Dope springs eternal

A new opium for the people

ROBIN DOUGLAS apologises for not putting on his shirt while giving a sermon to a parishioner via Skype. His listener doesn’t mind; she doesn’t feel well enough to drive the hour from her home to the Church of the Holy Smoke in White Rock, a seaside town near Canada’s border with the United States. So she gets his rambling advice via a laptop.

Even in the Vancouver area, mocked by Canadians from elsewhere as a nest of decadence, Pastor Douglas, as he calls himself, leaves nobody indifferent. His parish office is a wooden house with hand-written signs at the front and old pizza boxes inside. His central place of “worship” is a tatty tent; the main liturgical practice is smoking marijuana.

The rich folk who share the beach-front rejoiced in midsummer when the council told him to fold the tent and put an end to the smoke, garbage and noise. He is unrepentant. “We are a church,” he insists. “We do good works, we help cancer patients with free marijuana. I could be a millionaire if I sold it.”

How strong is his legal case? Canadian courts, like American ones, have been asked...

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Not so serene

“I AM completely calm,” declared Otto Pérez Molina, stoutly, at a press conference on August 31st. He was referring to the corruption allegations he faced. By the next evening, he had much less reason to be sanguine, because the country’s lawmakers voted to end his immunity from prosecution. Hours later, he was barred from leaving the country; then an arrest warrant was issued, and he resigned.

Mr Pérez becomes the first leader of Guatemala to be forced out of office and made to face legal proceedings because of sleaze. For anti-corruption campaigners throughout Latin America, the news was a rare and sweet breakthrough for the principle that holders of high office must be held to account like everybody else. In Guatemala, a land which is still riven by social divisions and demands for justice after a long civil war which ended in 1996, street protesters cheered enthusiastically.

The president stands accused of involvement in “La Línea”, a scheme named after the hotline it used, in which customs officials are alleged to have accepted kickbacks in exchange for reducing the import duties companies were required to pay.

Allegations linking the president to La Línea are not new. Congressmen had already voted once before on removing Mr Pérez’s immunity, but supporters of the move did not reach the two-thirds threshold required by the constitution. On...

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Desperate times, desperate moves

WHEN a president has single-figure approval ratings, faces calls for her impeachment, and has lost control of her political base, is she in a position to play hardball with the country’s legislators? Brazilians will soon find out.

On August 31st Dilma Rousseff, their president, sent Congress a budget for 2016 with a gaping primary deficit (before interest payments) of 30.5 billion reais ($8 billion), or 0.5% of GDP, challenging its members to close the gap. It was a break with the sound-money practices that have underpinned Brazil’s economy. It was, some critics say, illegal. Certainly nothing similar has happened since at least 2000, when Fernando Henrique Cardoso, then the president, transformed public finances.

On a charitable view, Ms Rousseff was shocking legislators into making hard decisions rather than simply blocking her fiscal proposals. A harsher reading is that she does not know how to lead...

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The new rustbelt

IF YOU visit south-western Ontario and the Niagara peninsula you will see scenes of industrial decay. Steel mills, vehicle-parts factories and food processors sit abandoned, their car parks studded with tufts of grass. The region has the look of a rustbelt, and that has Canadians worried.

Manufacturing took a beating in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when high oil prices drove up the value of the Canadian dollar, making factories less competitive. But Canada should now be recovering from that bout of Dutch disease. The “loonie”, as Canadians call their currency, has been dropping along with oil prices. On August 25th it fell to its lowest level in a decade against the American dollar. That, plus the strong economy in the United States, the market for three-quarters of Canada’s exports, should have scraped off much of the rust.

So far it has not. Factory sales rose 1.2% in June, but were 3.1% below their level of a year earlier. The failure of manufacturing to respond to the tonic of a weaker currency is one reason why the economy probably contracted during the first half of 2015.

Now Canadians are starting to suspect that much of what they lost may never come back. In 2000 manufacturing accounted for 18% of GDP, not much lower than the share in Germany; by 2013 that had dropped to 10%, about the level in Britain and the United States. Factory...

