Category: South America

South America

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Uruguay

Uruguay

Millisphere (noun): a discrete region inhabited by roughly 1000th of the world population. Around seven million people but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million will do. A lens through which to observe human geography.

The tiny millisphere of Uruguay (2018 population just under 3.5 million) has a population growth rate that is tending towards zero. Because of emigration and a falling birth rate its population is remaining about the same.

Contested between Spain and Portugal, Spanish-speaking Uruguay became independent in 1828, after a gaucho uprising lead by Jose Artigas. During the military dictatorship of 1973-85 many Uruguayans moved to neighbouring Argentina, Brazil, and the United States and Spain.

At the height of the Cold War the US was involved with local military terror squads in many Central and South American countries. Democratic governments were replaced with military dictatorships and community activists, school teachers, journalists and union organisers were imprisoned or suddenly disappeared. The American ideology, at the time, portrayed it as a battle for world domination between the West, capitalism and religion on one side and the East, communism and atheism on the other.

During 1962-63 American journalist Hunter S Thompson travelled through South America and his pieces sent back to the National Observer provide some of the few criticisms of the cold-blooded American geo-political arrogance to be published in the US at the time. In retrospect Thompson was right.

In the 1960s the Tupamaros were actively opposing the military and police in Uruguay, and their actions included the assassination of an American FBI agent whom they accused of advising the Uruguayan police on torture.

One of the Tupamaro leadership, Jose “Pepe” Mujica, was imprisoned for 13 years in squalid conditions during the 1970s and 80s before being elected Uruguay’s 40th president from 2010 to 2015.

Known as “the Switzerland of the Americas,” Uruguay now rates first in South America for democracy and peace. Uruguay provides more troops per head of population to United Nations peacekeeping operations than any other country and it is rated first in South America for press freedom and the absence of terrorism.

Uruguay is a prosperous country by South American standards and has a sizeable middle class. Ninety-five percent of Uruguay’s electricity is generated from renewables (hydro and wind) and, like NZ, they have a lot of dairy cows – and dirty streams. Uruguay has a well developed education system with free access to university and liike New Zealand some graduates find their country too small to achieve their goals and emigrate.

Uruguay is noted for its historic separation of church and state and is roughly 60 percent Christian with 40 percent having “no religion” – Christmas is officially known as “family day” and Easter “tourism week.”

The Economist in 2013 named Uruguay its “country of the year” because of its liberal attitude towards same-sex marriage, abortion and cannabis legalisation.

Under the Mujica government it became legal to grow six plants and produce up to 17 ounces of cannabis per year, and they made it legal for pharmacies to sell up 1.4 oz of cannabis per month to any citizen over 18 registered as a cannabis user. Out of Uruguay’s 1,100 pharmacies only twelve have registered to sell cannabis and initially there were complaints about the low THC content of the state supplied weed. Traditionally being a cohort that doesn’t trust the state, Uruguay’s pot smokers have proved reluctant to register as cannabis users and the underground market continues, as do the illegal sales to foreign drug tourists.

One unexpected outcome of Uruguay’s cannabis law reform was that their banks started getting letters from American banks, including the Bank of America, demanding that they close down the account of anyone involved in the sale of marijuana. It transpired that the US “Patriot Act”, passed shortly after September 11th, 2001, made it illegal for any American financial institution to have anything to do with any other institution dealing in controlled substances, including marijuana.

It is estimated that more than one hundred billion US dollars of illegal drugs are consumed in America every year and yet American banks can  dictate to Uruguay about their enlightened drug policy – a policy Uruguay has ostensibly designed to get drug traffickers out of the market!

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Parana

Paraná

Millisphere (noun): a discrete region inhabited by roughly 1000th of the world population. Around seven million but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million will do.

On April 7th, 2018, Luis ‘Lula’ da Silva, President of Brazil from 2003 to 2011, started serving a nine-and-a-half year sentence for corruption at a prison in Curitiba in the state of Paraná in southern Brazil.

Brazil (population 210 million) has around 30 millispheres and the three southernmost – the states of Rio Grande do Sul (11.3 million), Santa Catarina (6.7 million) and Paraná (11.8 million) are currently experiencing calls for independence. The movement, called The South Is My Country, has its headquarters in Curitiba.

The three “South Is My Country” states have low crime rates by Brazilian standards and they only see about 60 percent of their taxes which, they say, go to a corrupt central government in Brasilia and to subsidise the populous cities and the poorer states to their north. Brazil’s south (south of the Tropic of Capricorn) is the country’s main agricultural region.

Curitiba (population 1.7 million) sits on a plateau that drains west into the Paraná river which flows south through Paraguay and into the River Plate near Buenos Aires. The city of Curitiba is known for its innovative approach to achieving environmentally sustainable outcomes. “If you want creativity take a zero off your budget, if you want sustainability take off two zeros,” said Jaime Lerner who was the mayor of Curitiba three times before becoming the governor of the state of Paraná.

Under Lerner, Paraná industrialised and Curitiba became known globally as a model green community. Lerner transformed areas of the city subject to flooding into extensive urban parks, maintained by flocks of sheep. He paid slum residents with vegetables, tickets to football games or transport tokens to bring their sorted rubbish out to waiting trucks which couldn’t access the narrow streets. Curitiba now has one of the world’s highest recycling rates.

Curitiba’s transport system uses special Volvo articulated buses, in dedicated bus lanes, which can carry 270 passengers and no one lives more than fifteen minutes walk from a transit line and no new development is approved unless in that zone. “A car is like a mother-in-law; if you let it it will rule your life,” joked Lerner.

