That probably won’t happen, though, and that decision is mostly Argentina’s to make. Sending Prince William and a few top-of-the-line ships to the islands have been passed off as routine, but nonetheless these events, coupled with Prime Minister David Cameron’s Iron Lady-like statements of resolve with respect to the Falklands, suggest Britain is standing firm.

The Argentinean government, on the other hand, has long used the “Malvinas” (as they call these cold and barren islands in the stormy South Atlantic) either as a distraction from other more pressing issues—like a slowing economy—or as a way to rally citizens and force neighboring countries to join in—Brazil, most importantly. Both reasons are at play here, and so too is the prospect of oil in the waters surrounding the Falklands.

Let us not forget, either, the raging “squid war,” as the NYT calls it:

But Argentina has added oil grievances to anger over the “squid wars,” a dispute over rich hauls of squid that are spawned along Argentina’s coast before moving into waters off the Falklands. [Argentinean President] Kirchner said at a summit meeting of regional states in December that Las Malvinas, Argentina’s name for the islands, were “a global cause, because in the Malvinas they are taking our oil and fishing resources.”

Argentine nationalism is a fiery thing. To outsiders, the fanatical attachment to rocky, windswept islets and odd bits of Antarctica (like many nations, Argentina has staked out claims on Antarctica) seems strange.  Many of the Argentines who feel most passionately about the subject are confirmed urbanites in Buenos Aires and have never visited the remote wildernesses where Argentina currently rules.  Many of them would rather die than live on some isolated rock in the stormy South Atlantic.  But even before the prospects of oil discoveries (or studies into the migratory habits of squid) gave the islands an economic allure, Argentines of most classes and political views insisted passionately, fervently and, again from an outsider’s perspective, irrationally that by every standard of law and right — and regardless of the views of the irrelevant people who happen to live there — the islands belong to Argentina.

Perhaps it is that 180 years of powerlessness to change a situation they do not like has become for Argentines a painful reminder about so much in the international order that they do not like.  Perhaps, given that Argentina like the US is an immigrant society in which the questions of unity and identity are always up for discussion, a common emotional commitment to this issue is one way people have of expressing and communicating their patriotic feeling. Grievances can help hold a nation together.

Most of the time, this element of the Argentine character is picturesque rather than dangerous. Being surrounded by prickly people on the subject of the Malvinas is one of the ways one knows one is in Argentina; it is expected, like the eternal laments of the Cubs fans in Chicago and of the Red Sox nation. It is endearing, as long as you don’t think about the link between this kind of nationalism and war.

It also stirs up the British; David Cameron’s government is happy to have the country discussing the prince in the Falklands rather than the unemployment rate.  And from a more serious angle, Britain’s stand on the Falklands is directly connected to its stand on Gibraltar.  This strategically vital rock that guards the entrance to the Mediterranean has been British territory since the early 18th century.  Spain wants it back; the British defend their possession on the ground that as long as the people who live on Gibraltar prefer British rule to Spanish rule, the Union Jack will stay. To give up the Falklands means giving up any serious claim to Gibraltar; it would be hard to see the British doing that.

What’s clear is that the economic issues, whether having to do with squid or with oil, can be negotiated, assuming a modicum of goodwill and rationality on both sides. There are possible face saving compromises for Argentina, if the Argentines wanted that kind of a solution. There is little sign that they do; Argentines, and their politicians, prefer a grievance to a compromise that doesn’t put the islands under Argentine sovereignty.

Most of the time, the whole dispute stays in the realm of light opera, a Gilbert and Sullivan production that lightens up the otherwise depressing world of international diplomacy from time to time. Let’s hope that it works out this way once again.

Brazil’s last president, Lula, was averse to criticizing the Castros on human rights, but Rousseff, a former Marxist militant who was herself a torture victim under Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s, will likely be a more forceful advocate for these issue behind the scenes. She also has the ability to provide Raul Castro with key backing as he pursues modernizing reforms.

Easing Cuba’s transition into the post-Castro future is a worthy goal for Brazil, and a common interest for the whole region—America included.

Oil didn’t save communism in the Soviet Union, and it won’t save communism in the Caribbean. (I remember back in the 1980s hearing the joke in Moscow: What would happen if the Soviet Union conquered the Sahara Desert.  Answer:  Nothing for fifty years, and then a shortage of sand. Revolutionary Cuba managed to achieve shortages of sugar even faster than that.)

The foreign companies now drilling for oil and basking in the government’s favor are likely to discover what many other foreign companies in Cuba have found: that their biggest problem isn’t the US embargo, but the changing policies of a Cuban government that remains deeply suspicious of all ‘imperialists’ and ‘capitalist exploiters’.

