These were held last October 15 and were contested by 13 candidates. The official result, after a tumultuous vote count, did not confirm the tendency signaled by opinion polls prior to the elections, with the exception of the runner-up, Rafael Correa, of the Country Alliance (AP) coalition, who received 22.51% of the ballots.


Ecuador’s presidential elections
Presidential elections in Nicaragua
The popular revolt in Oaxaca
The building of the wall along the US-Mexico border passes
Choosing Latin America’s and the Caribbean’s representatives to the UN Security Council
Election of the new UN Secretary-General
US elections – promising prospects for the Democratic Party
Elections in Congo
Crisis in Darfur continues
China and Africa strengthening their ties
New Internet control rules
New protests in France’s suburbs
French Socialist Party holds primary to define presidential candidate
News from the Middle East
New Prime Minister in Japan
Nuclear test in North Korea
The social movement’s calendar for the next months

Ecuador’s presidential elections

These were held last October 15 and were contested by 13 candidates (see Periscope no. 7). The official result, after a tumultuous vote count, did not confirm the tendency signaled by opinion polls prior to the elections, with the exception of the runner-up, Rafael Correa, of the Country Alliance (AP) coalition, who received 22.51% of the ballots.

The surprises came on account of Leon Roldós of the Democratic Network – Democratic Left (RED – ID), who had always been pointed by the polls as the electorate’s favorite and who, nevertheless, finished in the fourth place with 15.50%, relinquishing the first place to Álvaro Noboa of the Institutional Renewal – National Action Party (PRIAN). Another surprise was the third place conquered by Gilmar Gutierrez, former president Lucio Gutierrez’s brother, for the Patriotic Society, with 16.36%.

The remaining candidates obtained the following results: rightwing Cynthia Viteri of the PSC, 9.91%; Fernando Rosero of the PRE, 2.15% and Luis Makas, an indigenous leader of the Pachakutik Movement, 2.12%. The other six candidates totaled approximately 4.8% of the votes.

The Ecuadorian Supreme Electoral Court (TSE) had promised a swift counting to be performed by electronic means for which purpose it had contracted Brazilian company “E – vote” for US$ 5 million. The counting system collapsed several times, raising suspicion of result manipulation, especially with regard to the frontrunner, whether Noboa or Correa.

The contract with “E – vote” was canceled, while the company began to be investigated by the Attorney General’s Office, who also requested the suspension of the immunity of the Ecuadorian TSE judges so that they may also be included in the investigation.

The second round will be held on November 26 between Álvaro Noboa, a millionaire from the banana exporting sector, and Rafael Correa, an economist and former Finance Minister of the incumbent administration presided by Alfredo Palácios, who substituted Lucio Gutierrez at the time of the latter’s ousting.

In spite of a frustrated attempt to bring leftist candidacies together in June before their formal registration, particularly between the Country Alliance and the Pachakutik, the left ran divided in the first round with five candidates. Besides them, also took part in the race deputy Luis Villacis, of the PCMLE, Jaime Damerval, of the Popular Forces Alliance, and Lênin Torres, of the Popular Participation Revolutionary Movement. The three however reaped only 3% of the votes.

Noboa was a candidate in 1998 when he was defeated by Jamil Mahuad, and was also defeated in the 2002 runoff election by Lucio Gutierrez. This time he repeated his essentially neoliberal platform campaign, but added draws to distribute computers and wheelchairs in his rallies and spending more on electoral advertising than allowed by the law. He is the candidate of the press and of big capital. Correa is the progressive candidate in these elections, presenting a nationalist platform with a strong social connotation, in addition to defending the integration of Latin America, opposing the Free Trade Agreement with the US, and having committed himself not to renewing the military agreement that allows the US to use the Manta air force base for its operations in Colombia. In the first round he was supported by the Ecuadorian Socialist Party, which had not launched a candidacy, and now in the second round he got the support from the Pachakutik, the Democratic Left – currently governing the capital city of Quito and which had lent its support to Leon Roldós– and the PCMLE.

An opinion poll held by Gallup Institute on October 25 showed a 58% preference of the electorate for Noboa and 42% for Correa. According to Ecuadorian political analysts, Noboa inherited most of Cynthia Viteri’s and Gilmar Gutierrez’s votes, while the Leon Roldós’ electors mostly migrated to Correa. Yet, there is a one month hiatus between this poll’s results and Election Day.

Read more at Alainet: Ecuador: Dos proyectos em disputa (Two projects at contest).

Presidential elections in Nicaragua

Daniel Ortega, of the National Liberation Sandinista Front (FSLN), won the presidential elections in Nicaragua with about 38% of the votes against 29% of the runner-up, Eduardo Montealegre, of the right wing Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance (ALN).

