The Debatable Land

Plucky Honduras!

Meanwhile, there is good news from Latin America. Cato's Juan Carlos Hidalgo reports that the President of Honduras is the latest Latin American leader to call for an end to the "War on Drugs". Argentina and Mexico have made similar noises in the past. Some of this, for sure, is because the continent is turning to the left and is less concerned about upsetting Washington. Some of it, too, becase the failure of the "War on Drugs" is ever-more apparent. But Hidalgo suggests another reason too:

Another important factor is that many Latin American countries are now less susceptible to punishment from the United States, thanks in part to free trade agreements. A decade ago, all Latin American countries but Mexico depended on unilateral trade preferences to export to the U.S. market. Upsetting Washington could represent losing these preferences. Today, 11 Latin American countries have implemented (or are in the process of implementing) permanent trade agreements with the United States that ironically gives them more stability in their relationship with Washington.

This, I must say, is perilously close to a (rare) win-win situation for libertarian-minded chaps. As such I am, of course, suspicious...

Latin America's Under-Performance

Tyler Cowen is generously soliciting questions: here's mine, asked knowing that Tyler is keen on South America and capable of answering almost anything...

Why do Latin American countries perform so poorly at the Olympic Games?

The Republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia win medals in sports such as wrestling and weight-lifting, West Africa has produced sprinters while East Africans dominate distance running. So it can't just be poverty, right?

Is Latin America's comparative failure explained by a combination of poverty and physiological factors? That is to say, do Latin American countries with high Indian populations suffer from an in-built disadvantage? If so, does this help explain why Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, three countries with greater European and, in the case of Brazil, African immigration are also the dominant (historically and currently) soccer powers on the continent?

But then you might also think Argentina and Brazil would do better in the Olympics than they do, wouldn't you? Argentina waited decades before winning golds in basketball and soccer in Athens. This is a poor return, surely, for a country with such a european-gened population. True, polo is no longer an Olympic sport and this disadvantages them, but why are there so few Argentine eventers or show jumpers?

Alternative theory: soccer is so popular that it crowds out the marketplace for other sports across the continent. (And, in Argentina, rugby which is an elite sport that draws wealthy athletes away from Olympic sports?) But really, I don't know. How would you explain it?

Relatedly, is it just the absence of rugby and cricket from the Olympics that explains South Africa's woeful performance?

Guatemala's Secret War on Israel

Wackiest anti-immigration argument yet (US edition): Hamas wins when Hispanics are allowed into the United States. At least I think that's what Mark Krikorian is claiming:

David Hazony at Contentions points to a new poll that incidentally illustrates an important result of assimilation. (Complete poll here, in pdf.) The survey found that 82 percent of American Christians felt they had a "moral and biblical" obligation to support Israel, including 89 percent of evangelicals, but also 76 percent of Catholics. It's this last statistic that's striking evidence of Americanization — I haven't seen comparable polls elsewhere, but it seems exceedingly unlikely that even a majority of Catholics anywhere else would agree.Christian Zionism is essentially a Protestant phenomenon, and a statistic like this suggests how thorough was the cultural (though not necessarily theological) Protestantization of American Catholics...

The policy point is this — does anyone think three-quarters of the grandchildren of today's Hispanic Catholic immigrants will be similarly pro-Israel? It's not that Latin immigrants are uniquely anti-Semitic (I suspect they're more anti-Semitic than today's Asians or yesterday's Irish and Italians, but less so than Eastern European immigrants); rather, our ability to Protestantize them (in the sense I'm using it) has declined dramatically compared to a century ago.

I'd like to consider this astonishing but, of course, it isn't really.

Things That Are Not True

From our old friends at National Review:

Or, as Bill Bennett puts it: Colombia is the Israel of Latin America.

Your nominations please for other unlikely Israels in unlikely corners of the planet. eg, Andorra is the Israel of Europe or Orvieto the Israel of Umbria etc. A prize to the best suggestion...

A Democratic Plan Colombia

Hillary Clinton on the proposed US-Colombia trade deal:

I am disappointed that President Bush has decided to send the Colombia Free Trade Agreement to Congress. As I have said consistently for several months, I oppose signing any trade deal with Colombia while violence against trade unionists continues and the perpetrators are not brought to justice. The United States should be pursuing trade agreements that promote human rights and worker rights, not overlook egregious abuses.  I will vote against the President's Colombia trade agreement, and will urge my Senate colleagues to do the same.

No surprise there. No surprise either that Barack Obama is bound to vote against the deal himself. Well, that's the way the wind is blowing: in favour of economic nationalism and state-run racketeering. So be it. Theoretically this might just be campaign posturing but it seems as though it might be hard for a Democratic president to abandon this sort of rhetoric once in office. So there we have it: Democrats will rebuild links with the rest of the world by slapping friends and allies in the face. How brilliant.

And the fig-leaf given to justify this (relatively modest) trade deal? Ah yes, dead trade unionists. Well, I don't approve of murdering trade unionists and it would be grand if more of those responsible for killing union organisers were brought to trial. But all sorts of people are liable to be whacked in Colombia and many of those responsible are never brought to trial either.

Of course, much of Colombia's violence is exacerbated by the United States' lunatic and criminal drug policies, but last time I checked I didn't see any Democratic presidential candidate calling for the abandonment of Plan Colombia.