Used wisely, an oil find could enable Cuba to make a smooth transition back to a more sustainable economic model and a less oppressive political system. Unfortunately, some of the dinosaurs in the Cuban ruling establishment will argue that the oil wealth should go to prop up the old methods up a little longer.  At least one of those dinosaurs is named Castro.

Cuba’s potential wealth lies in the creativity of its people and their intense hunger for a better life.  Its tragedy is that the government tries to crush that creativity and frustrate that hunger. This is a problem that oil can’t fix.

US policy toward Cuba is absurd, but Cuba’s policy toward Cuba is much worse.

Development is like the Olympics. The world is not, as pundits have long liked to say, neatly divided between “developed” and “developing” countries. The reality is far more complex. In 2010 Via Meadia described a development scale of five basic groups: There are regular winners like the United States that remain steady at the top of the pile; others like Brazil that gain ground on the leaders and could one day join them; the mediocre middle that isn’t gaining on the winners but at least isn’t falling behind; failing countries teetering on the precipice; and, dead last, the Somalias of the world.

Against the backdrop of a weak global economy, the past two years has seen both success stories and failures. Despite or perhaps because of its oil wealth, Nigeria is facing what its current president calls its greatest crisis since the Biafran War of secession 35 years ago. The instability resulting from Egypt’s revolution has combined with the weak economic structure inherited from the past to bring Egypt perilously close to economic collapse. Chile and Brazil have found some economic success but still struggle with the politics of capitalism and with the commodities cycle of boom and bust. Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia are stagnating or falling behind, and Argentina appears to be slouching toward the kind of destabilizing meltdown that became so depressingly familiar in the 20th century. Greece is falling behind, and Turkey has surged, but there are ominous signs ahead. The Congo, Somalia, and too large a group of other states stagnate at the bottom of the pile.

The failures, of course, are more striking, and make front-page news with each new political misstep, economic crash, or violent outburst of unrest. We need not go into the Greek case extensively here, but if anything it is a story of a country betrayed by unsound economic policy and left in the dust of its many EU compatriots—austerity might make things worse, too. Haiti entered the 2010s crumbling—and then the earthquake hit. Things are improving two years on, but there are only a few good signs.

The African Time Bomb is the biggest worry, as most governments in sub-Saharan Africa have not found a workable strategy for development. This is not a problem that will one day explode in a single spectacle. It is rather numerous bombs (by the names of Nigeria, Eritrea, Congo, and others) set with different fuses that make Africa seem like a giant minefield: colonial borders that do not make sense, intermingled ethnic groups, religious friction, inability to set up reliable services like electricity and agriculture, and more.  The rise of Boko Haram is particularly alarming in this respect: in a region of weak states, a transnational group of violent fanatics with outside funding could do a lot of harm.

As Via Meadia pointed out in the original post two years ago, this is a grim picture—and in many cases it is unlikely to improve. Too many governments are woefully unprepared to adapt their institutions and systems to live up to modern demands, and in the absence of an effective, capable government that is committed to the task of national economic development, nobody really knows how to make a poor country much better off. In many cases (like those of Greece and Argentina), cultural factors and historically rooted behavior patters among the people at large mean that voters over and over again choose leaders whose understanding of and commitment to effective policy remains weak.

First, thank you for coming to Via Meadia. But secondly, did you technically get paid for those five minutes you just spent composing that email?

Should your employer be paying you overtime for checking that email?

That may seem a ridiculous idea, but in Brazil President Rousseff recently signed a law mandating companies pay overtime for those emails and after-work business calls. The FT reports:

More wide-reaching than restrictions in other countries, such as a regulation at Volkswagen in Germany that blocks the sending of work emails to some employees outside the office, the law could set a precedent for other government concerned that modern smartphones are creating nations of Crackberry-addicted workaholics.

Yet, in a country that already has strong protections for workers, there are fears the law will only make the cost of hiring steeper in Brazil, discouraging employers from recruiting and encouraging more litigation.

Workers should watch out: if companies started deducting pay for hours on company time spent on personal emails, social media and general web-surfing, many of us would be getting much smaller checks. I’ve been to Brazil a number of times over the years and on the whole find that the danger of Brazil turning into a nation of workaholics is well under control.

Before Colombia’s cocaine industry exploded in the 1980s, coca was largely produced and refined in Peru and Bolivia, where it is legal. Washington focused its anti-drug efforts on these places, assisting police and and shooting down planes suspected of transporting drugs. The result? Operations simply shifted to Colombia.