According to that country’s legislation, a winner in the first round is that candidate who receives a minimum of 40% of the votes, or 35% should there be a 5-percent lead over the second place, which is what occurred in Nicaragua.

The result marks the return of the FSLN to power after 17 years, when the same Daniel Ortega failed to be reelected in the 1989 presidential election. Yet, Ortega’s comeback occurs under very different circumstances from those of the time he left the presidency. There is no more cold war and no armed conflicts in Central America, yet the country is even poorer and in this regard is second only to Haiti. Neoliberalism had its practical effects with the privatization of various public services, the signing of a Free Trade Agreement with the US and the mushrooming of sweatshops in Free Trade Zones.

The social programs that the Sandinistas had implemented at the time of the “revolution” suffered an enormous setback; for example, illiteracy, which had practically been eradicated, is around 30% today.

The Front itself underwent changes. Firstly, with the emergence of a dissident party, the Sandinista Renewal Movement (MRS), which counts with historical leaders in its ranks, such as Ernesto Cardenal, and ran with its own candidate in these last elections –initially with Herty Lewitis, Managua’s ex-Sandinista mayor who died in the early days of the campaign, and then with candidate Edmundo Jarquin, who replaced Lewitis. And, secondly, by establishing more to center-leaning alliances. The vice-presidential candidate in Ortega’s slate, Morales Carazo, for example, was a top aide of liberal president Alemán and in the 1980s was a member of the “Contras”.

The campaign was extremely tough and the defeated candidates were mostly engaged in attacking Ortega rather than campaigning in favor of an alternative proposal, with Ortega’s “Daniel Peace and Love” strategy turning out to be more effective. The American ambassador, Paul Trevili, also joined the campaign by stating that the US aid to Nicaragua might be cut if the FSLN candidate won, while declaring after the elections that they were full of abnormalities and that it would not be possible to affirm that they had been transparent and impartial. And all that in spite of the presence of nearly 18,000 international observers and the statements made by the Carter Center, the OAS, and the European Union that the elections had been “peaceful, massive, and orderly”.

On the other hand, Daniel Ortega was also favored by the right’s being split over two candidacies that together totaled 54% of the votes, indicating that in the hypothesis of a second round he would most likely have been defeated. As the results turned out, the FSLN also failed to achieve a majority in parliament. Out of a total of 90 deputies, the Sandinista Front elected 37 (down from 38 in the current legislature), the ALN and the Constitutional Liberal Party (PLC) together made 47 deputies and the MRS, six.

That is, difficulties abound and the other progressive governments in the region must step forward to help overcome them. Nevertheless, the progressive political process in Latin America keeps advancing.

The popular revolt in Oaxaca

One of the tactics used by the right during the Mexican elections was to link social conflicts to the PRD’s Andrés Manoel Lopez Obrador candidacy, a threat that would tend to grow should he win the elections, and thereby scare, mainly, the middle class. One of the last episodes before the election confirming that tactic occurred when the PRI governor of Oaxaca, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, decided to send the riot police to expel 70,000 striking schoolteachers who were camped on the central square of the state’s capital city, also called Oaxaca, a city with 600,000 inhabitants.

The strike was sparked by a demand by the teachers for the adoption of a career plan, and decided by Section 22 of the Education Workers National Trade Union (SNTE), a union whose national board and president –Elba Esther Gordillo– were historically linked to the PRI, but today broke ties with the PRI and allied with President Fox’s PAN party through the joint work of the “Vamos México” (“Let’s go Mexico) presided by his wife.

Section 22, however, is run by leftist political sectors, which explains the measures adopted against the strikers. The operation to disperse the teachers started at 5 in the morning of June 14, with widespread use of tear gas and firearms. More than 70 people were injured and 4 were killed, including a child, but the police were unable to accomplish their objective, and both the strike and the occupation went on.

With the repression, the strike escalated into a popular revolt against the governor, authoritarian and corrupt, whose impeachment on the ground of ineptitude came to be discussed in the Senate, where it was rejected by the PAN – PRI coalition, reinvigorated by the proclamation of Felipe Calderón’s victory in the presidential election (Ortiz’s impeachment would entail calling elections in which any PAN or PRI candidate’s chances were very slim).

Over the last months there occurred a series of marches, occupations of downtown areas and the setting up of barricades, as well as the creation of a parallel government organized and run by the “Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca” (APPO). Toward the end of October the federal government authorized the use of force against the movement and on the 29 a contingent of 4,000 members of the Pre-emptive Federal Police (PFP), with the back-up of two armored vehicles, entered the city with the purpose of dismantling the barricades and dispersing the revolters. They were also supported by paramilitary groups connected with the governor.

