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COHA

Brazil Spearheads UNASUR Defense Council, but in a Surprise move, Colombia Withdraws

• Implications for Brazil
• The Venezuela-Colombia Rift
• Regional Autonomy
• The Rebirth of the Fourth Fleet and with it the Ghost of Gunboat Diplomacy
• The new Pattern of United States-South American Relations

Member states of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) signed a pact on Friday, May 23 in Brasília to establish judicial and political components for the emerging, limited union. On the docket was a plan to create a military coordinating component of UNASUR, the Conselho Sul-Americano de Defesa (CSD). However, the CSD was destined to be founded without the important exception of Colombia, which recently confused its neighbors by revoking its intention to join. Brazil, in collaboration with Venezuela, spearheaded the creation of the defense portion of the pact, which will be increasingly NATO-like in structure.

Successfully founding the CSD, which had been scheduled to include Colombia, would have represented an enormous victory for what has been called President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s “pragmatic left” leadership. It was no secret that Brasília hoped to use the CSD to strengthen regional ties across highly sensitive boundaries, with Colombia on the right, Venezuela on the left, and Brazil hoping to act as the mediating middle. However, the withdrawal of Bogotá, with one of the region’s most advanced militaries, has significantly weakened the pact from its onset. Brazilian defense minister, Nelson Jobim, described the basic tenets of the CSD as an integrated alliance without an operating field capability. CSD forces would cooperate, for example, in contributing to UN and other humanitarian missions if necessary. The alliance will also be expected to coordinate military technology and resources.

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COHA’s Women’s Studies Series: SERNAM and the Underrepresentation of Women in Chile

COHA on Cuba

The latest ill-fated salvo in President Bush’s poorly-focused rhetorical war against Cuba, which was just issued, once again fell far short of the target. In minimizing the importance of the reforms now being witnessed in Havana, Bush continues his record of trivializing U.S.-Latin America policy and undermining its lack of coherence and relevance regarding the important reforms now occurring almost daily on the island.


It is not an exaggeration to say that, under Bush, U.S. influence in Latin America is at its lowest point since the end of World War II. Much of the low esteem in which Washington is now held is due to the dead weight of its unremitting sterile policy toward Cuba that has pulled the State Department down to where its regional initiatives are scorned by almost any other country inside or outside of the region.


Ironically, Bush’s wasted words occurred some time after the E.U.’s senior development commissioner, Louis Michel, visited Cuba and urged all E.U. sanctions against the country be scrapped. Whatever shortcomings Cuba now exhibits in terms of the lack of civic guarantees it offers to its citizens—and there are many— President Bush would be well advised to inspect any number of important U.S. institutions that have been gored and disgraced by his own dysfunctional and constitutionally challenged administration and an all but illiterate diplomacy, that has produced neither tangible results nor appreciable leverage, over Cuba. In spite of the unrelenting hostility, the island today has a stronger economy and a brighter history of diplomatic success which consistently has out-trumped Washington on an almost daily basis.


President Bush’s verbiage may make the Florida delegation of exile representatives Lincoln Diaz-Balart, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, and Connie Mack, full of admiration, but it has no standing with most Americans who look upon U.S.-Cuba policy with a sense of embarrassment and despair.

While the successful turnover of the Pinochet regime in 1989 presidential elections marked the formal beginning of civilian rule in Chile, it also brought on an important turning point in the relationship between civil organizations and the state. In focusing on the female sector, this transition has been shown to affect their movement in a number of ways. Though the women’s movement had presented a strong and often autonomous voice during the years of the Pinochet dictatorship, Chile’s transition to democracy began the institutionalization of women’s issues within society, changing the way that their demands were processed as well as affecting the types of issues that came before public agencies.

SERNAM’s Role

El Servicio Nacional de la Mujer (SERNAM) is an important state-sanctioned institution that was created after the transition to democracy had begun, in order to address issues of gender equality in the social, economic, political, cultural, and familial spheres of everyday life (Richards, 2003, 42). However, while some might suggest that SERNAM actually provides important resources and a set of objectives around which the women’s movement has re-mobilized (Franceschet 2003), others suggest that SERNAM is limited in its scope, and therefore, does not adequately represent the concerns of the popular sector when pushing the government for certain policies and programs high on its agenda. In addressing this second claim, we hope to show that SERNAM functions as a conservative organization for the concerns of a limited portion of the popular sector, by discussing the non-inclusive nature of SERNAM’s policy proposals, its low level of autonomy from the state government, and the general channeling of the popular women’s movement through state-sanctioned intermediaries. The conclusion reached is that the transition has pushed civil society organizations and their mobilization capacity to operate within a state-directed and institutionalized political arena.

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