Up pops a cartel, whack it. Up pops another. The drug trade adapts. A step forward in Colombia means a step backward in Bolivia. If there is a better policy than Whack-A-Mole on the drug war, nobody seems to have found it.

If you live in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba or Ecuador, you might have an opportunity to catch the Iranian president’s traveling road show. There won’t be a lot to see.

The WSJ reports:

In calling on some of Iran’s few friends abroad, Mr. Ahmadinejad may be trying to show Iranians that the country still has its supporters and can rely on allies to help it ease the impact of sanctions, analysts say.

This isn’t the first time that Mr. Ahmadinejad has tried to shore up support in Latin America. According to the article “Iran estimates that it has entered 70 joint venture deals with Venezuela, including a factory to assemble cars and tractors under the brand name ‘Veniran’.” We are eagerly awaiting the chance to test drive one of these but as yet can’t find a Veniran dealership in Queens.

But the real story is about the countries which Iran’s president is not visiting. No stops in Argentina, nothing in Mexico and Chile and, more importantly, no stops in Brazil.   The trip may be intended to show that Iran still has important friends around the world, but the effect is to underline its isolation. The A-jad will be out there at Danny Ortega’s inaugural on a shoeshine and a smile; back home the Supreme Leader and the real powers that be in Iran will be taking care of some serious business.

Readers will remember that late last year Hugo Chavez called the US out on its clever plot to decimate the Latin leftie leadership by giving cancer to Latin American leaders who stood up for their heroic peoples against the evil colossus of the north.

Now it turns out the plot was more twisted, more evil than even the profound and sagacious mind of Hugo Chavez could fathom. Argentina’s president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner turns out to be cancer free. Doctors operating on what was thought to be her thyroid cancer found no trace of the disease.

The imperialist plot now lies exposed in all its sick glory. First, Yanqui secret agents infected many Latin leftie leaders with their top secret cancer causing agents. Then, they gave President Fernández something that looked enough like cancer to fool her doctors. This of course caused President Chavez to denounce the plot — only to look like a loon and a goose when, inevitably, the Argentine president was found to be cancer-free.

Chavez’ mistake is clear. The honesty and purity of his own character, that of a man who has dedicated his life to the simple quest for justice for the poor, prevents him from fully assessing the twisted depths of the perverse imperialist psyche. In future, he must dig deeper, think harder and above all, imagine more creatively if he is to unmask the dozens, nay hundreds of Yanqui plots being launched at his revolution every minute of every day.

Unfortunately, violence is only the tip of the iceberg. The damage to Mexican institutions, the rise of dark power structures far worse than anything the US saw during Prohibition, the escalating corruption and the climate of fear: Mexico is being damaged and its prospects undermined in ways that will be felt for decades.

The US talks grandly about promoting democracy around the world. Our uncontrolled appetite for drugs, and our inability to find policy solutions to mitigate the consequences of our behavior, is wrecking a promising democratic experiment next door.

Via Meadia is frequently reminded of Mrs. Jellyby in Charles Dickens’ great novel Bleak House.  Her house was a mess, her children neglected, her affairs in chaos — as she bustled around endlessly promoting various fatuous schemes for improving the lives of people living far, far away.  America often looks like her these days, and Mexico is one of the chief victims of our lack of focus and our character flaws.

“It would not be strange if they had developed the technology to induce cancer and nobody knew about it until now … I don’t know. I’m just reflecting,” he said in a televised speech to troops at a military base. “But this is very, very, very strange … it’s a bit difficult to explain this, to reason it, including using the law of probabilities.”

Unfortunately, the US Department of State has felt it necessary to respond, calling the Chavez statements “horrific and reprehensible.”  Machiavelli would have counseled an enigmatic smile and a statement emphasizing the importance of regular physical exams as there does seem to be a lot cancer around these days — and would have suggested that we go on to offer treatment in the US to President Chavez and his colleagues if they are worried.

Chavez’ statement like most of his speeches was intended more as political theater than as serious analysis of the way the world works; nevertheless it is interesting to see how the cancer charge reflects ideas he shares or thinks will jazz up his base.  As a psychological portrait of a certain element of the Latin left, the speech is quite revealing.

First, the US is portrayed as immensely powerful.  As a society we not only produce medical advances that others seek to imitate; we have mastered the secret technologies of cancer itself.  The secrets in our labs are years beyond the pitiful, pathetic efforts of Venezuelan and Cuban scientists and health workers.  Who knows what other incredible advances the capitalist world masters are holding in reserve: drones are clearly just the tip of the iceberg.