The PFP action was, as customary, extremely violent, leaving 40 gun shot and two dead, among them an altermundista press American journalist, Bradley Will, shot dead by a paramilitary, who added to the other nine victims assassinated since the movement erupted. There also were tens of arrests and some 30 people are missing.

A sector of those involved in the revolt, formed by local groups as the Revolutionary Popular Front, the Oaxaca Indigenous Council, the Popular Fight Ample Front, among others, took refuge in the university from where it operates a radio station. In spite of several attempts including the one made on the Day of the Dead, the police were unable to remove them. The struggle for the impeachment of the governor, the liberation of those arrested and the appearance alive of those missing continues.

The revolt of the state of Oaxaca with its characteristics – the political forces acting in the region, the local leftist groups and the people who just want to get rid of the governor– is not the only one in the country. There are fights also in the states of Chiapas –where the right is trying to impede the swearing in of the governor elected by the PRD– and Tabasco. No doubt that the electoral atmosphere and the current political contest in Mexico, in particular the fraud that delivered the presidency of the country to Calderón, have contributed to the radicalization of the process and will most certainly lead to other episodes.

The building of the wall along the US-Mexico border passes A new bill proposing the construction of 1,100 km of fences along the southeastern border of the US with Mexico was signed by President Bush on October 26 and presented to the American people as an important step in the process of overhauling immigration rules.

Motivated by the electoral period, the bill was received with much criticism not only in Mexico but also from the other countries of Latin America, gathered at the Iberian-American Summit held in Uruguay in early November. The 24 countries present signed a special document at the end of the summit whose theme was precisely migration, expressing great concern regarding the construction of a border wall, for a “new wall” will only contribute to generate more discrimination and xenophobia.

The Organization of the American States (OAS) also condemned the American decision, and of the 34 member nations 27 signed a joint declaration in which they express their deepest concern with regard to the US’s position. According to the declaration, “the unilateral measure goes against the spirit of understanding that should characterize the attention to the common problems between neighboring countries and affects cooperation in the hemisphere”.

Before being promulgated by Bush, the border protection act for the states of California, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas had already been approved in the Senate by a wide margin. According to estimates, the construction and adaptation of the wall will cost the US approximately US$ 1.2 billion. Yet the bill does not contain in itself the source of the funds for such expenditure, which might indicate that the measure is intended more as a response to the pleas of conservative Republicans, in the period preceding congressional elections, than an actual plan.

Read more in:
– La Cumbre Iberoamericana se une contra el muro entre EEUU y México
– The New Phase in Anti-Immigrant Crackdowns – The Bipartisan Border Wall
– An Apartheid Fence in America?- Fear and Loathing in the North.

Choosing Latin America’s and the Caribbean’s representatives to the UN Security Council

Additionally to the five permanent members of the UN Security Council with power of veto (USA, England, France, China and Russia), since 1965 ten other countries participate on a rotating basis. Before, there were only six. These have no power of veto and their mandate is for two years each time.

Their election is done in the General Assembly and must observe a geographic distribution that ensures five seats for Africa and Asia, one for Eastern Europe, two for Latin America and the Caribbean, and two for Western Europe. The required number of votes to be elected is a minimum of two thirds.

Thereby, the countries with a non permanent seat in 2007 will be: South Africa, Belgium, Slovakia, Ghana, Indonesia, Italy, Peru, Qatar, Congo and another one from Latin America and the Caribbean. This last vacant seat replaces that of Argentina. (Read more).

Two candidates of the continent stepped forward: Guatemala and Venezuela. The first one has the full backing of the United States and the second is supported by Brazil and other countries of the continent. Regardless of the nearly 20 voting sessions, neither country reached the two thirds of votes required, and with the support of the Group of Latin American and Caribbean Countries (GRULAC) both withdrew their candidacies. A third country, Panama, was launched as the continent’s consensus candidate, and was elected.

The US manifested its satisfaction for having prevented Venezuela, and Hugo Chávez, from being chosen, and Chávez says he barred the election of the American administration’s candidate. At any rate, politically Panama represents a progressive option because it is ruled by Martin Torrijos of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD).

A social-democrat, Torrijos was elected in 2004 running against a neoliberal candidate, although his professional background was built in private sector companies. His most important government platform is the enlargement of the Panama Canal, which is responsible for collecting almost a third of the country’s taxes.

Election of the new UN Secretary-General

The Minister of Foreign Relations of South Korea, Ban Ki-moon, was elected the next Secretary-General of the United Nations. Ban Ki-moon’s choice was made by a unanimous decision at the General Assembly in New York in mid-October, and he is scheduled to begin his five-year term next January 1.

