Hundreds of Chileans have made their way to the country’s presidential office to say goodbye to one of the most popular heads of state in the world.

Despite widespread criticism over the government response to a devastating earthquake and tsunami and a rocky start to her tenure four years ago as a result of a poorly managed transportation system upgrade in Santiago, Michelle Bachelet is leaving office tomorrow with an opinion poll rating of 84 percent.

Though Chile was among the first Latin American countries to give women the right to vote conditionally in 1931 and universally in 1949, women rarely played a role in Chilean politics. Michelle Bachelet changed that.

“Chile is no longer our fatherland—it’s our motherland” became a popular refrain when she was elected four years ago to become the South America’s first female president since Bolivia’s Lydia Gueiler Tejada became interim president of that Andean nation in 1979. Gueiler, however, became president via appointment by the Bolivian Congress and she was deposed in the country’s 129th coup on July 18, 1980.

It’s somewhat remarkable that she even became President. Bachelet, an agnostic and single mother of three boys, is an atypical mother in a country widely viewed as one of the more conservative Catholic countries. Divorce only became legal in 2004. She is the daughter of an air force general who died after being tortured during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1989). Bachelet with her mother fled into exile returning only the situation in Chile stabilized. Between 2000 and 2002, Bachelet was health minister in the government of fellow Socialist Ricardo Lagos, and she was later the country’s defense minister, up until October 2004 when she resigned in order to run for the presidency.

A pediatrician by training, Dr. Bachelet embraced gender issues from the start, vowing that her government “will fight with all its capacity for the full exercise of women’s rights.”

Among her government’s accomplishments:

- A law gave women the right to breast-feed at work.
- A law stiffened the penalties for men who fail to pay alimony.
- Hundreds of nurseries have been established nationwide, along with domestic violence shelters for women and children.
- Equal numbers of women and men are now serving in top government jobs, including her Cabinet.
- Women were for the first time admitted at the naval academy.

But it is in the realm of social investment and especially in the area of childhood development that Bachelet left her mark. Under Bachelet Chile shaved off 0.3 points off the country’s GINI co-efficient narrowing the income inequality gap from 0.56 to 0.53.

During much of the 1990s, Chile’s economy averaged annual growth of 7.8%, earning it the title of Latin America’s most turbocharged but the country’s growth was uneven with the rich getting richer and the bottom half of Chileans getting left behind. Chilean leaders had long hoped to match the affluence in Portugal or a Greece, two of the less affluent European nations.

Chile’s growth was fueled by free-trade agreements with 56 countries that opened markets to Chile’s natural resources such as copper (which remains in state hands) and timber, and to food items such as fruit, fish and wine. Chile in a public-private partnership, for example, developed the country farmed salmon industry from zero in 1990 to where it is today, the world’s second largest after Norway.

But despite the global commodities boom, growth slowed at the start of this decade to half what it was in the 1990s, to an average of 3.7%. The economic expansion was no longer keeping pace with the growth of the labor force. Far from catching up to Portugal’s economic output of about $23,000 per capita, Chile’s remained stuck at $14,000.

And its income inequality was among the worst anywhere. Women can get welfare but few can get a job, according to data that show the nation ranks near the bottom among Latin American countries in terms of formal employment. This is what Bachelet changed by making the narrowing of social inequality a policy goal.

At a 2008 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, President Bachelet noted that “Chile has set even more ambitious goals for itself. Chile’s currently a middle-income country, and within the next few years its per capita income, measured through the use of the purchasing power parity, will be in excess of $20,000 per year. In keeping with this, the country’s now in the process of conducting reforms that will enable us to make a strong leap towards development…We must increase competitiveness, promote innovation and ensure that all members of our societies participate in the development process, what we have called social cohesion. We need to go further in social cohesion, too.”

Under her tenure direct foreign investment in Chile increased 64 percent and Chile became the first South American and the second Latin American country to join the OECD, a group of the world’s top 31 industrialized economies.

Bachelet is part of Latin Ameica’s “pragmatic socialism” movement, a left-leaning democratic coalition of countries that includes Brazil, Uruguay, and El Salvador that aims for progressive social policies coupled with traditional economic policy. She’ll be greatly missed.

The Chilean Constitution does not allow for successive presidential terms. She is eligible to run again in 2013 when Chile next holds presidential elections. In the meantime, she is headed to work on childhood development issues at the United Nations.

As Chile digs out from the powerful 8.8 magnitude earthquake that struck just off-shore, it is increasingly clear that many of the deaths were cause by a tsunami that followed about an hour after the quake first felt. The small fishing village of Dichato, (pop. 3057), located 40 miles north of the city of Concepción in Chile has been about 85 percent destroyed with the devastation stretching a kilometer inland.

