"Reducing Inequality Should Be a Political Priority"

José Domingo Guariglia interviews HERALDO MUÑOZ, UNDP Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean

Photo Credit: José Domingo Guariglia/IPS

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 5, 2011 (IPS) - According to the Human Development Report 2011 released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) this week, Latin America remains the region with the highest income inequality, even as the situation has improved in countries like Argentina, Brazil, Honduras, Mexico and Peru.

Nevertheless, in a global context of persistent financial and economic crises, Latin America has made important advances in equality of access to education and health services, and many countries are nearing full enrolment at the primary and secondary education levels.

"People are unsatisfied that Latin America is growing economically but the distribution is unequal. People feel that the country is growing but that prosperity is not entering in their homes," UNDP Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean Heraldo Muñoz told IPS.

UNDP's annual report this year focuses on sustainability and equity in global development, and the next challenges for the 187 countries it covers, including 33 in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Chile and Argentina are the only Latin American nations in the list of countries with a "very high" Human Development Index in 2011, ranking 44th and 45th, respectively, while the countries with a "high" Human Development Index include Uruguay, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, Colombia and Belize.

IPS Correspondent José Domingo Guariglia spoke with Muñoz regarding the main challenges and opportunities for Latin America and the Caribbean in a context of global recession, poverty and increasing violence.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Do you think it is possible to reach the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in Latin America by 2015, especially the eradication of poverty, and gender equality?

A: I think that many Latin American countries will achieve the MDGs, while others are far from the goal. What is very clear is that Latin American countries have made many efforts in reducing poverty. We have programmes of conditioned cash transfers like Bolsa Família in Brazil or Oportunidades in Mexico or Chile Solidario in Chile, and poverty has been reduced.

In addition, there has been growth in the region. Latin America is passing through one of its best moments in recent history.

As UNDP, we are making efforts to collaborate with governments to do an MDG acceleration framework, which is a strategy to try to bring the efforts of attending the MDGs from a national level to a local level.

In general, Latin America will fall rather behind in the attainment of some goals like maternal mortality, gender empowerment and equality.

Q: Latin America has experienced a long democratic period, characterised by a sense of frustration due to inequalities, corruption, crime and violence. Do you think a new institutional framework is needed?

A: For sure. One of the keys to strengthen democracy is working on strengthening institutions. Latin America is passing through a good moment in electoral democracy. This year there will be six presidential elections: Haiti, Peru, Argentina, the first round in Guatemala, and the pending elections in Nicaragua and Guyana by the end of the year.

However, there is a question on the quality of our democracies. There is frustration, there is apathy, institutions are weak and that is the key: working on strengthening the separation of the branches, strengthening the judiciary, collaborating with parliaments, organising the work of the executives.

People are unsatisfied that Latin America is growing economically but the distribution is unequal. People feel that the country is growing but that prosperity is not entering into their homes.

Latin America continues to be the most unequal region in the world. Out of the 15 most unequal countries in the world, 10 are from Latin America and that's absolutely unacceptable. The first step would be to recognise that reducing inequality should be a political priority.

We have reduced inequality in the last decade thanks to the expansion of programmes in education and health, but we still have a long way to go.

Q: Can Latin American countries grow with high rates of criminality like the ones that exist in Honduras, Mexico or Venezuela right now?

A: Crime can be a threat. We live in the most violent region in the world. Latin America and the Caribbean represent nine percent of the world population but we concentrate 27 percent of world homicides.

There is a very important impact of crime in development. Central American countries spent last year four billion dollars in security- related investments, money that could have gone to education, health and social purposes.

This is a situation of epidemic proportions in Latin America. It should be placed as a priority and the key is how to address it. The strategy includes control and repression but also prevention, how to tackle the situation of youth, reform of the penal code, in the penitentiary system, justice, police, international cooperation.

Q: Do you think multilateral organisations in Latin America like Mercosur, Unasur or ALBA can contribute to South-South cooperation?

A: Latin American cooperation has been changing. Unasur is an expression of the combination of Mercosur and the Andean Community. It wants to be like the European Union to tackle military affairs, political coordination and cultural integration. It is quite an ambitious project and it can be the basis for South-South cooperation and to provide assistance for least developed countries.

As UNDP, we are trying to cooperate with countries of the region to give assistance to others. We are working to take the experience of democratic transitions to countries that have experienced the Arab Spring, particularly Egypt and Tunisia.

Q: How is the current financial crisis impacting developing nations?

A: The region has resisted the crisis better than Europe and the United States. Latin American countries have strong banking regulations because of the experience of the crisis of the 1980s. In addition to that, several countries have implemented policies that allow them to spend more during crisis and save in the moments of boom.

These are times for caution in the region. If the situation in Europe becomes more and more delicate and the United States does not get out of the moment of stagnation, it will be very difficult for Latin American countries to not feel the pinch of the crisis.

Q: Next year will be the International Year of Cooperatives. How do you evaluate the presence of cooperatives in Latin America?

A: Cooperatives have the people at the centre of development. In addition to that, cooperatives and small-medium enterprises have created jobs. They are always a significant part of the solution.

