BRAZIL

• Wages remain stagnant and this has led to a few strikes, including one by the Federal Police a few months ago and an action this week by bank workers. Lula's government is determined to wipe out clandestine slave labor in rural areas, but as a recent two part series in the Miami Herald (Part I here and Part II here, the process is daunting and dangerous.

• Nationwide municipal elections are scheduled for next month in which mayors and city council members will be elected. There are a number of parties and according to my brother-in-laws Marcos and Márcio, the benefit of this is that many people tend to vote for the candidate and less so for the party. Brazil also uses electronic voting (with a paper trail). Voters punch in the number of their candidate, the candidate's face appears on the screen and the voter either affirms or corrects their entry. Signs are everywhere and the television advertising is ubiquitous. I have a couple of cousins running for council in Belo Horizonte and Teófilo Otoni in the state of Minas Gerais on the Green Party and Social Democrat Party, respectively. Good luck Iara and Roberto!

• Finally, I was glad to see in the airports in Belo Horizonte and São Paulo as I was leaving that Embratur, the national tourist board is busy with researchers asking survey questions of foreign travelers to Brazil about their feelings about travel to the country and what they would recommend. I don't see enough of an effort being made to attract visitors from the US and I think that this is a good start.

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

• I also spent four days in the Dominican Republic last month visiting Santo Domingo and the baseball mecca of San Pedro de Macoris, and while hardly a thorough visit, I did have the opportunity to talk with some people about the return of Leonel Fernandez to the presidency. The general consensus was that it was a good thing to get rid of Hipolito Mejia. A tour operator I chatted with felt very confident about Fernandez's ability to govern, but many of the other Dominicans who were interested in expressing their thoughts were not so sanguine. Some felt that Fernandez was not a significant improvement and that he was probably more interested in promoting himself than improving the lives of his citizens.

• The challenge for the country is the amount of debt it is carrying and continues to carry. Fernandez in his inauguration speech spoke of austerity, yet many citizens are close to the breaking point. There is great potential here. Tourism has grown nearly exponentially (American Airlines flies to five destinations there: La Romana, Punta Cana, Santo Domingo, Santiago and Puerto Plata) and it's a popular destination for European tourists. Gold, silver, bauxite and other minerals are mined there and unlike its neighbor on the island of Hispaniola (Haiti), the land is fertile and farming is widespread. Only time will tell whether the country will recover from the Mejia administration. I will withhold judgment and try to remain optimistic.

CENTRAL AMERICA

Panama

• Outgoing Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso has granted pardons to four terrorists convicted of attempting to assassinate Fidel Castro with thirty-three pounds of explosives at a summit meeting in Panama City four years ago. Three of the pardoned terrorists who happened to be US citizens returned to Florida. The fourth, Luis Posada Carriles escaped to Honduras on a fake US passport and remains at large. He is wanted in Venezuela for the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed seventy-three.

• Marcela Sánchez is asking the right questions about this matter here. Check her out.

El Salvador

• Imperfect justice is better than no justice as someone is finally held accountable for the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero. The sad facts of the matter is that this was a civil trial, not a criminal trial, the trial was held in the US, not El Salvador and the defendant, Alvaro Rafael Saravia, is currently on the lam. Nevertheless, the facts of Romero's murder are not part of a legal public record and judgment.

Costa Rica

• Why would a nation that has no army, has committed no financial resources toward the Iraq war and a commitment in its constitution to neutrality be part of the Coalition of the Willing. As Central American blogger, David Holliday notes, that's a good question. President Abel Pacheco claims that he only agreed to have his country's name added because they oppose terrorism, but a decision by the country's Consitutional Court called for the removal of the country from the list of the Coalition countries. After more than a week, it was finally removed.

VENEZUELA

• Questions as to the legitimacy of the referendum results that kept Hugo Chávez in power have continued to be raised since the vote. As David Holliday noted, The Wall Street Journal published an article about the work of two Venezuelan academics living in the US, Ricardo Hausman and Roberto Rigobon, who are economists at Harvard's Kennedy School and MIT, respectively who claimed through a statistical analysis that the odds of a clean vote were 1 in 100.

• Meanwhile, two computer scientists make the case here make the case that while electronic voting offers opportunities to cheat, in their simulations they observed no statistical anomalies.

• So what is the answer? I wish I could say with some uncertainty. Caracas Chronicles lists the Carter Center's response and then takes Hausman and Rigobon to task rightfully for missing an obvious anomaly of their own. After all this, in the words of Michael Palin, "My brain hurts!"

• What has changed? Essentially nothing. As Andrés Oppenheimer notes, Chávez is hungry for power and as Michael Shifter writes here, the Bush administration is all too eager to take the bait and seek to clash with Chávez again. No one wants this more than Chávez in his ongoing effort to maintain street cred with his base. Nevertheless Chávez is no idiot. While he will threaten retaliation against the US using petroleum as a cudgel, his history shows that he only tends to pursue these threats against countries like the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica. Cutoffs to these nations would do little harm to Venezuela, whereas a cutoff of oil to the US could be devastating and would probably screw up his social programs and alienate his base. The Bush administration should try a different tack with Chávez and ratchet the rhetoric down a little. If nothing else, it will confound Chávez.

HAITI

• Hurricane Jeanne has battered Haiti and more than 600 have been killed as a result. This comes four months after more than three thousand were killed in floods along the border with the Dominican Republic. The above link has tips on how you can help, especially if you're in South Florida. This link also takes you to the home page of Haitian Women of Miami, a social services organization that has information on how you can help. Please consider sending something to help those who have so little.

CHILE

• An internal review of Riggs Bank found that former chairman Joe Allbritton was one heck of a personal banker for Augusto Pinochet. Among other special favors, when Pinochet was indicted by Spanish Judge Baltazar Garzón in 1999 and ordered that Pinochet's assets be frozen, Riggs Bank canceled a US$1.6 million CD in its London branch without penalty, transfered the money to Washington then engaged in a labyrinthine attempt to cover the tracks of these transfers. All for a general whose salary was a little over US$10,000 per year.

• Judge Garzón is none too pleased by this and has requested that US authorities file criminal charges against Riggs Bank and seven top executives including Allbritton. This reeks of money laundering and illicit enrichment. In this day and age when terrorism exists because of funding subterfuges like this, there should be no hesitation in vigorously invesitigating this matter and, if the evidence warrants, prosecuting those responsible.

Randinho's Latin America Briefing will be back next month. Meanwhile, regular updates concerning Latin American events can be found at Beautiful Horizons.