The ceremony was opened by the president of the UN General Assembly, Sheikha Haya Al Khalifa, who requested that the rotating president of the Security Council, the ambassador of Japan, Kenzo Oshima, presented the council’s recommendation. Ban Ki-moon will be the UN’s eighth secretary-general, replacing Kofi Annan, who leaves the post in December after two terms of office.

Always described as a hardworking and harmonizing man, the South Korean has in his favor both the support of China and the US, and though the theme is not met with much enthusiasm by either country, he is a strong advocate of the International Criminal Court and of the Responsibility to Protect project of humanitarian intervention adopted by the UN early in 2005. (Read more in Responsibility to Protect).

Formally, the function of the UN Secretary-General carries little power, relying much more on the ability to persuade member states to adopt the organization’s guidelines. Ban Ki-moon will have two and a half months to prepare for the job, unlike Kofi Annan who, ten years ago, was only elected on December 17.

One of the next Secretary-General’s biggest challenges will be very near home as he will have to deal with the tensions surrounding North Korea, and the interests of the Americans, Japanese and Chinese in the issue. Read more in A tough job for Ban Ki-moon and in Look East for a New UN Leader.

US elections – promising prospects for the Democratic Party

In control of Congress since 1994, the Republican Party went as far as to influence the apportionment of electoral districts to give its incumbent congressmen an edge in the elections. However, a landslide of scandals and political losses led to a discontentment against the control exerted by the party over the House, the Senate and the Presidency. Many Republican congressmen, as Tom DeLay (Texas) and Bob Ney (Ohio), were indicted and found guilty of corruption in episodes related to lobbyist Jack Abramoff. More recently, it was discovered that Representative Mark Foley (Florida) harassed young male interns in chats over the Internet, and the investigation proved that the Republican leaders had known about his behavior since 2003 and took no measure to that effect.

The years of 2005 and 2006 revealed a series of covert, illegal programs by the US government such as telephone wirings without judicial warrants, besides what was earlier mentioned in Periscope no. 7 regarding the passage of the so-called Torture Bill legalizing unacceptable practices in prisoners’ interrogatories.

Opinion polls had numerically already been signaling to the population’s dissatisfaction with the government since 64% disapproved of President George W. Bush’s performance in the White House and 75% disapproved of Congress’s work, the lowest rating in the whole history of the United States. Read more.

The ballot on November 7 to elect the entire House of Representatives, one third of the senate and 36 state governors out of a total 50 modified the country’s political scenario. Until that date, the Republican Party had 15 seats more than the Democrats in the House and 5 more in the Senate. Now the Democrats are the majority in both houses and state governorships as shown in the table below:

* Ten seats still pending definition.
** The president of the Senate is the vice-president of the country, Dick Cheney, not computed in the table.

One of the central themes in the electoral campaign was the war in Iraq, which has already cost in excess of US$ 338 billion and the lives of almost 3,000 American soldiers. A study on mortality rates conducted by doctors of Johns Hopkins University, published in The Lancet last October, demonstrated that as a result of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, approximately 655,000 more Iraqis died when compared to pre-war mortality statistics. Read more.

About 79 million voters turned out to the ballot, which represented a 40.4% participation of those registered to vote, against 37% two years ago. A survey conducted with those who voted in Democrat candidates showed that 75% were motivated by corruption scandals involving Republicans and 60% by the war in Iraq.

In the latest Zogby poll released on October 26 only 41% approved of the decision of President Bush to keep the American troops in Iraq without any withdrawal timetable. In a poll commissioned by NBC/Wall Street Journal, on October 31, only 37% of the respondents believed the effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power had been worthwhile, while in a poll conducted by Newsweek magazine on October 23 61% of the respondents stated they would like to see the government define a date for withdrawing the troops from Iraq.

The George Bush administration is running the risk of facing a full investigation by the legislative branch after losing control over Congress. The way the White House operated, under the assumption that the president could adopt unconstitutional measures, on account of the exceptional circumstance of the war, was never questioned by the Republicans.

In the same poll commissioned by Newsweek, mentioned above, asked about what should be the priority of a congress controlled by Democrats, 51% of respondents answered that the discussion over the impeachment of George W. Bush should be given priority.

Yet, in spite of the little support for the war in Iraq and President Bush’s extra-constitutional powers, most of the Democrat candidates did not use these issues in their campaigns. Representative Nancy Pelosi, who became the Democrat leader in Congress, declared during a prime time TV interview that the impeachment of Bush was “off the table” and a “waste of time”. Representative Rahm Emmanuel, who coordinates the party’s funds for congressional elections, selected 23 candidates to support in difficult-to-win districts, 22 of them being against the withdrawal of the American troops from Iraq. Many defeated activist candidates who opposed the war in the party’s primaries.
Read more.