 
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=105742

Cooperatives: "Meeting Human Need, Not Just Human Greed"

José Domingo Guariglia interviews PAULINE GREEN, president of the International Cooperative Alliance, on the International Year of Cooperatives

Photo Credit: Rousbeh Legatis/IPS

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 3, 2011 (IPS) - Different countries may celebrate Oct. 31 in a variety of ways, but this year, the 193 member states of the United Nations (U.N.) launched the International Year of Cooperatives 2012 to raise awareness about the impact of cooperatives on the development of communities where they operate.

"Cooperative enterprises build a better world" is the theme for the first International Year of Cooperatives (IYC). The cooperative sector has 800 million members in more than 100 countries throughout the world.

Global discussions about the impact of cooperatives will take place at a local level among the U.N.'s 193 member states, members of media, sponsors and international organisations.

One of those organisations is the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA), founded in 1895 as an independent non-governmental group that unites and represents cooperatives around the world. Its members are 260 cooperatives operating in 96 countries.

ICA focuses on the promotion and protection of the cooperative identity in order to guarantee that cooperatives will be able to compete in the market as legitimate forms of enterprise. At the same time, it pushes for changes in legislation and policy to foster cooperatives' growth.

ICA President Pauline Green has worked with the cooperative movement for the past 35 years. She was chief executive and general secretary of Co-operatives UK from 2000 to October 2009 and co-president of Cooperatives Europe and ICA vice-president for Europe until she was elected ICA president in November 2009.

IPS correspondent José Domingo Guariglia interviewed Green about her expectations for the IYC and on the importance of cooperatives.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: The 2012 International Year theme is "Cooperative enterprises build a better world". Do you agree with that statement?

A: Cooperatives teach good democratic practices, help to build solidarity and cohesion in local communities, develop leadership potential among local people and support training and education.

Cooperatives are about meeting human needs, not just human greed, and they do this by creating member-owned businesses that allow local people to support the development of their own community. By returning profits from the business to their members, they keep the wealth within local communities and allow it to grow further.

It is about allowing people to pull themselves out of poverty through their own endeavours and with dignity. In this way cooperatives have diminish conflict, created more cohesive societies, enhanced skills and supported the evolution of well-informed, empowered citizens.

That is how cooperatives build a better world.

Q: Who is financing the IYC?

A: So far the ICA is funding its activities for the IYC directly from its own resources and from its member contributions, and we have an appeal out for that purpose. Occasionally we ask for sponsorship for specific events or publications.

The more we can raise, the more we can do to lift the visibility and profile of our model of business across the world, lobby governments and global bodies to improve cooperative access to the market, and show to the world that we have a model of business that is not business as usual.

Q: Why did the ICA get involved in the organisation of the IYC?

A: The ICA has been working for this outcome for a considerable time – probably five years in a serious way. Much is owed to the government of Mongolia who finally took the resolution to the floor of the General Assembly of the U.N. seeking a mandate for the IYC.

In the final analysis, the resolution at the U.N. was supported by nearly double the number of governments than usually sign the resolutions on an International Year – so it was very gratifying and a clear sign that in many countries, governments regard the cooperative input to their national economy to be important in their nations.

Q: Do cooperatives have a role in the achievement of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals?

A: Cooperatives are active in a whole range of sectors of the economy, from agriculture to insurance, from retailing to health, from banking to renewable energy, from housing to education.

From a commercial perspective, they support the lives and livelihoods of both their members and their employed staff who, incidentally, are often members as well.

Cooperatives can help in achieving the U.N. Millennium Development Goals. In fact, I would argue that over our 170-year history we have done more than any other single organisation to take people out of poverty.

Q: What else should the U.N. do to promote the work of the cooperative sector?

A: The different organs of the U.N. have supported the growth of various sectors of the cooperative economy – in agriculture, credit unions and microfinance, for instance. And the ILO (International Labour Organisation) has, of course, worked hard over the years to support good cooperative legislation across the world that subscribes to the worldwide values and principles of the movement.

As to what more the U.N. could do, we are about to launch the U.N.'s latest great gift to cooperatives worldwide and that is the International Year of Cooperatives.

It might look extremely ungracious to be asking for more. However, at a moment when so many people are suffering as a direct result of the collapse of the investor-led financial sector of the economy, and the resultant recession, it is vital that the cooperative movement is reinforced and strengthened to do its job for those people whose lives could and should be better.

That is something for which cooperators around the world will work very hard.

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=105720

Latinos Call for Immigration Reform, Not Record Deportations

JOSÉ DOMINGO GUARIGLIA

Photo Credit: José Domingo Guariglia

NEW YORK, Nov 1, 2011 (IPS) - In his campaign, President Barack Obama promised to make comprehensive immigration reform a top priority – a pledge mainly directed at Latino voters.

But in his nearly three years in office, his attention has been on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, healthcare reform and the financial crisis, disappointing Latino voters and jeopardising an important source of support for his bid for re-election in 2012.

But the Obama administration has not merely left aside the question of reform.