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Plaguing paradise

Not how it looked in the brochure

SPEYSIDE on the island of Tobago has taken a direct hit. So have Skeete’s Bay, Bathsheba and other beaches on the southern and eastern coasts of Barbados. Cancún, a Mexican resort, has been struck. The bombardment takes the form of globs of sargassum seaweed which have landed on Caribbean beaches this year, forming piles that are sometimes metres deep. They emit a rotten-egg stench when they decompose, ruining holidays for anyone with a sense of smell. Hilary Beckles, the vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies, calls it “the greatest single threat to the Caribbean economy I can imagine.”

There are more than 100 species of sargassum, possibly named after a Portuguese water flower. S. natans and S. fluitans spend their lives afloat and normally bother nobody. Buoyed by gas-filled bladders, they drift from nutrient-rich waters in the Gulf of Mexico into the Sargasso Sea.

They can be as friendly to marine life as a coral reef. Ten species of fish live only in sargassum...

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Justice decayed

IT STARTED with a shooting. Two men, apparently on a motorbike, attacked a Venezuelan army anti-smuggling convoy on August 19th, close to the main border crossing with Colombia. Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, quickly went on television and vowed to hunt down the “murderers” (though the four victims were injured, not killed). He decreed a state of emergency in six municipalities in the frontier province of Táchira and expelled more than 1,000 Colombians living in Venezuela. The Simón Bolívar International Bridge is closed until further notice.

The expulsions were summary and carried out brutally. But for once, the accusations levelled at foreigners, the usual scapegoats for any problem in Venezuela, were not entirely spurious. Colombians are certainly involved in the lively contraband trade in petrol and other goods, which are made artificially cheap in Venezuela by price controls and the weak currency, the bolívar. (Venezuelan mafias, some of them linked to its army, are equally enthusiastic smugglers.) But most Venezuelans, especially the 5m residents of its capital, Caracas, and its metropolitan area, worry more about home-grown killers...

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Wonder women and macho men

“CRISTINA’S pleasure” blared the cover of a 2012 edition of Noticias, a tabloid news magazine in Argentina. A caricature of the country’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, seemed to show her in mid-orgasm, her head thrown back, her mouth open. “Every day she seems more confident, sensual and even shameless,” the story went on. For further enlightenment, readers were invited to watch an animated video online of the president masturbating.

Good taste is not how tabloids sell copies in any country, but it is hard to imagine a British red top describing a female politician quite so crudely. The treatment of Ms Fernández in Noticias points to a Latin American paradox. Women have made great progress towards equality with men, especially in schools, workplaces and politics. But social attitudes have changed more slowly. Women’s ambitions are often belittled; hostility towards them is common. Raw statistics tell a story of female advancement; machista culture has yet to catch up.

In the past quarter-century, the proportion of women in the workforce has risen more in Latin America than...

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The migrant nation

IT WAS a slim volume, just 108 pages, and its title was hardly one to quicken pulses. Nevertheless Desborde Popular y Crisis del Estado (“Popular Overspill and Crisis of the State”) quickly became a bestseller in Peru after its publication in 1984. That was because the author, José Matos Mar, an anthropologist who died this month aged 93, had put his finger on a far-reaching social revolution which continues to reshape his country and has echoes across Latin America.

Mr Matos’s argument was that migration from the Andes to Lima and the other cities of Peru’s Pacific coast was no mere movement of population. Rather it amounted to an unstoppable tide of social change that smashed down or simply bypassed Peru’s oligarchic political and economic structures. The migrants settled—there would be 8m of them between 1940 and 2010—in largely self-built shantytowns (though by now many have brick houses and paved streets). They forged a new culture, mestizo (mixed) but with Amerindian roots, and had their “own sense of law and morality”. They created jobs for themselves in a growing “informal” (ie, unregistered)...

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Girl power

SEXISM is not just wrong. It is also expensive. Latin America has made progress in bringing women into the workforce (see article). But their participation rate still lags far behind that of men. If the gap were closed, the region’s GDP per person would be 16% higher, estimate David Cuberes of Clark University in Massachusetts and Marc Teignier of the University of Barcelona.

