Public support for presidential life terms, whether on the right (Colombia) or the left (Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Nicaragua) is beginning to run its course in Latin America. Not because of constitutional constraints. Pliant congresses and courts amend constitutions for political or monetary gain to satisfy the megalomania of presidents who believe themselves indispensable. But growing numbers of their citizens are beginning to understand that presidential perpetuation harms key principles of democratic governance: the alternation of power, and the unthreatened existence of a viable, balancing opposition that functions within the judicial restraint of civil society.
Voters’ support is also fading for the political trick of a departing president leaving a favorite in place to ensure his or her return in the next round. This happened in Argentina when the Kirchners switched seats. It might happen in Colombia in 2010, if President Uribe leaves either Juan Manuel Santos or Andrés Felipe Arias “Uribito” to keep Uribe’s seat warm until 2014.
The current constitutional crisis in Honduras, precipitated by Zelaya’s quest for his unlimited re-election as president, will be solved only after one of the warring parties exhausts its level of public support. If history holds, which it is likely, in the interim Hondurans will witness disappearances, summary executions, internal displacement, abuses of power, and judicial travesties inflicted upon and suffered by both sides.
Oscar Arias (Costa Rica) and José Miguel Insulza (OAS) are wasting time trying to mediate between parties who, so far, have no intention of negotiating a win-win solution for Honduras. Concurrently, Hugo Chávez (Venezuela), Daniel Ortega (Nicaragua), and Rafael Correa (Ecuador) are interfering with a political, legislative, and judicial impasse over which they have no control or direct influence, and where few, if any, want their intrusion. In my view, all of them, and the US indirectly through Arias and the OAS, should leave Honduras to the Hondurans to resolve their crisis in any way they can.
Instead Arias, et al, should focus on a critical issue of future security in Latin America: water security, and Latin America’s dependence on hydroelectric power. In an era of raising temperatures, acute droughts in some areas and torrential rains in others are changing the composition of agriculture, the mainstay of the region’s economy, exports, and food supplies.
Water Security
Latin Americans, like the rest of the world, drink water, not oil. With limited or restricted supplies of water, energy self-sufficiency will be of relative value. Latin America has the largest supply and reserves of water in the world. The Guaraní Aquifer alone has a volume of 55,000 Km3 within 1.2 Km2. However, persistent and harsher droughts, coupled with rising temperatures, present a serious threat to the economic, political, social, and cultural stability of the region in the future.
Whether the US government and its private investors in Latin America understand this, the consequences of water shortages, declines in food supplies, and unemployment decreased agricultural production will create in years to come will arrive at the doorstep of the US. They will arrive via increased illegal migration; increased production of illicit drugs (which need little water because heroin poppies thrive in arid soils and coca is drought resistant); increased human trafficking; increased illegal trans-border crossings within the region; and, larger restive groups whose attitude is less than friendly to the US.
For starters, 90% of all energy in Latin America is hydroelectric. Every drought brings a decline in agricultural production and, consequently, in exports (the mainstay of the region’s economy), and food shortages. Unemployment, food riots, political instability, and ad hoc policymaking to contain civil unrest, particularly in the countryside, follow.
As temperatures rise in Latin America, mainly in the Southern Hemisphere, Brazil’s GDP declines along with the decline in reservoirs. Some parts of Argentina’s agricultural sector collapse. And Chile rations energy, leading to decreased industrial and agricultural activity. In the now-intense summers the Guaraní Aquifer (the largest reserve of potable water in the world) declines along with the water it supplies to 15 million people in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Five hundred cities in Brazil depend on the Guaraní for all their water needs. There is now a dispute among Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina about how much water each country receives from Guaraní and how much they pay Paraguay for it. There is a spat between Argentina and Brazil over how much of the Guaraní each country really owns; Argentina claims it owes more than Brazil.
Along with Guaraní, the Itaipú Dam, the world’s largest power plant, is a major source of electricity to Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina. When the volume of the Paraná River, which feeds the dam, goes down, so does the electricity Itaipú distributes. There is a spat between Paraguay and Brazil over Itaipú, too.
Most of the water supplies and reserves of Latin America are located in poor, rural areas. Their residents are demanding a say in what is done with these resources, who owns them, who operates them, and what they get from their usufruct by others. So far they stopped the Chilean government from building a hydroelectric plant in the south, a plant Chile needs because it must import all the energy it needs. Brazil is facing a similar situation in Maranhão State in the face of protests against a hydroelectric plant there, although Brazil continues with its plans. Mexico’s water-resources problems are well known. Similar situations repeat country after country.
Therefore, it is imperative for the US government to understand the political, economic, social, and cultural drivers that underpin the beliefs that drive attitudes, perceptions, and intentions of the residents of the communities where the water supplies and resources lie, who owns them, how they are used, by whom, and who benefits from them.
The actions of these communities have the potential for being detrimental to the US’s security and interests in the region, or from the region. Water-related issues will lead to: decreased agriculture and food supplies; the spread of disease through polluted, scarce water; unemployment; illegal migration; and, illegal trans-border movements of people, arms, drugs, and chemicals. This will result in political and economic instability in a region whose importance to US security can neither be denied nor ignored.
Maria Velez de Berliner
President
mvberliner@lat-intel.com