Yet it is not only the war that worries American voters. The war is seen as part of a flawed foreign policy not only by Democratic Party supporters but also by 43% of the Republicans, who declared they sought candidates who had a different vision of the country’s foreign policy (together with 77% of the independents and 91% of the Democrats). According to 76% of the Republicans and 85% of the Democrats, the United States should act in a more cooperative way with the rest of the world.
Read more in Time for a Global Good Neighbor Policy.

The first to pay for the poor electoral result was Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the strategist of the Iraq invasion, dismissed as the result was announced. Democrats, however, obtained a one-man slim majority in the Senate and that includes Senator Joseph Liebermann from Connecticut, who was elected as an independent candidate after he lost the Democratic Party’s nomination, to which he was affiliated, because he had supported the invasion of Iraq. There are backstage negotiations underway by George Bush to bring him to the Republican Party or alternatively appoint him to some office in the administration so that one Republican may replace him in the Senate.

One should not expect great changes in the short term since Bush will continue as president for two more years, plus the fact that internally Democrats will have to untangle their own contradictions, making it difficult for a more radical change of course to occur. There should, however be a containment of the more extreme security measures such as those implemented by Bush. It is also to be expected a scaling up of American trade protectionism, which may initially entail a refusal by Congress to renew the TPA in 2007, thereby hindering any breakthroughs in negotiations at the WTO.

The race to replace George W. Bush in the presidential office in 2008 starts as of now.

Elections in Congo

Despite some reports of disturbances in the second-round runoff election in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the country’s 25 million registered voters were able, for the first time since independence in the 1960s, to elect their president.

The first round had been held last July 30 and incumbent President Joseph Kabila received 45% of the votes, twice as many as the contestant, Vice-President Jean Pierre Bemba. The second voting will define who will exercise the leadership in a country scarred by civil wars in 1996 and in 2002.

President Kabila is expected to be elected should the first results giving him more than 60% of the votes be confirmed. He managed to make alliances with some of the first round defeated candidates. His present allies include Nzanga Mobutu, son of former chief of state Mobutu Sese Seko, ousted in 1997. Nzanga was captured by soldiers loyal to Bemba while campaigning for Kabila and later left at a UN post in a demonstration of the country’s present level of tension.

The head of the UN Peacekeeping Mission in Congo, William Swing, declared that the elections in the country are the most important in the African continent since the 1994 election in South Africa that took Mandela to power and ended with the apartheid regime.

The UN Peacekeeping Mission in the country has 17,000 troops working together with another 2,000 sent by the European Union. On Election Day, private security agents worked alongside with the peacekeeping force to guarantee security, a still worrisome issue. After the announcement of the results for the first round, Bemba and Kabila supporters clashed on several occasions leaving more than 30 people dead.

The capital city remains heavily armed, reinforced by some 5,000 soldiers of Kabila’s presidential guard and Bemba’s 600-strong group. Both sides accuse each other of having provoked the pre-electoral violence, but neither Kabila nor Bemba made public appearances after July’s ballot.

Both candidates have a background of armed conflicts. Kabila served as a rebel soldier under the command of his father, former president Laurent Kabila, who coordinated the forces that overthrew Mobutu with the help of Rwanda and Uganda. Bemba, for his part, was a rebel leader supported by Uganda in the 1998–2002 war and is also accused of war crimes for supporting a failed coup in the Central African Republic.

Peace in the Democratic Republic of Congo could bring stability to the heart of the African territory and economic development, spearheaded by the country’s wealth of natural resources. Congo has borders with nine other African countries and its wars have involved the presence of six different armies, some with eyes only to the exploration of the country’s mineral reserves, such as gold, diamonds, coltan (used in cellular phones), uranium, among others, and not to ensuring Congo’s peace.

Crisis in Darfur continues

The Sudanese government expelled Jan Pronk, the UN envoy to the country in late October, and soon after reconsidered the decision allowing him to return, but only to transmit his post to another UN diplomat.

Jan Pronk, a former Dutch minister, has served as the UN special envoy to the country since 2004 and received 72 hours to leave Sudan on allegations that he had made improper comments in his blog. The action underscores once again the non diplomatic position of President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir in relation to the UN.

The president has insistently refused to receive UN peacekeeping troops to work in the country’s western Darfur region, not heeding to appeals made by the UN and the US. The argument presented by the government of Sudan is that UN Resolution 1706 goes against the Abuja peace accords and that, therefore, it cannot be implemented.