Yet this analysis of our alleged medical prowess, like much leftie analysis of our alleged political omnicompetence, is curiously disembodied from actual knowledge of how either science or power works.  There are many different kinds of cancer and so far as the (settled?) science tells us, they don’t have much to do with each other.  It is conceivable that US scientists might discover how to spread one particular type of cancer; it is cuckoo to think we have stumbled on a host of such techniques.

Second, this all powerful American capitalist monster is uniquely concerned with the mortal threat posed by the heroic populist revolutionary movements of Latin America. American policymakers do not actually think about Hugo Chavez very much; when they do they see him more as an irritating nuisance than mortal danger: a buzzing horsefly, not a tiger or even a cobra.  The response is logical: ignore his irritating buzzing as much as possible, though when and if he prepares to land and bite (for example, if his cooperation with Iran and/or narco-terrorists linked to Hezbollah gets out of hand), one doesn’t rule out the possibility of a slap or at least a wave of the hands to make him fly off.

This is not what Chavez wants his followers to believe.  There must be a cosmic drama: Don Quixote tilting at a giant.  “Aspiring anklebiter” is not how the glorious leader of the Great Bolivarian Cultural Revolution wants to be known.  The Colossus of the North must be dedicating the supreme gifts of its scientific imagination, the most intense and top secret efforts of its nefarious super spies and the full attention of its national security establishment and corporate state to combat the uniquely deadly threat posed by Citizen Chavez and the aroused masses behind him.

This line of thought has a long history in the Latin and Caribbean left.  Most US based policy people sympathetic to Latin America think that Latin America’s relative unimportance to the US is responsible for many of the historic failings of US policy in the hemisphere.  In the 1950s for example Western Europe was too important to be left to banana companies as a foreign policy playground.  Corporate interests and others were often able to dominate the formation of US policy toward Latin America because nobody else was in the room.

Latin lefties often try to recast this history: America’s resource based policy toward many Latin American countries (more interest in getting the copper/bananas/tin/whatever out on the cheapest possible terms than in doing anything constructive to help the people) reflects the unique and vital importance to the US economy of Latin America’s strategic natural resources.  Latin America is a central theater of American foreign policy in this view, rather than, as most Americans who think about it at all assume, a dismal and somewhat depressing backwater in America’s world efforts.

But if we are using the top cancer-causing secrets of our top scientists primarily on the Latin left, it is obvious to a child (at least to a Latin leftie child) that Latin America matters hugely to the US and indeed that the continent and its left hold the keys to the world’s future in their confident hands.

The sad truth is that even if we had invented some kind of untraceable multi-cancer agent and decided to use it, we wouldn’t be wasting it on Venezuela.  There might be a wave of cancers in Iran, where recent news events point to a certain activism on the part of US and other agents.  Some Taliban and Al-Qaeda leaders, and perhaps a few others in the region, might suddenly show the effects of intensive chemotherapy.  But as is so often the case, poor Latin America would be the orphan stepchild of US foreign policy.  Maybe we would give Chavez the flu.

Finally, the cancer story bolsters another important Chavez myth: that the Latin left is united.  If Lula and Chavez are both victims of the same imperialist plot, it is obvious that both are part of the same cause.

Again, from the point of view of most US policy thinkers, this is wishful thinking rather than geopolitical analysis.  In the US, Lula is widely regarded as a benign figure the success of whose moderate and pro-market policies did more to check Chavez’ revolutionary career than any other force in the world.  Lula showed that a left that respects the institutions of the market and of private property can develop a successful capitalist economy whose wealth can then improve the lives of the poor.  The contrast with Chavez, whose misgovernment in Venezuela requires constant subsidies from his country’s irreplaceable oil wealth, could not be greater — or, from the US point of view, more positive.  If the US secret government actually were running around dispensing secret medicine to world leaders, its agents would be spritzing Lula with water from the Fountain of Youth.

There is nothing trivial or contemptible about the problems of Latin America’s poor.  And there is nothing wrong with the aspirations of many Latin Americans for their countries and their region to enjoy more global respect and to wield more global clout.  The record of US foreign and economic policy in the region is nothing that many informed US citizens feel particularly proud about.  The western hemisphere will need new approaches in the 21st century.

That is why people like President Chavez are bad news.  They perpetrate the cycle of Latin impotence, corruption and failure.  Had someone more like Lula come to power in Venezuela, both that country and the region would be significantly better off than they are now.  Chavez had the ability to become a hero and a champion of the poor and of Latin America.  He has decided instead to become a buffoon and a thug.

Even so, Via Meadia wishes him well with his health. (The US flagged prescription drug bottle in his hands in the photo was an addition by a Via Meadia tech wizard. The original Wikimedia photo shows him with a copy of the Venezuelan constitution.)