Latin America- Current Latin American news and information

Group of 17 prominent figures comes in for criticism for supporting Falklands inhabitants' right to self-determination

A group of 17 leading Argentinian intellectuals has come in for heavy criticism from the government of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and its members branded as traitors for supporting the right to self-determination of Falkland Islands inhabitants.

"I don't see how our country can impose on a group of 3,000 people, whose ancestors arrived there 180 years ago, a government, a sovereignty and a citizenship they do not want," said Fernando Iglesias, a former opposition legislator and one of the men behind Malvinas: An Alternative Viewpoint, a paper penned by the group. The paper argues against Argentina's long-standing position that Falklanders are a transplanted population from Britain with no rights over the islands.

Peronist senator Anibal Fernández dismissed the paper's 17 co-signatories, a veritable who's who of important thinkers, journalists and writers in Argentina, as "cheap intellectuals".

In a column in the pro-government daily, Tiempo Argentino, Fernández reaffirmed the official position that Argentina inherited the islands from Spain when it became independent in 1816, branding as usurpers the British who have ruled the islands since 1833.

"They are presenting a perverse document, plagued with inaccuracies and kinks, in absolute opposition to the wishes and sentiment of the majority of the Argentinian people," the right-hand man to President Fernández said about the document, which is causing furore despite not having yet been made public.

Following news of the train crash that killed at least 50 people in Buenos Aires on Wednesday morning and concerned about calls from pro-government media for a rally outside the venue where it was planning to present its document, the group is rethinking how to release its statement.

The mass-circulation populist daily Crónica featured pictures of members of the group against a red background under the headline In Favour of the Pirates accusing them of accepting the British position.

Argentina's claim to the islands it calls the Malvinas has been revived and placed at the centre of national policy by Fernández, on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the Falklands War between Great Britain and Argentina on 2 April. Adopting a hardline policy, Kirchner has blocked Argentina's ports to ships flying the Falklands flag and obtained the support of other South American nations who have also blocked their ports.

Supporters of President Fernández quickly flooded Twitter with abuse against Iglesias under the "Fernando Iglesias has died" hashtag. "Someone who fought tirelessly for imperialism has passed away," wrote one "K", as Fernández supporters call themselves. "Condolences have arrived from Margaret Thatcher," wrote another.

Iglesias says Argentina has much more urgent issues than the dispute with Great Britain to deal with. "The train crash today with some 50 dead is just another example," he said. "The nation's rail system is in disarray and this was an accident just waiting to happen."

Iglesias is especially indignant about foreign minister Hector Timerman's reiterated claim that Falklanders are a transplanted population with no rights over the islands. "My own grandparents only arrived in Argentina from Spain in the 1930s while some families on the islands have been there since the 1840s," says Iglesias.

One of the signatories, well-known author and journalist Pepe Eliashev, is concerned about the anger directed against the group. "These exasperated reactions from ultranationalists on the right or the left, and the government's use of the Malvinas as a smokescreen, do not bode well for the future," he said.

Iglesias says that despite believing Argentina has rights over the islands, "what we underline is the right to self-determination, we cannot impose citizenship or sovereignty on a population that does not want it".

Another member of the group, the historian Vicente Palermo, has gone the furthest, questioning even the basis of Argentina's claim. "There will be no Argentinian solution to the Malvinas question until the inhabitants want to become Argentinian," he wrote in a recent column in the conservative daily La Nación.

Another signatory, Jorge Lanata, perhaps Argentina's most popular journalist, opened his daily radio programme on Wednesday ironically calling himself "Morgan the Pirate" in response to the avalanche of criticism he is under.

"I've been to the Malvinas. Over there they hate us. For them the war was an invasion. We speak of the Malvinas as if nobody lived there.

"We are aware we run the risk of being labelled traitors, but it is a risk we are willing to take if we believe in the right under democracy to express our viewpoint."