In a new paper these two economists also looked at the economic effects of gaps in the rates at which men and women run businesses. Latin American women are relatively enterprising. The effect of the difference between male and female entrepreneurship is smaller in the region than it is, for example, in the United States. Still, if the difference were eliminated Latin America would be 4.7% richer per person, they claim (see chart).

Labour-force participation rates vary widely. In Mexico, the second-largest economy in Latin America, and in Chile, one of the most advanced, it is much...

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Long live Cantopop

IT IS a novelty that few students are likely to notice. When the University of British Columbia (UBC) resumes classes in September it will for the first time offer a course for credit in Cantonese. That seems an unremarkable decision by a Chinese-language department that claims to be the largest in North America. In fact, it is a bookish act of resistance.

Cantonese was widely taught at Canadian and American universities 30 years ago, says Ross King, head of UBC’s Asian-studies programme. That is because most Chinese immigrants came from Hong Kong and southern China, where it is the main language. Cantonese still resounds in Chinatowns, such as those of Vancouver and San Francisco. But the economic rise of mainland China, whose official language is Mandarin Chinese (or putonghua), is pushing Cantonese off the streets and out of the academy. UBC wants to bring it back.

Newcomers to Vancouver’s Chinatown are richer and speak Mandarin. A sign advertising luxury apartments welcomes potential buyers (in Roman letters) with ni hao, the putonghua greeting, rather than the Cantonese nei hou. A decade ago, dignitaries at Chinese-new-year festivities gave speeches in Cantonese; today they speak Mandarin.

Cantonese is not about to die out...

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A Central American spring?

LIGHT from thousands of bamboo torches cuts through the gathering darkness in Tegucigalpa, Honduras’s capital. The protesters who carry them call their demonstrations marchas de las antorchas (torch marches). They have been taking place weekly at dusk since May. Their purpose: to rail against what participants see as grotesque corruption at the highest levels of government. “We can’t take it any more,” says Yelso Serna, a salesman who has marched three times.

In neighbouring Guatemala the protests, and the scandals that provoke them, are even bigger. Every Saturday since April thousands have poured into Constitution Square in Guatemala City to demand an overhaul of the political system, starting with the removal of the president, Otto Pérez Molina.

The size and stubbornness of the crowds in both countries has prompted some observers to dub the protests a “Central American spring”, like the Arab revolts that toppled corrupt Middle Eastern regimes in 2011. They draw inspiration from Brazil, where hundreds of thousands of people, enraged by a multibillion-dollar bribery scandal involving Petrobras, the state-controlled oil company, have...

from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1Mm9Apo

Legislative landfill

BRAZILIANS are fastidious folk. They take more showers than anyone else. Their neighbourhoods are spotless. Even the narrow streets of favelas (shantytowns) are litter-free. But much of the rubbish that Brazilians scrupulously sweep away ends up where it shouldn’t.

Under a federal law passed in 2010 all solid waste must be deposited in modern landfills, lined to stop toxins from soaking into the soil. The deadline was a year ago.

That the deadline was missed will surprise few Brazilians. More unsettling is that the law made virtually no difference at all. In 2010 42.4% of rubbish was dumped unsafely, according to ABRELPE, a group that represents the sanitation industry. By last year that had fallen—to 41.6%. In absolute terms the amount of misdirected garbage rose, from 23m to 30m tonnes. Brazilians have a phrase for this: the law, they say, não pegou (didn’t take).

This is a chronic Brazilian condition. Some laws don’t take because they are unworkable. One requires employers to give holidays of no fewer than 30 consecutive days. Some are outmoded, such as one that imposed a cap of 12% on interest rates. The supreme court eventually struck it down. The rubbish law had neither of those flaws. It was “simple, modern, high-quality legislation” says Mario Mantovani of SOS Mata Atlântica, a green NGO....