And how many trade unionists were murdered last year anyway? Fewer than 40. This chart shows you how, happily, it's safer to be a trade unionist in Colombia than to used to be. In 2002, by contrast, there were more than 30,000 murders in Colombia - or 78 per 100,000 Colombians. Many, perhaps even most, of those murders weren't solved either.

Department of Incentives*

This time in poor Colombia:

Funded in part by the Bush administration, a six-year military offensive has helped the government here wrest back territory once controlled by guerrillas and kill hundreds of rebels in recent months, including two top commanders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

But under intense pressure from Colombian military commanders to register combat kills, the army has in recent years also increasingly been killing poor farmers and passing them off as rebels slain in combat, government officials and human rights groups say. The tactic has touched off a fierce debate in the Defense Ministry between tradition-bound generals who favor an aggressive campaign that centers on body counts and reformers who say the army needs to develop other yardsticks to measure battlefield success.

*ie, the importance of getting them right.

Fidel: Forever In Our Hearts...

Commenting on this post about Fidel Castro's welcome retirement, a reader wrote, quoting part of my argument:

"If conservatives – on both sides of the North Atlantic – were too ready to turn a blind eye to Pinochet's crimes, left-wingers have been equally credulous with regard to Castro's Cuban dictatorship."

When Pinochet died, Jonah Goldberg and I had an email back-and-forth about this very claim. I dispute that the level of admiration for Castro on the left is anything approaching the right's support for Pinochet. Only among the most extreme, throwback lefties would you find a good word for man. Compare with Pinochet, who received so many kind words from conservative pundits upon his passing, and who maintained friendships with Thatcher, Reagan et. al. Sorry, it's not the same.

Perhaps that's true in the United States. But not all countries are the United States. You can imagine the delight I felt then when - via Mr Eugenides - I spied this comment from Harriet Harman* MP, currently Deputy Leader of the Labour Party as she answered questions from readers of The Independent:

Fidel Castro: hero of the left, or dangerous authoritarian dictator?

Hero of the left – but time for Cuba to move on.

*Ms Harman, it should be stressed, is not a Lady of the Loony Left. On the contrary she's been identified with the right-wing of the Labour Party. True, she's also hopeless but that's another matter entirely...

From Colombia to Queen's

A classic, touching American story by my friend Nancy Trejos in the Washington Post's magazine:

SAT ON THE AVIANCA FLIGHT FROM BOGOTA TO PEREIRA, my forehead pressed against the window, staring out into the clouds. It was September 11, 2007, and I was flying over Colombia, my father's homeland. I had been there only once before, at 13, when I accompanied my father to visit my grandparents and other relatives in Pereira, his home town. They hadn't seen my dad since he left for the United States 25 years earlier. They welcomed him back as a hero then because, unlike them, he had made it to America and created a life for himself there.

Seventeen years later, I decided to go back alone. This time, I was in Colombia to meet a relative I had not known about the first time. This time, I was there to meet my half brother -- a brother I had never seen before, not even in photographs.

His name is Humberto Trejos. He is the product of my father's first marriage in Colombia, the marriage he never spoke of. He is the son my father left behind.

You can read it all here.

VORP over arabists? Not so much. Or, more proof that games played and RBIs are junk stats.

Words just about fail me.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on the latest Great Moment in Public Diplomacy:

"Sports is a universal language... Everybody knows that if you can play baseball like Cal Ripken then you're going to... have the world at your feet... So he's going to go out and I'll bet he'll find people who want to be Cal Ripken in Pakistan and people who want to be Cal Ripken in Guatemala and people who want to be Cal Ripken in Europe... That's the wonderful thing about sports: it really transcends culture and it transcends identity."

It's obvious, isn't it, that you would send a retired baseball star to cricket-playing muslim countries to preach the merits of blue collar American-ness and hard work and being an "Iron Man" and all the rest of it. The wonder is that Karen Hughes didn't dream up this masterful idea sooner.

Equally tellingly, you'll notice that Dr Rice doesn't mention the one country where Mr Ripken might conceivably (and even then it's a stretch) do some good for the Yankee image. That would, of course, be Venezuela - the one South American country that considers baseball, not soccer, its national sport. But then again, why would you want to engage with the Axis of Evil's Junior Varsity skipper?

[Hat-tip: Belgravia Dispatch]

Mad Idea of the Day

Today's nominee for a session or two with Sir Roderick Glossop is Foreign Policy's Sam Dupont. Relating the stirring tale of a Colombian policeman's escape from the FARC (and his statement that three American hostages are still alive, as is 2002 Presidential nominee Ingrid Betancourt), he floats this idea:

Curiously, nothing much has been made of this news in the U.S. media, and nobody is proposing to do anything about it. While an intense search for three U.S. GIs held hostage south of Baghdad stretches into its seventh day, the three Northrop Grumman contractors, one of whom is reportedly suffering from hepatitis, continue to languish in their jungle prison. The parallel only highlights the inexcusability of letting U.S. citizens—government contractors, no less—waste away in the hands of a narcoterrorist group. Send in the Marines? [Emphasis added, of course.]

I assume Mr duPont only prefers a small deployment to the Colombian jungle to a full-scale invasion. Nonetheless might one suggest, albeit with the appropriate degree of hesitation, that US involvement in Colombia contributes to a problem that is unlikely to be lessened by increasing the US military presence in Colombia. That's just a hunch however.