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Perú has long been one of the world’s largest producers of coca, the plant often used to produce cocaine.

It figures alongside Afghanistan, Colombia and Mexico in the list of countries where growing plants that can yield narcotics is a multibillion-dollar industry. Although Perú has seen a recent surge in the coca production, a United Nations initiative is helping farmers in the city of Tocache abandon coca and find alternative crops.

Officials think they can replicate the town’s success in other farming areas.

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A powerful 8.8 magnitude earthquake on the Richter scale has struck south-central Chile. The quake, the third strongest in the past 100 years, was centered in the VIII Administrative District of Chile also known as the Bío-Bío near the city of Concepción, Chile’s second largest city with just under 900,000 inhabitants. The quake struck at approximately 3:30 AM local time when most residents were sleeping and was felt as far north as Santiago and as far east as Mendoza, Argentina. 

The quake, which was centered 22 miles deep in the Earth, set off a tsunami with warnings spanning the Pacific including ones for Hawaii and southern California. Tsunami warnings are in effect for 53 countries across the Pacific Basin. Waves hit the Juan Fernández Islands (the setting for Robinson Crusoe) wiping out half of the small town. The coastal areas of Easter Island were evacuated as a precaution. A tsunami wave travels at about 600 miles per hour, about as fast as a jet, and it can be expected to cross the Pacific and hit Japan 21 hours after the quake hit.

The loss of life so far stands at 147 but is expected to rise as Chileans awake to the devastation and sift through the rubble. This was a deep quake though it was 101.8 times more powerful than the 7.0 quake that struck Port-au-Prince back on January 12, 2010. However, the Haiti quake was shallower and Haiti’s infrastructure wasn’t built to withstand quakes. Chile has much more experience with earthquakes and much more stringent building codes. Nonetheless, the damage to infrastructure especially in Concepción seems vast. The city was founded in 1550 and one can expected buildings from the colonial era to have suffered immensely.

The Bío-Bío is one of the world’s richest fisheries. That small region accounts for some 5 percent of world seafood production. The region is a major producer of sea bass, farmed salmon (Chile’s second largest export), mackerel, hake, sardines and anchovies. The Bío-Bío is also, not surprisingly, a major shipbuilding center. The area is also a major forestry products producer and a tourist gateway to the lake district in Patagonia. The region is named after the Bío-Bío river, one of the most rugged rivers in the world and a major whitewater rafting destination. Finally, the region is a major hydroelectric power producer.

The quake comes at an odd time for Chile as the country is in the midst of a Presidential transition and a change of power from one party to another. Sebastián Piñera, the first right of center candidate to be elected President in Chile since 1958 and the first conservative since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship, is to assume the oath of office on March 11th. Outgoing President Michelle Bachelet has declared a “state of catastrophe.”

Chile’s Seismic History

The magnitude-8.8 earthquake that struck off the coast of Chile early Saturday morning occurred along the same fault responsible for the biggest quake ever measured, a 1960 tremor that killed thousands in Chile and hundreds more across the Pacific.

Both earthquakes took place along a fault line where the Nazca tectonic plate, the section of the earth’s crust that lies under much of the Eastern Pacific Ocean south of the Equator, is sliding beneath another section, the South American plate. The two are converging at a rate of about three and a half inches per year.

Earthquake experts said the strains built up by that movement, plus the stresses added along the fault line by the 1960 quake and smaller ones in the intervening years, led to the rupture on Saturday along what is estimated to be about 400 miles of the fault. The quake generated a tsunami, with wave heights of about 5 feet recorded along the Chilean coast and larger waves forecast for Hawaii and elsewhere in the Pacific.

The quake was centered about 140 miles north of the center of the 1960 earthquake, which ruptured more than 650 miles of the fault and was measured at magnitude 9.5. The fault is a thrust fault, in which most of the ground motion during a quake is vertical.

Experts said the earthquake appeared to have no connection to a magnitude 6.9 quake that struck off the southern coast of Japan on Saturday. The Chilean event also had no connection to the magnitude-7.0 quake that occurred in Haiti on Jan. 12.

That quake, which is believed to have killed more than 200,000 people, occurred along a strike-slip fault, in which most of the ground motion is lateral.

Paul Caruso, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colo., said the quake on Saturday generated about 500 times more energy than the Haitian quake, which was measured at magnitude-7.0. “But even though this quake is larger, it’s probably not going to wreak the devastation that the Haitian quake did,” at least on land, Caruso said.

For one thing, he noted, the quality of building construction is better in Chile than in Haiti. And the fact that the quake occurred offshore should also help limit the destruction. In Haiti, the rupture occurred only a few miles from the capital, Port-au-Prince. The rupture on Saturday was centered about 200 miles southwest of the Chilean capital, Santiago, and 60 miles from the nearest town, Chillan.