Pronk’s work focused on pressuring Khartoum to accept the presence of the UN 20,000 peacekeeping troops that are to replace the 7,000 African Union troops.

Yet last September an American mission visited the country and since then Washington has announced that it will change its position with regard to a conflict that as yet has killed more than 200,000 people. The speech is that now the US won’t pressure Sudan to accept the UN troops but will seek an alternative way to solve the conflict.

The new US position may have some connection with the announcement of new deals between Sudan and China in the gold and iron ore mining industries, further strengthening the two countries’ ties after the signing recently of oil contracts.

China and Africa strengthening their ties

This year the Chinese people celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations with the first African country, Egypt, in 1956 during the Gamal Abdel Nasser government.

Way back during the cold war and the decolonization of Africa, China had already sought to strengthen its relations with several countries of the continent, mainly for political rather than economic reasons, but not without some contradictions. For example, in the 1970s, while the Soviet Union backed the ZANU, a guerrilla group led by Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, China supported another group, the ZAPU, led by Holden Roberto. Later on, while the whites surrendered the government to the black majority, the two organizations merged but, today, with Mugabe still retaining the power, the two countries are much closer.

Several other countries like Tanzania and Zambia also enjoyed some form of Chinese support after their independence. Over these fifty years, some 18,000 Africans from more than 50 different nationalities have studied in China, and about 16,000 doctors, engineers, technicians and military personnel have worked in various African countries.

Today, trade imperatives also have weight and the Chinese, pragmatically, have sought allies among those countries where the American and European presence is less felt, as in Sudan, Angola, Zimbabwe, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and Nigeria, targeting the acquisition of raw materials and energy inputs, although the relation currently underway in South Africa included in the past a range of manufactured goods.

Angola and Equatorial Guinea sell approximately one third of their oil production to China. In 2005, Africa exported approximately US$ 17 billion to China, with imports of nearly US$ 15 billion, this trade flow having grown 38% when compared with the year before, and is bound to keep growing.

New Internet control rules

The American government announced that as of 2009 it will give full autonomy to an American non-governmental organization to manage the Internet domains, though actually the organization will continue to be the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is based in California and was created by the US Department of Trade in 1988.

The difference is that the Department until recently kept rigorous surveillance of the decisions taken by ICANN and is now committed to a lighter regime over the next three years. This is the outcome of an agreement signed in October. From now on ICANN will have to report to American authorities and the entire Internet community as well. Before, reports were only submitted to the US government on a six-monthly basis.

The new three-year agreement that may be revised after half its duration includes a clause establishing that the Department of Trade will hold regular meetings with ICANN’s senior management in order to evaluate progress, unlike the previous process in which ICANN reported directly to the government.

The European Commission has a special interest in the issue and was responsible for divulging this new model. The European Union always questioned the American control over the Internet management, in particular the attitude of the Bush administration to impede the creation of a “.XXX” dominion for online pornography use.

The proposal does not meet the demands of Brazil, India, Iran and other countries that the UN should take over the control of the Internet, but at least opens up the possibility for an middle-of-the-road “cooperation model”, advocated by the European countries, which would allow for greater transparency, besides attributing greater responsibility to ICANN. Read more.

New protests in France’s suburbs

Toward the end of October, practically one year after the riots that shook the outskirts of Paris involving young unemployed immigrants, new incidents resurfaced with so far six urban buses being torched.

Though without the same dimension of last year’s riots when some 100 cars were burned every night, the situation is still serious, particularly the incident involving a bus in Marseille torched while its passengers were still inside. A 26-year-old woman suffered second and third degree burns on 60% of her body.

In the first semester of this year, the government managed to pass some legislative measures designed to promote equal opportunities and to invest additional resources in an attempt to tackle with the problem of unemployment and the lack of activity that affect mainly young immigrants living in the poor outskirts of the French metropolises. However, in the opinion of specialists, these measures are insufficient to meet the full dimension of the problem and in the opinion of some residents there has been no change whatsoever.

Unfortunately, a lack of structural solutions ends up increasing xenophobia, while the ultra-right’s presidential candidate, Le Pen, reaches 18% in the polls for the 2007 presidential elections.

French Socialist Party holds primary to define presidential candidate

With the withdrawal of Lionel Jospin’s candidacy, three names are racing for the party’s nomination: Ségolène Royal, Dominique Strauss Kahn and Laurent Fabius. Ségolène is the incumbent governor of the Poitou–Western Charentes, Strauss Kahn was a minister of finance and Fabius was prime minister during the Mitterrand government.

After a series of internal debates, support for Ségolène has dropped considerably, while her adversaries accuse her of seeking the nomination through a series of right wing populist proposals.