At least 340 people have been injured and 49 killed in a train crash at the busy Once station in Buenos Aires this morning. The accident occurred during peak time after a train approached the station too fast and slammed into a barrier at the end of the line

Helicopters and ambulances ferry survivors to hospital after rush hour service ploughs into barrier at end of line in Buenos Aires

A train packed with hundreds of morning commuters slammed into the end of the line in a busy station in Buenos Aires on Wednesday, killing 49 people and injuring hundreds in Argentina's worst rail accident in decades.

Federal police commissioner Nestor Rodriguez said 48 adults and one child had died.

At least 550 more were injured, and emergency workers were slowly extracting dozens of people trapped inside the first carriage, said Alberto Crescenti, the city's emergency medical director. Rescuers cut open the roof and set up a pulley system to ease survivors out one by one.

The commuter train came into the Once station too fast and hit the barrier at the end of the platform at about 16mph, smashing the front of the engine and causing the carriages behind to concertina into it.

Omar Maturano, chief of the conductors' union, told local radio that the train might have been travelling as fast as 18mph.

Most damaged was the first carriage, which passengers share with bicycles. Survivors told the TeleNoticias TV channel that many people were injured in a jumble of metal and glass.

Passengers said windows exploded and people standing between the seats were thrown into each other and to the floor by the impact.

Many people who had suffered minor injuries were left waiting on the station's platforms as helicopters and more than a dozen ambulances took the most seriously injured to nearby hospitals.

It is Argentina's worst train accident since 1 February 1970, when two trains collided at full speed in the Buenos Aires suburbs, killing 200.

"This machine left the shop yesterday and the brakes worked well," said Ruben Sobrero, the train workers' union chief on the Sarmiento line, in a radio interview. "From what we know, it braked without problems at previous stations. At this point I don't want to speculate about the causes."

The driver is in hospital and the union had not yet been able to speak to him, Sobrero added.

Demonstrators from remote Aysén region make appeal to neighbouring country over lack of services from own government

Protesters in a remote region of Chile have triggered controversy by asking Argentina to "adopt" them because they feel forgotten by Chile's government.

Residents in Aysén, a sparsely populated Patagonian realm of glaciers and forests, have lit bonfires, blocked roads and clashed with police in a campaign for more support from the capital Santiago, 800 miles (1,300km) to the north.

This week several thousand people in the town of Puerto Aysén marched and carried banners, some of which said "Argentina adopt us", and chanted the slogan. Students, environmentalists and trade unions were due to march in Santiago in solidarity.

Two government ministers met protest leaders to discuss their demands for jobs, cheaper fuel and food and better health services. Isolation and restricted access make Aysén's cost of living higher than other parts of Chile.

Requesting annexation by Argentina appeared an attempt to catch Chilean state attention rather than a serious proposal for secession but the idea still provoked derision from its neighbour.

Readers of Clarín, a Buenos Aires daily, scorned the invitation on the grounds Chile supported Britain during the 1982 Falklands conflict. "Why don't you ask England to adopt you? They are your best friends and allies!" said one typical comment.

It was the latest sign that the diplomatic row between London and Buenos Aires over the disputed islands has focused Argentinian grievances before the conflict's 30th anniversary.

Another reader called Chileans "dirty traitors" for having aided the British task force which seized the archipelago back from Argentina. Another defended Chileans, pointing out that it was the dictator Augusto Pinochet who helped Margaret Thatcher, not the Chilean people.

"Chileans have a very strange way of protesting ? that doesn't mean they really want to be Argentinians," said one reader, then added: "Even if subconsciously all Chileans would like to be Argentinian."

Aysén is one of the biggest of Chile's 15 administrative areas but is sparsely populated, with just over 100,000 inhabitants scattered around mountains, fjords, lakes and ice fields.

The indigenous Cunco people were nearly wiped out by disease and attacks from European settlers, especially from Germany, Britain, Spain and the Balkans, who were invited to tame the wilderness by governments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The state has built roads and other basic infrastructure but the area's mining, fishing and forestry communities say they suffer from isolation, high prices and scarcity.

The Social Movement for the Aysén Region, a coalition of 25 groups, last week mounted barricades and protests to disrupt roads, ports and airfields. Several police officers were injured.