In 2010 Curitiba was given the United Nations Global Sustainable City award and Time magazine named Lerner one of the world’s ten most influential thinkers.

In the same issue Time named Brazil’s president Lula one of the 100 most influential people in the world and also in 2010 Lula was given the Global Statesman award at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Lula da Silva’s career started in 1979 with a strike of 180,000 metal workers in Sao Paulo when he headed their union. The strike ended peacefully and soon the strikers were negotiating the release of political prisoners and the end of the ban on left wing organisations.

After the end of the military dictatorship in 1989 Brazil had their first presidential elections and in 2002, on his fourth attempt, Lula won the presidency and in 2006 won a second term, before stepping aside for his deputy Dilma Rousseff. Under Lula, Brazil became the world’s eighth largest economy; the number of Brazilians living in poverty was reduced by 55 percent the minimum wage increased by 75 percent; real wages rose by 35 percent; unemployment rates hit record lows; and Brazil’s infamous structural inequality was finally narrowing.

In 2011 Jaime Lerner was sentenced to three-and-a-half years for “the illegal layoff on a public tender while the governor of Paranas,” but he wasn’t arrested because of his age (and his popularity). In 2016 Dilma Rousseff was impeached and removed from office, and in 2017 Lula da Silva was sentenced to nine-and-a-half years for “influence peddling and corruption.”

Instead of the summary executions used back in the 1960s and 70s Brazil’s “old  family” oligarchy is using “lawfare” to wrest control back from the left.

Legal proceedings against Lula (currently the front-runner in opinion polls) are designed to stop to him running for president again. Brazil’s democracy is now the weakest it has been since military rule ended.

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Mapuche

millisphere (noun): A discrete region of approximately 1000th of the total world population – a bit over 7 million people but anywhere between 3.5 million and 14 million will do. A lens through which to examine human geography.

We have been Wwoof hosts (willing workers on organic farms) since 1976, and over the years we’ve hosted young travellers from all over the world.

Last year we had our first South Americans – from Chile.

Danielle was a young vintner from Santiago working the season in New Zealand vineyards and Jose was a recent English language graduate from southern Chile, and I took the opportunity to quiz them about Jose’s millisphere of Mapuche.

Relative to the rest of the world, South America is characterised by large rural millispheres, indicating low population density; and a number of very large cities where South Americans tend to congregate.

Eighty per cent of the indigenous people of southern South America are Mapuche who remained independent for the first 350 years of European settlement until the Arauco war in Chile and the “Conquest of the Desert” in Argentina around 1870 brought them under state control.

There have been Mapuche settlements in Chile and Argentina since 500 BC and there is evidence that the Fuegians reached the Falkland and South Shetland Islands by canoe.

At the southern tip of South America, the island of Tierra del Fuego is divided east/west by the boundary between Chile and Argentina. This boundary continues up the continent following the watershed of the Andes. Chile drains west into the Pacific and Argentina east into the Atlantic.

It takes most of the land south of the major cities of Santiago (7.3 million) in Chile and Buenos Aires (13.5 million) in Argentina to make up enough people for a millisphere.

Most of the people cling to the coast; the rest of southern South America is too cold and too dry to support much life.

Both Danielle and Jose were “Mestizos” (of mixed European and Amerindian blood).

University of Chile figures reveal that the Chilean population is around 30 per cent Caucasian, 65 per cent Mestizos and 5 per cent indigenous. The “average” Chilean gene is 60 per cent European and 40 per cent Amerindian.

Argentina was originally majority Mestizo until mass European immigration in the 19th century.

Of the two million Mapuche, most live in the Araucania region of southern Chile where Jose was from. Although Jose was a Mestizo, he certainly didn’t consider himself Mapuche. In 2002 only 4.3 per cent of Chileans identified as Mapuche; by 2016 this had risen to 11.4 per cent, and there are about 200,000 remaining Mapuche language speakers.

Ever since the Chilean army invaded Mapuche territory in the late 1800s, Mapuche relations with the state have remained fractious.

The conflict has accelerated in recent years with armed groups burning houses, churches, trucks and forest plantations. Forestry is Chile’s second highest export earner after mining.

Only 36 per cent of Chileans believe that Mapuche feel they are “Chilean”.

Under the military administration of General Augusto Pinochet (1970-73), remaining Mapuche land-holdings were reduced from 10 million to 400,000 acres when the state acquired land for forestry (mostly Pinus radiata for export to the United States).

Pinochet introduced anti-terrorism laws which are still applied to Mapuche resistance – and 60 per cent of Chileans believe terrorism exists in the Araucaria region.

Chile is in the grip of a 10-year drought, experiencing historically high temperatures and about a million acres of forest, valued at US$333 million ($464m), were destroyed by fire last summer, most being attributed to accidental causes.

This year’s Indigenous Peoples’ Day (Dia de la Raza), held on the day that Christopher Columbus made landfall in the Americas, was marked by marches in Santiago calling for Mapuche judicial autonomy, return of their ancestral lands and the re-establishment of Mapuche cultural identity.

Both Danielle and Jose acknowledged that “indigenous things have less value” in Chile and that Chileans were prejudiced against Mapuche – prejudice highest among the old, the poor and the right-wing, they told me.

The violence between Mestizo landowners and Chile’s indigenous people was getting worse, they thought, and that “both sides are victims of the ongoing processes of globalisation”.

■When Fred Frederikse is not building, he is a self-directed student of geography and traveller, and in his spare time he is the co-chair of the Whanganui Musicians’ Club.