According to a poll conducted by the CSA Polling Institute, today she would have 57% of the preferences of the 200,000 members of the Socialist Party, against 23% of Strauss Kahn and 10% of Fabius. However, according to this very same institute, she came to have a 72-percent support and, therefore, the holding of a second round involving the two most voted candidates is not discarded. The first round will occur on November 16 and, if there is a second round, it will be on the 23.

The candidate chosen will probably have to face the center-right candidacy of Nicolas Sarkozy, the incumbent minister of the interior of the Chirac government, and the previously mentioned extreme right candidacy of Le Pen for the National Party.

News from the Middle East

After the military adventure in Lebanon, the present Israeli government has definitely abandoned any prospect of adopting a more centrist policy. With his popularity sinking, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of the Kadima Party invited the ultra right party Yisrael Beiteinu (“Israel Our Home”) led by Avigdor Lieberman to join the governmental coalition.

This party will add 11 members of parliament to the coalition which will, thus, have a majority of 78 MPs of a total 120 in Parliament. Lieberman, however, has become known for defending the expulsion of Arab citizens living in Israel and the sentencing to death of anyone willing to negotiate with the Palestinian Hamas or the Lebanese Hezbollah. The Labor Party, which opposed the alliance at first, now seems to have resigned itself.

While Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is striving to set up a coalition government between the Al Fattah and the Hamas that will give him more moderation and governability to dialog with the US and the European Union, and hopefully bring back international aid, the Israeli government becomes more radical, and an alliance with Lieberman will only throw more fuel in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Even so, a preliminary agreement between Palestinians was announced.

Indeed, since June, more than 300 Palestinians, mostly civilians, were killed in military actions by Israel in the Gaza Strip and the likelihood of Israel withdrawing its troops from the West Bank seems increasingly more remote, especially in light of the international community’s omission. The latest tragic incident reported was the opening of fire by Israeli soldiers on a group of Palestinian women who were trying to embrace a mosque, killing many of them.

In Iraq, the situation is converging toward the scenario we had predicted in previous Periscope editions. The country is presently experiencing a process of division staged by Kurds, Shiahs, Sunnis and Christians, in which the two first will occupy better and richer-in-oil territories, while the others will be confined to localities with hardly any prospects of development.

Meanwhile, the civil war escalates with, on average, a daily toll of 50 Iraqis dead, and the number of American troops killed exceeding 3,000. Unless deep changes are made in the American policy, there are no short term prospects of solving the conflict. And this at the exact moment that the ad hoc court that is trying Saddam Hussein ruled his death sentence for the massacre of a Kurd community. The date his conviction was announced was probably chosen to favor those Americans supporting the intervention in the US mid-term elections. Read more.

New Prime Minister in Japan

The Japanese parliament elected, late last September, Shinzo Abe to substitute Junichiro Koizumi as the country’s prime minister. Abe is part of a new wave of Japanese nationalist politicians and was elected by a wide majority of legislators, mostly members of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and his coalition party, Komeito.

At the age of 52, Abe is the youngest Japanese prime minister since World War II, and occupies the office pledging to strengthen Japan’s military alliance with the US and to promote a quality leap in the country’s relations with China, plus dealing with the nuclear threat represented by North Korea.

However, tensions with China will rise should the newly elected prime minister insist on fulfilling a campaign pledge to rewrite the Japanese constitution in order to allow the country to rearm itself and to send troops to other countries to defend allies such as the US. Abe also strongly advocates that patriotism should be taught in Japanese schools.

Though these issues are gaining momentum, the life of his administration will depend more on how he handles economic issues. Abe must decide if he will raise interest rates or reduce spending in order to reduce Japan’s huge public debt. He must also find a way to deal with the pro-market reforms captained by Koizumi at a moment when the Japanese are questioning themselves about an increase in social inequality stemming from these measures.

Nuclear test in North Korea

In the month of October North Korea detonated an underground, low-intensity nuclear artifact and became a member of the “Nuclear Club”, not without being pressured from all sides, including China, one of the few allies the country has.

The UN Security Council unanimously approved a series of economic and political sanctions against North Korea, which will tend to worsen the situation of a country that is poor, though technologically capable as proved by the explosion.

Even though it managed to detonate an atomic bomb, there is still doubt as to whether October’s experiment was a complete or partial success. At any rate, the sanctions adopted and the diplomatic negotiations that were reinitiated aim to prevent new explosions, for the nuclear technology that North Korea masters and the country’s ultimate capability to adapt that technology to the ballistic means it possesses will altogether imbalance the region’s correlation of military forces.