Local and national authorities have said violent demonstrators would be prosecuted. "The government is not going to accept or tolerate public disorder," a spokesman, Andrés Chadwick, told reporters.

President Sebastián Piñera, already under pressure from separate protests from students and indigenous Mapuche communities, sent a delegation to defuse the row.

Jaime Mañalich, the health minister, and Pedro Pablo Errázuriz, the transport minister, said their meeting with protest leaders went well and that both sides had signed a provisional agreement.

We're told that Fed officials and the Obama administration saved us from another 1930s-style slump. Nonsense

As President Obama's re-election campaign heats up, there are several new accounts of his track record finding their way into print. One item for which he is ? undeservedly ? given credit is saving the country from a second Great Depression. The political elites believe in the salvation from the second Great Depression myth with the same fervency as little kids believe in Santa Claus. And it has just as much grounding in reality.

While the Obama administration, working alongside Ben Bernanke at the Fed, deserves credit for preventing a financial meltdown, a second great depression was never in the cards. The first Great Depression was brought about not only from misguided policies at the onset of the financial crisis, but also from an inadequate policy response.

The spending associated with second world war ultimately got us out of the Depression. There is nothing magical about spending on war; spending of the same magnitude on road, schools, hospitals or anything else also would have lifted the economy out of the depression at any point after the initial collapse in 1929-30.

The problem was the lack of the political will to spend in these areas, whereas there was plenty of political support for fighting the war after the attack at Pearl Harbor. The lesson from this period is that the United States could have gotten out of the Great Depression any time it was prepared to spend the money to do so. This means that a financial meltdown could not possibly have condemned us to a decade of double-digit unemployment, since that would require a decade of ongoing policy failures after the original collapse.

All this should be obvious to anyone familiar with the history of the Depression. But we don't have to go back 70 years for lessons on recovering from financial crises; we just have to look to the south. In December of 2001, Argentina broke the link between its currency and the dollar, and defaulted on its debt. The result was a financial meltdown that was certainly at least as severe as the worst-case scenarios that the United States might have faced in the dire days following the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

Following this default, Argentina's economy went into a free fall for roughly three months. Banks were insolvent, families and businesses could not get access to their savings, and normal business dealing became almost impossible.

However, by the second quarter of 2002, the government had largely pasted things together, to the point that the economy had stabilized. It began growing rapidly in the third quarter of the 2002, and continued to grow rapidly until the world recession slowed the economy in 2008. By the middle of 2003, it had recovered all the ground it had lost in the initial crisis following the default.

Based on the experience of Argentina, we can say that in the case of a full meltdown, we might have seen three months of freefall (even worse than we actually experienced from September of 2008 to April of 2009), followed by three months of stability and then a return to growth six months out. Of course, it's possible that our policy crew of Ben Bernanke, Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner may not be as competent as the team in Argentina, but even if we double the time periods, we get six months of freefall and three years to get back to pre-crisis levels of output. That's bad news for sure, but quite a bit short of anything that could merit the title of a "great depression".

The attack on the second great depression myth is not simply an exercise in semantics. The Obama administration and the political establishment more generally want the public to be grateful that we managed to avoid a second great depression. People should realize that this claim is analogous to boasting that we've kept our kids safe from being attacked by tigers. It's true that almost no kids in the United States are ever attacked by tigers, but we don't, typically, give out too much political praise for this fact ? since there is no reason to expect our kids to be attacked by tigers.

In the same vein, we are all supposed to be very happy we aren't in the middle of a second great depression ? except there was never any good reason for us to fear a second great depression.

What we most had to fear was a prolonged period of weak growth and high unemployment. Unfortunately, this is exactly what we got. The only question is how long it will drag on.

? Editor's note: the article originally stated that Argentina's economy had made up its lost ground after defaulting by the middle of 2009; in fact, it did so by the middle of 2003. The article was amended at 8am ET (1pm UK time) on 17 February 2012

President Hugo Chavez said Tuesday that doctors in Cuba have found a new lesion in the area where he had cancer surgery last year, and he will require surgery.