One of the key demands of Latino rights activists is an end to a controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) programme known as Secure Communities.

Although the aim of the programme is to deport undocumented immigrants who have criminal records, it has led to massive sweeps of immigrants without criminal records.

The Secure Communities web site says the programme "uses an already-existing federal information-sharing partnership between ICE and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that helps to identify criminal aliens without imposing new or additional requirements on state and local law enforcement…Under Secure Communities, the FBI automatically sends the fingerprints to ICE to check against its immigration databases.

"If these checks reveal that an individual is unlawfully present in the United States or otherwise removable due to a criminal conviction, ICE takes enforcement action – prioritising the removal of individuals who present the most significant threats to public safety as determined by the severity of their crime, their criminal history, and other factors – as well as those who have repeatedly violated immigration laws," the web site adds.

But "the programme has been a total failure," Roberto Lovato, cofounder of Presente.org, an online Latino advocacy organisation, told IPS. The result, he said, is that "the immigrant community avoids going to the police to report crimes that are being committed or that they have witnessed."

Secure Communities, which is to be extended nationwide by 2013, has also been rejected by authorities in California, Illinois, Massachusetts and New York. Nevertheless, it has been activated by the federal government in some districts in those states.

Besides the deportations, activists are concerned about reported violations of the human rights of the detained immigrants.

"Lost in Detention", a Frontline documentary aired on the PBS public broadcasting station on Oct. 18, examines the situation in the country's network of detention facilities for immigrants.

According to the programme, the country's immigration laws – and Secure Communities in particular – have broken up families. The documentary also shows immigrants being held in subhuman conditions and reports sexual and psychological abuse of detainees, as well as racism.

Deportation – in numbers

According to the Department of Homeland Security, there are some 11 million unauthorised immigrants living in the United States.

Of that total, 6.6 million, or 62 percent, are from Mexico. The next leading source countries are in Central America: El Salvador (620,000), Guatemala (520,000) and Honduras (330,000); and South America: Ecuador (110,000) and Brazil (100,000).

One million immigrants have been deported since Obama took office in January 2009.

Of the nearly 400,000 people deported in fiscal year 2011 – a record high – 55 percent had felony or misdemeanour convictions, according to ICE Director John Morton.

The various programmes – Secure Communities, Criminal Alien and 287(g) – that give state and local authorities the power to enforce federal immigration laws, and the lack of reforms to regularise the status of long time immigrants, have generated confusion in the scope and aims of the country's immigration laws.

In an unprecedented encroachment on a policy area constitutionally reserved for the federal government, several states have passed their own immigration laws, such as Arizona's SB 1070, enacted in April 2010 and partially blocked by the federal courts, and Alabama's HB 56.

The Alabama law, passed by the state legislature in June 2011, is described as one of the country's harshest anti-immigrant bills. It requires that police demand identity documents of anyone who they have "reasonable suspicion" to believe is in the country unlawfully, and requires public schools to determine the immigration status of primary and secondary school students, while authorising school officials to report children or parents who may be in the country illegally.

It also establishes penalties, even jail time, for people who hire, rent to or even assist undocumented immigrants, by giving a ride to a neighbour, for instance.

The NY Immigration Coalition's director of immigration advocacy, Jacqueline Esposito, said Secure Communities and similar programmes "have created an environment where anti-immigrant laws like those in Arizona and Alabama have flourished at the local level."

Lucía Gómez, executive director of La Fuente, an umbrella community organisation for civic participation projects in New York, says these laws confuse civil immigration violations with criminal offences. "An immigration infraction does not mean someone is a criminal, like someone who has killed a person," she told IPS.

In many cases, immigrants are immediately deported, without being allowed to contact their families or talk to a lawyer, after they are transferred to detention centres far from their homes, she added.

The view from Washington

The Obama administration announced in August that it was suspending deportations while it reviewed 300,000 pending cases. Under the new policy, immigration authorities will cancel the deportations of long time residents who do not pose a risk to society and do not have a criminal record.

But Esposito said "the new policy has not yet been implemented, which raises serious concerns."

Felicia Escobar, White House senior policy adviser on immigration, recently told local Latino leaders gathered at Baruch College in New York that the president wants immigration reform, but is obligated to enforce current laws until an agreement is reached.

"We all think that the laws should be changed and the system is broken," said Escobar.

But Obama has repeatedly stated that he will not act on his own to implement a reform bill that has failed to gain congressional approval.

Esposito said Congress is divided by "partisan politics" and has failed to adequately address the question of immigration.

Lovato believes the recent suspension of deportations was merely an attempt to win Latino votes, "a way to channel the hopes, wishes and passion of Latino voters towards Obama. But now they need to win the votes of more conservative independent whites," he said.

Gómez said the president is trying a two-pronged approach to hang on to the support of the two-thirds of Latinos who voted for him in 2008.

"The problem is the president's negotiating strategy: he's trying to show that he can be tough, but that he also respects the community. It has been a dangerous dance because the Republican Party has not yielded an inch, and we have been victims of that strategy," he said.

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=105664