Hugo Chávez just won re-election by a convincing margin in Venezuela. If I may, my friend Francisco Rodríguez at Bank of America called it correctly. To be honest, although Capriles did have a few good poll results, most of them showed a Chávez win. Anyway, the Bolivarian Revolution will go on until 2019 , even if the President passes away in office in the meantime. His successor probably won’t be Vice-president Elías Jaua. If something happens to Chávez between now and January 10, 2017, a new election will be held within 30 days. If he passes away after that date, then the vice-president will take over, but the Veep serves at the pleasure of the President and there is no guarantee that the person in the office will be the person in the office then.
In Ecuador, meanwhile, the big news concerns Assange and Occidental. With the former, not a whole lot is likely to happen. The Ecuadorians are settling in for the long haul: it is an easy way for Correa to take an anti-imperialist posture and distract attention from press measures at home. Correa is ahead in the polls for the 2013 election, but there is a while yet.
What I love is that Rafael Correa is going to advise Tunisia about dealing with debt! That is awesome.
Bolivia is having a rougher time. Two different groups are in conflict over the mining industry: unionized employees and cooperative independent miners. Until June, the government could play a conciliatory role, with Glencore as the foreign villian. But by nationalizing the mines, Evo has lost his cat’s paw. Now he is smack in the middle of a fight between the union and the small independent miners, which is a bad place to be. Moreover, his nationalization fights are starting to go bad. He just told a Canadian silver mining firm to go hang, no compensation. Legal recourse is not the problem, since the investment happened after Bolivia left ICSID (although there are other options, see next paragraph). Rather, the problem is that the nationalization, like earlier ones, has put the government smack in the middle of a conflict between different local interests. This is trouble.
President Morales has made a habit of nationalizing something every May Day, usually with compensation, but Rurelec has taken Bolivia to arbitration over a 2010 electricity nationalization. Since ICSID is no longer available, the arbitration will be held under looser U.N. rules. The nationalization beat the hell out of Rurelec: it lost 80% of its revenues and its share price crashed from 16p to 9p (U.K.). So it wants its money. It is less clear if it can collect, although the new nationalizations are making its life a little easier. The company sounds confident.
Finally, all-quiet on the Nicaraguan front, including a giant sigh of relief that President Chávez won re-election, what with this project getting underway. We think.
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