Colombian authorities seize property valued at $5.8 billion, previously owned by two drug trafficking brothers.

Colombia's Attorney General dismisses Bogota's former ombudsman and bars him from government service for 12 years.

President Juan Manuel Santos says security forces killed six guerrilla in the west of Colombia.

Protests continue against a multi-national company that plans to flood five towns in order to construct a hydroelectric plant, a local radio station reports.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos Tuesday wished controversial Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez a speedy recovery ahead of an operation.

Be a smart customer of tele-communication services. How? Here are some tips.

If you have a computer and a decent bandwidth (minimum 33.6 Kbps), use free software like Skype to make calls.

All you need is a microphone and speakers that already are included in most modern computers. You need a decent bandwidth, if you do not use video, you don't need much. A telephone dial up connection will not work.

Guatemala. It is a very long and difficult fight and it will need the support and cooperation of all political parties, the private sector and civil society sectors.

The first steps the Government has taken on the 19th of August 2008, was to institute The Vice- Ministry of Transparency in the Ministry of Public Finance. The second step is the creation of the Commission for Transparency.

The Commission for Transparency is headed by Vice-President Rafael Espada and represents government and civil society sectors. This Commission will be conformed by Álvaro Mayorga and Armando Boesch, representatives of the Private -Industrial Sector, (CACIF), Comité Coordinador de Asociaciones Agrícolas, Comerciales, Industriales y Financieras.

2008 Olympic Games, Beijing. Guatemala?s Jose Amado García managed to obtain a very good 35th position out of 98 runners that participated in the marathon. Alfredo Arevalo obtained position 63. Both athletes did improve their performance from the previous Olympic Games in Athen, in time and positions.

Women of Virtue is an award presented to ten outstanding women from South Florida every year by LATINBIZ. Among the 2008 honorees is Ms. Ruby Ortiz, Guatemalan. She has been serving the South Florida business community for more than 10 years in management development, business consulting and Coaching. More than 1,000 managers from Florida and Latin America have benefitted from her professional consulting and training.
Ruby Ortiz is a member of the advisory board and professor at Florida International University -MTI-, she is Director of the new Florida Institute of Management and she is also Senior Consultant of RO International Inc.

Guatemala, Antigua - Cultural event at Centro de Formación de la Cooperación Española en Antigua Guatemala.

Invitation for next Saturday, November 22 at 18:00 pm. Play: "Women forging Dreams," Mujeres fraguando sueños, by the theater company Abrego (Cantabria / Spain). The entrance to the event is free. It will be held at Centro de Formación de la Cooperación Española en Antigua Guatemala.

"Women forging dreams", Mujeres fraguando sueños, is a show with an ethic committed to a social reality that requires all our efforts to make a forceful denunciation and a sober reflection on domestic violence. It is a contemporary piece that keeps a distance to the complex elaborations exclusive to intellectuals.

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With their ancestral homeland in danger of destruction at the hands of a Canadian mining company, the indigenous Huichol people used their annual pilgrimage to stage a rally in defense of their sacred territory last week.

A confessed perpetrator and key witness in a high-profile multiple homicide died this weekend in Guadalajara, barely a week after turning himself in to authorities.

Alberto Cardenas Jimenez promised to "kick out" the PRI from Guadalajara city hall after winning the PAN mayoral primary on Sunday.

You need to be able to read past the headlines of the updated, state-by-state travel warning for Mexico released last week by the U.S. State Department.

Three straight days of inclement weather could not take the fire out of the 2012 Mexican National Chili Cookoff.

AP - President Hugo Chavez has raised serious doubts about whether he'll have the stamina for a successful re-election bid, revealing that he needs to return to Cuba to have a lesion removed that is probably malignant.

Reuters - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's imminent departure for more cancer surgery in Cuba has thrown his re-election campaign into uncertainty and once again shaken the socialist leader's passionate supporters.

Reuters - A packed commuter train plowed into the buffers at a Buenos Aires station during Wednesday's morning rush hour, killing 49 people and injuring more than 600 in Argentina's worst rail accident in more than 30 years, officials said.