This imbalance will increase American presence in the region and stimulate Japan to rearm itself with the economic means this country certainly has. Should that happen, China will most certainly increase its military capacity and South Korea will try to equal North Korea’s power. In other words, the powder keg will become even more dangerous.

Sure that regardless of all this there is a valid discussion over the reasons why certain countries have the right to possess nuclear weapons while others do not. Still there is yet another valid discussion involving international security and the dangers of an arms race. Such a debate cannot, evidently, be limited to this news story.

Read more in As Coréias sob pressão and U.N. Security Council Edicts Challenged.

The social movement’s calendar for the next months

During the upcoming months of December and January three very important activities organized by the social movement will take place. Two of them are concomitant with governmental activities, as in the case of the Cochabamba Social Summit simultaneously with the South American Community of Nations meeting, and of the Mercosur Social Summit to be held during the Mercosur Presidential Meeting in Brasília. The third event is the seventh edition of the World Social Forum that will occur in Nairobi, Kenya.

The Cochabamba Summit is being organized around a four-level strategy:
1- Reaffirming the resistance fights underway in the continent against neoliberalism in their diverse forms of expression;
2- Advancing in the debate and the building of the Alternatives to the Americas in general and integration in particular;
3- Developing strategies to pressure and alter the process of the South American Community of Nations;
4- Strengthening the building and networking of our own movement.
The “Cumbre” will occur on December 6–9 in the city of Cochabamba, Bolivia. It will be multidisciplinary and will focus on 11 themes besides the self-managed activities. Such themes are: Energy; Funding; Institutionality and Asymmetries; Defense and Militarization; Migrations and Citizenship; Infrastructure; Social Rights and Work; Food Sovereignty; Biodiversity; Water, intellectual property; Trade; Indigenous Peoples; Justice and Impunity.

Charged with the organization of the “Cumbre”, the Hemispheric Social Alliance is a network of social organizations and NGOs that was structured in 1997 to fight against the FTAA when the governments negotiating at the time held the third foreign trade ministerial conference in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Several other Bolivian organizations also participate in this effort. Read more at www.asc-hsa.org.

The Mercosur Social Forum will occur on December 13–15 in Brasilia, the second time there is a wide-ranging spectrum of social movements. Traditionally since the founding of the Mercosur it was basically the social movement that tried to influence the process through the Coordination of the Southern Cone Trade Union Central Bodies.

Given the fact that this meeting will be held in Brazil, the Brazilian government adopted initiatives to facilitate the participation and interlocution of the social movement in relation to the Mercosur, since without social participation there will be no integration in the magnitude desired.

The Summit will also work on the basis of thematic working groups addressing the following themes: Family Farming; Land Reform, Cooperatives, Solidarity Economics and Food Security; Women, Race and Ethnicity; Culture, Youth, Communication, Education; Employment, Migrations, Human Rights and Small and Medium Enterprises; Environment, Natural Resources, Water, Infrastructure and Energy; Free Trade Agreements, Integration and Development and Investment Models; Citizen Participation and Mercosur Institutions; Health; and lastly, the Mercosur Parliament.

The objectives pursued by the organizers are: broadening and consolidating the “SOMOS MERCOSUL” program; stimulating and broadening social participation; promoting a supranational identity of the regional citizenry; systematizing and giving visibility to the socio-environmental agenda of the Mercosur; promoting the political, productive and cultural Mercosur; influencing the Mercosur’s political agenda; and informing and building the capacity of the regional citizenry.
The organizers are various Brazilian social organizations, some with international ramifications, among which we may mention ABONG, REBRIP, CCSCS, World March of Women, CONTAG, COPROFAM, ORIT, UNE, and the Association of Black Women NGOs. Read more.

The 2007 World Social Forum will be held on January 20–25 in the city of Nairobi in Kenya. After a world consultation on actions, campaigns and struggles in preparation to the event, nine thematic terrains were defined around which will be organized the activities proposed by the organizations taking part in the WSF. These are:

1. Building a world of peace, justice, ethics and respect for diverse spiritualities;

2. Liberating the world from the domination of multinational and financial capital;

3. Ensuring universal and sustainable access to the common goods of humanity and nature;

4. Democratization of knowledge and information;

5. Ensuring dignity, defending diversity, guaranteeing gender equality and eliminating all forms of discrimination;

6. Ensuring economic, social, human and cultural rights, especially the right to food, healthcare, education and decent work;

7. Building a world order based on sovereignty, self-determination and rights of peoples;

8. Constructing a people-centered and sustainable economy;

9. Building real democratic political structures and institutions with full people’s participation on decisions and control of public affairs and resources;

Registrations for the WSF self-managed activities are already open, as well as for those only willing to watch. Read more.