In some respects, the Chilean quake is similar to the Indonesian earthquake of Dec. 26, 2004. That quake, which also occurred along a thrust fault, generated a tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people around the Indian Ocean.

When they occur underwater, thrust-fault earthquakes are far more likely to create tsunamis than tremors on strike-slip faults, said David Schwartz, an earthquake geologist with the geological survey in Menlo Park, Calif. “When they slip, the fault that causes the earthquake breaks the surface, and pushes the water up,” he said. “It pushes an awful lot of water. And that water has to go somewhere.”

That is what occurred in 1960. A tsunami generated by that quake devastated Hilo, Hawaii, with waves as high as 35 feet, killing 61 people. The tsunami reached as far as Japan, reaching northern parts of the main island, Honshu, about a day after the quake and killing 185 people and destroying more than 1,600 homes.

The New York Times has a full account as does The Independent. The UK Guardian has some great coverage of the tsunami impact.

If you understand Spanish, you can watch Chilean television at TV de Chile on Ustream.

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Thirty-two leaders from the Americas agreed to create a new regional cooperation organization that would exclude the United States and Canada. Christopher Sabatini offers his perspective.

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Felipe Calderón, Mexico’s president, has bet his presidency on his so-called war on drugs.

But his military-focused strategy has, so far, seen little results in a conflict estimated to have cost more than 15,000 lives since 2006. And now the government is being accused of ignoring the biggest drug gang of all.

Accusations of a “corrupt” Mexican government protecting certain cartels have been around since the 1970s, but now some of the country’s leading investigative reporters say they have solid evidence showing that authorties are going after other cartels, but not targeting Sinaloa.

“There are no important detentions of Sinaloa cartel members,” Diego Osorno, an investigative journalist and the author of a book on the Sinaloa cartel published last year, told Al Jazeera’s Franc Contreras.

“But the government is hunting down [Sinaloa's] adversary groups – [and] new players in the world of drug trafficking.”

Tiny fraction

The government did recently annouce the arrests of two members of the Sinaloa cartel, but experts say the men arrested were not senior cartel leaders.

Edgardo Buscaglia, a leading law professor in Mexico and an international organised crime expert, has analysed 50,000 drug-related arrest documents dating back to 2003, and said that only a tiny fraction of the them were against Sinaloa members, and low-key ones at that.

“Law enforcement shows you objectively that the federal government has been hitting the weakest organised crime groups in Mexico. The Familia Michoacana, mainly, Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez,” he told Al Jazeera.

“But they have not been hitting the main organised crime group, the Sinaloa Federation, that is responsible for 45 per cent of the drug trade in this country.”

Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman – one of the most wanted criminals in the world – runs the Sinaloa cartel. Arrested in Guatemala in the 1990s and transferred to a maximum security prison in Mexico, Guzman escaped in 2001 and has amassed a more than $1bn forture by trafficking cocaine, heroine and methamphetamines to the US.

The Mexican government has consistently denied any involvement with Guzman and his cartel, backed up the US drug enforcement agency, which is involved in counternarcotics operations there.

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From Raw Story:

Prolific Mexican politician and intellectual Jorge Castañeda believes that a greater North American community — a “North American Union” — with economies tied together under a European Union-style system, complete with open borders and a unified currency, is the wave of the future.

In a new interview with Web site BigThink.com, Castañeda, Mexico’s foreign minister from 2000-2003 and a global distinguished professor of politics at New York University, said that with nearly 11 percent of Mexicans living in the United States, he has stopped seeing his nation as a Latin American country.

“Well, my sense is that we’re moving closer and closer to forms of economic integration with the United States and Canada and conceivably Central America and Caribbean could become part of that in the coming years,” he said. “I don’t see Mexico as a Latin American country. Too much of trade, investment, tourism, immigration, remittances, absolutely everything is concentrated exclusively with the United States. So, Mexico has to be part of a North American community, a North American union, which at some point probably should include some type of monetary union along European lines with a free flow of labor, with energy being on the table, etc.”

Often demonized as some type of “conspiracy theory” in mainstream American press, the so-called North American Union proposals have actually existed for some time. In May of 2005, the Council on Foreign Relations released a document entitled “Building a North American Community” in which it calls for an EU-like integration of Canada, the United States and Mexico.

While the document does not specifically call for the ceding of sovereignty between the three nations — as some vocal opponents of the idea have suggested — it does recommend the formation of a North American Advisory Council and a multinational inter-parliamentary group to facilitate mutual cooperation. Though the group originally set out to achieve this goal by 2010, few in mainstream America are even aware of it today.

