs. They are not necessarily primary sources, but blogs are great stepping stones to finding the right information. They usually comment about something that has happened--they regurgitate existing information to some extent, and add bloggers' insights and thoughts about that information.

I've often thought that our society has gone through similar stages as the ancient Greeks did. But I always wondered how it'd be possible for us to be as close to policy and opinion shaping as they were. And blogs do seem to fill that gap. We can't all meet in Washington or Ottawa to discuss politics. But like in Athens, we're now listening to the most popular opinion-makers through blogs, though these are not politicians or anyone of national importance. I like that.

My question is, who's going to be our Alexander the Great?