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Next steps in Havana

SUCH is the power of a symbol. A planeload of American journalists was due to fly to Cuba for the day on August 14th to watch John Kerry raise the Stars and Stripes and formally reopen his country’s embassy in Havana after 54 years. Yet should the secretary of state look eastwards along the Malecón, the seafront of crumbling, salt-scarred buildings, towards Old Havana, his view would be obstructed by a forest of flagpoles and an open-air stage adorned with the slogan: ¡Patria o Muerte, Venceremos! (“Fatherland or death, we shall win”). Used over the past 15 years or so for anti-imperialist rallies, there are no immediate plans to dismantle this theatre of agitprop.

The official portrayal in Cuba of the decision by Barack Obama and Raúl Castro to restore diplomatic ties is that it was a victory for Cuban communism’s half-century of stubborn resistance against the American economic embargo. The popular reaction was one of euphoria, a surge of hope that trade, investment, tourists and the almighty dollar will now rain down on the island.

Eight months on, euphoria has given way to cautious expectation tinged with queasy uncertainty. Many...

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Ten, nine, ten...

RUSSIA had Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin. In 2003 China put a man in space. Even India is exploring the heavens: last September an Indian probe began circling Mars. Brazil thinks of itself as the peer of these big emerging economies (all are members of the BRIC grouping). But when it comes to space, its efforts are earth-bound. It has put up just six smallish, non-commercial satellites, four built with Chinese help and launched on Chinese craft.

Brazil’s space programme suffered a blow in July when President Dilma Rousseff scrapped an 11-year-old agreement with Ukraine to launch satellites aboard Ukrainian Cyclone-4 rockets from Brazil’s Alcântara spaceport in the northeastern state of Maranhão. The official explanation implied that the much-delayed project, which had been budgeted at 1 billion reais ($290m), had become too expensive. Brazil may also fear that Ukraine will not fulfil its part of the deal, not least because its space industry is located near Donetsk, which is controlled by Russian-backed separatists.

Brazil started well. In the 1950s and 1960s it sent rockets to the upper atmosphere. Its National Institute for Space Research runs a world-class satellite-testing facility in São José dos Campos, 100km (62 miles) from São Paulo. But Brazil’s attempts to construct its own satellite-bearing rocket were tragically...

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An edifice in search of a function

AT MITAD DEL MUNDO (“Middle of the World”), a park in an Andean valley outside Quito, Ecuador’s capital, a stone monument marks the line of the equator. Just a couple of hundred metres to the south rises a striking new building clad in silver and black glass, its two cantilevered wings describing a U. It is the headquarters of the South American Union, or Unasur, opened last year.

The host government of Rafael Correa, then flush with oil money, agreed to finance the planned construction cost of $66m. It is a grand architectural statement. But it is still half-empty, and its splendid conference rooms are sparsely used. The building poses a question: just what is the point of Unasur?

Formed in 2008, its origins lie in the South American Community, a Brazilian-inspired push to merge Mercosur and the Andean Community, two would-be common markets, and to develop cross-border infrastructure linking the countries of South America. Under the influence of Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s socialist strongman, the group changed both its name and its purpose. It shed its economic mission in favour of “political co-operation”. The more or less explicit...

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Evil orbs

Microbeads, macroproblem

ANTHONY RICCIARDI, a scientist at McGill University, was looking for evidence that an invasive Asian clam had colonised a warm spot in the St Lawrence river when a member of his team made a more headline-worthy discovery. Peering through a microscope at sand scooped up from the riverbed, the student saw hundreds of tiny plastic spheres that stood out for their unnatural roundness and vivid colours.

Microbeads, widely used as an abrasive in toothpaste and face soap, are common in the world’s oceans, lakes and rivers. Scientists had assumed that they floated in fresh water and were flushed downriver to the sea. Now Mr Ricciardi has shown that some sink to the bottom of lakes and rivers, where they are eaten by bottom-feeding fish, some of which, such as yellow perch, end up on dinner plates.