The CFR’s full proposal is available online. [PDF link]

“Economic and social citizenship in North America implies the ability of citizens to exert pressure for the implementation of an inclusive economic policy at home and to be engaged in the international economy,” wrote CFR member Carlos Heredia. “To the extent that citizens of the three partner countries see that North American integration brings concrete benefits, a new constituency will be galvanized to support these efforts in the years to come.”

“How far away are we from that?” Castañeda asked, rhetorically. “Quite far, but so did it seem back in Europe in the 1950’s and very little time later they came around and understood that that was their future lay. My sense is that the Mexican society is voting with its feet. We have a higher share of Mexicans living in the United States than we have ever had in our history. One out of every nine Mexicans, Mexican citizens, people born in Mexico, live in the United States today.”

In recent weeks, Castañeda also appeared on CNN’s Amanpour for a debate about the drug war. He explained that in his view, marijuana should be legalized in order to take away the drug cartels’ primary revenue source. However, “we can’t do it in Mexico if the U.S. doesn’t do it at the same time,” he said.

Speaking to BigThink, he carried a similar message.

“Having recklessly plunged the country into [the drug war] now, I think what Calderón and the United States should do is to sort of sit back for a second, think this through, see what they really want to achieve, what is achievable and what should be done that’s new,” he said. “For example, there are more and more states in the US that are moving towards decriminalization at least of marijuana. Mexico is still a very important producer of marijuana. Some people say that up to 60 percent of the profits of Mexico’s cartels come from marijuana. Well, if the United States or California’s de facto legalizing it through medical marijuana, what sense does it make for Mexicans to die to stop marijuana from entering the US when once it enters it can be sold legally at over 1,000 dispensaries in Los Angeles, more than the number of public schools there are in Los Angeles. That’s certainly one thing that we can do.”

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Mexicans abroad are sending less money home to their families as a result of the global financial downturn and rising unemployment levels. These remittances are the country’s second largest source of foreign currency — after oil sales- – and their rapid decline has hit the Mexican economy particularly hard.

More background from CBS News:

Money sent home by Mexicans abroad plunged a record 15.7 percent in 2009 as migrants worldwide struggled to find work during the global economic slowdown, the central bank reported Wednesday.

Remittances – Mexico’s No. 2 source of foreign income after oil exports – totaled $21.2 billion in 2009, compared with $25.1 billion in 2008, the bank said.

Since the bank began tracking remittances in 1996, it has recorded just one other annual decline – a 3.6 percent decrease in 2008, as the world financial crisis exploded.

Central bank president Agustin Carstens attributed the latest drop to the weak economy in the United States and the increased difficulty Mexicans are having securing employment there. More than 11.8 million Mexicans live in the U.S.

Carstens said a 1.3 percent uptick in remittances in December, compared to the previous month, gave some hope for a recovery.

“It is just one figure, but it could indicate the beginning of a relative stabilization in the drop in remittances, and it would be congruent with the fact that economic activity in the United States is about to go from negative to positive,” Carstens said.

An analyst was less optimistic, saying that employment levels in the United States “remain very bad” and remittances to Mexico will probably continue to decline through the first half of 2010 when compared to the same period of 2009.

“It is important to remember that many Mexicans are employed in very volatile sectors that remain depressed, like construction, manufacturing, restaurants,” said Hector Rodriguez, a researcher at the Graduate School of Public Policy and Administration in the northern Mexico city of Monterrey.

Experts blame a crackdown on illegal immigration that has stemmed the flow of those heading north to seek work as well as the U.S. recession, in which many Mexicans, especially construction workers, have been laid off.

Mexico receives the largest amount of remittances in Latin America and the third largest in the world, after India and China. The country was also the hardest hit in Latin America by the U.S. economic slump with a drop of about 7 percent in Mexico’s GDP.

While remittances represent less than 4 percent of GDP, their decline is being felt in towns across Mexico, where lines at Western Union counters have all but disappeared. New businesses financed by migrant money are no longer opening and construction has stopped on homes that have been built in stages as cash arrived from those working abroad.

In the first part of the decade, Mexico’s remittances grew rapidly – from $9 billion in 2001 to $26 billion in 2007 – because of swelling migration and better record-keeping.

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José Moya, a professor of Latin American history at Barnard College, joins Daljit Dhaliwal to discuss the impact of the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba. Moya explains what U.S. policy has meant for Cuban businesses and for American companies investing in Cuba. He also discusses the future of U.S.-Cuba economic relations.

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Almost five weeks after Haiti’s earthquake, fallout from the disaster is spilling into the political arena.

Haitians angry at what they feel is the government’s mishandling of the crisis, are rallying for the return of the former president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide who lives in exile in South Africa.

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