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CIAO Focus, February 2006: The Shifting Political Landscape in Latin America | ||||||||
Bachelet, who is Chile's first female president, ran on a platform of gender equality and social benefits. Her father, an air force general, was tortured to death under Pinochet who seized power in a U.S.-backed coup in 1973. Bachelet and her mother were also tortured and sent into exile, first to Australia and then to Eastern Germany. She returned to Chile in 1979 and became active in socialist party politics. Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian, is Bolivia's first indigenous president. A trenchant critic of the free trade policies favored by the United States, his frequent pledges to impose greater state control over Bolivia's substantial gas and oil reserves have raised concerns in Washington. Morales has also vowed to legalize the cultivation of coca and expel the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration which provides funding to proxy forces that have been accused of human rights violations. For two decades now, the United States has spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to eradicate coca plants in its war against drugs. This month CIAO examines the shifting political landscape in Latin America. From CIAO's database: Harvesting the Past: The Social Mobilization of Bolivia's Indigenous Peoples The Last Days of Bolivia? Bolivia Alert: A Primer on Bolivia's Elections Coca Eradication Pinochet's Chile: The United States, Human Rights, and International Terrorism Economic Survey of Chile, 2003 Democracy and the Future of Civil-Military Relations in Chile: An Exercise in Historical Comparison Outside Links*: Bolivia and the WTO http://www.wto.org/English/thewto_e/countries_e/bolivia_e.htm U.S. Department of State: Bolivia http://www.state.gov/p/wha/ci/c2841.htm Latin American Network Information Center: Bolivia http://lanic.utexas.edu/la/sa/bolivia/ Bolivia Coca Cultivation Survey (UN Office on Drugs and crime) http://www.unodc.org/pdf/bolivia/bolivia_coca_survey_2003.pdf Latin American Network Information Center: Chile http://lanic.utexas.edu/la/chile/ U.S. Department of State: Chile http://www.state.gov/p/wha/ci/c2851.htm * Outside links are not maintained. For broken outside links, CIAO recommends the Way Back Machine [http://www.archive.org/]. |