This finding adds to alarm over plastic pollution in the Great Lakes, which contain a fifth of the world’s fresh surface water. Sherri Mason, a chemist at the State University of New York in Fredonia, found 1m plastic particles per square kilometre in Lake Ontario. According to a team from the University of Waterloo, the...

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Long, but not boring

THE hard-nosed, frontiersman’s personality of Stephen Harper has dominated Canadian politics for a decade. However it turns out, therefore, the federal election on October 19th will be fateful. If the Conservative prime minister wins a fourth consecutive term in office, he will be the first leader to do so since 1908. If he loses, it will be the end of an era, and what comes next will be very different. The election might well bring to power the left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP), which has never governed Canada before.

To forestall that prospect, Mr Harper triggered the campaign earlier than he had to. On August 2nd he asked the governor-general to dissolve parliament, giving his Conservative Party 11 weeks to put its case to the voters. That is double the length of recent election campaigns.

He needs the extra time. The slogan emblazoned on the Conservative campaign bus is “Safer Canada/Stronger Economy”. Although the country feels relatively secure, its economy is hardly vigorous. As the world’s fifth-largest producer of oil, Canada has been hurt by the collapse in prices. The economy contracted in the first five months of 2015....

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Scraping the barrel

VISITORS arriving at Quito’s new airport are swept to Ecuador’s capital, 35km (22 miles) away, along a brand new six-lane motorway. Together with new hospitals, schools, social housing and benefits and student grants, the vastly improved road network is the work of President Rafael Correa’s “Citizens’ Revolution”. With his melange of technocratic modernisation and leftist populism, Mr Correa leads a strong and hitherto popular government that has lasted eight years in a country where none of his three predecessors completed their terms.

But now Mr Correa is running out of money and the citizens are starting to turn against him. In June, in the biggest of many protests, some 350,000 people took to the streets of the port city of Guayaquil to demonstrate against plans to impose punitive additional taxes on inheritances and gains from property transactions.

The protests came as the plunge in the oil price and the strength of the dollar—which Ecuador has used as its currency since 2000—have combined to halt economic growth. The economy contracted in the first quarter of this year compared with the previous one. Independent economists...

from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1SP07Hl

The scion and the heir

A COUNTDOWN clock hangs over the desks in the open-plan political headquarters of Mauricio Macri, the mayor of Buenos Aires, who hopes to be Argentina’s next president. It tells skinny-jeaned campaign workers how many days, hours and minutes there are “until change”. The clock will hit zero on August 9th, when political parties hold primaries to select their presidential candidates. Then, presumably, it will be reset for the first round of the election itself, to be held on October 25th.

The primaries are less momentous than the clock suggests. There is little suspense about who will win. Mr Macri (pictured, left) is way ahead of rivals to be the candidate of Cambiemos (“Let’s change”), an electoral front that consists of his Republican Proposal and two other parties. The other main contender for the presidency is likely to be Daniel Scioli (pictured, right), the governor of Buenos Aires province. He is the only candidate from the Front for Victory (FPV), the party of Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

Even so, the primaries matter. If pollsters’ guesses are correct, the presidential election is a two-horse...

from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1SP07Hb

Slaves of the past

FOR Peruvians it was a reminder of a long-ago nightmare. On July 27th soldiers and police rescued 26 children, ten women and three men whom they said had been held as slaves for up to 30 years by Sendero Luminoso (“Shining Path”), a Maoist terrorist group. The captives, some of whom are from the Ashaninka Amerindian tribe, were growing food for the guerrillas. Officials said the women had been raped. All had received political indoctrination; some were reluctant to be rescued.

Sendero, as Peruvians call it, was the strangest and most vicious of Latin America’s once-numerous insurgent groups. Its creator, Abimael Guzmán, a philosophy professor who espoused the Maoism of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, launched a “People’s War” against the Peruvian state in 1980, as the country returned to democracy after 12 years of military dictatorship.

Sendero imposed a reign of terror in Andean peasant communities, and bombed and murdered in cities. The army response was a “dirty war” in which civilians were victims. Patient police work led to the capture of...

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