Americas view

AFTER being trapped for hours in a hospital during a police mutiny last September, Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s president, bet much of his political capital on an attempt to shore up his power through a constitutional referendum. On May 7th, he put to voters a package of ten amendments that would allow him to increase his control over the courts and media. The early results suggested a split decision, with most of the proposals narrowly passing but two key measures falling short. However, towards the end of the drawn-out vote-counting process, the Yes camp pulled ahead on both questions. Its lead held up: the National Electoral Council (CNE) announced on May 19th that all nine amendments put to a national vote had been approved, albeit mostly by very slim margins. (The final question, on whether to ban killing animals for public entertainment, was settled at the local level).

The opposition has cried fraud, and filed hundreds of legal appeals. Its leaders have honed in on low-income neighbourhoods in Guayaquil, the country’s biggest city, as the likely site of the government’s mischief. Many polling stations there reported more than the maximum of 400 voters. Electoral officials have argued the numbers were caused by high turnout from the police and army. But Martha Roldós, an opposition leader, notes that the rolls from those locations include high numbers of women. Even one of the CNE’s directors, Marcia Caicedo, has accused her colleagues of favouring the government and dragging its feet on the opposition’s complaints. Mr Correa’s rivals say they hope their appeals will at least delay the publication of the official results of the referendum and the implementation of its most controversial measures.

The president, by contrast, has focused on locking in his tenuous gains, touting the outcome as a “ten to zero” landslide. The referendum’s changes to the judiciary will automatically take effect as soon as the CNE releases its final results. But legislative approval is required for its provisions on regulating the media, outlawing “unjustified” wealth, closing for-profit gambling operations and criminalising employers’ failure to register their workers with the social-security service.

The referendum stipulates that those bills be passed “without delay.” However, it is unclear whether Mr Correa, who lacks a congressional majority, can force lawmakers to vote for them. Although he has the right to dissolve Congress, doing so would require him to stand for re-election as well—a highly unpopular move in a country that has had to vote every seven months on average since November 2006. Instead, he is threatening to try to have legislators who vote against the package dismissed for dereliction of duty—a tactic he used successfully in 2007 against lawmakers who opposed a referendum on a new constitution—and to have the Constitutional Court write the laws itself. There is little hope of legislative compromise: the president recently said he would refuse to negotiate with groups seeking the “submission” of the government, and has vetoed such deals in the past. He has enough support in congress to block any attempt to override his veto.

No matter how many of the referendum’s measures are approved, Mr Correa’s bid to use it to strengthen his political position has come up short. Just one of the ten questions got over 50% support; given the numbers of blank or spoiled votes, the rest merely obtained a plurality. And although he remains broadly popular, his approval ratings have been in steady decline this year. If the populist president really wants to firm up his hold on power, he will need to campaign less and govern more effectively.

AS NOTED in last week’s print edition, Brazil’s long-impoverished north-east is catching up fast to the rest of the country. Infrastructure projects like ports and railways, as well as scores of new factories, are going up across the region. Yet no matter how much physical capital the north-east can accumulate, in the end its prosperity will depend on its human capital. And when it comes to education and training, notes Alexandre Rands of Datamétrica, a consultancy, a “crystallised gap” still yawns between the north-east and the rich south. Around one-fifth of the region’s adults are illiterate, twice the proportion in Brazil at large.

The lot of poor nordestinos (north-easterners) has certainly improved over the last two decades. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Brazil’s president from 1995 to 2002, conquered the hyperinflation that hit their income hardest. His successor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, built on Mr Cardoso’s income-transfer programmes and increased the minimum wage. Nearly six in ten of working-age nordestinos with an income earn no more than the minimum wage—more than twice the proportion in the south-east.

At one mega-construction site in the town of Salgueiro, where two branches of a railway leading to the ports are being built, the least-qualified employees earn around 600 reais ($375) a month on top of their living costs, and sleep four to a prefabricated room. Nonetheless, the rooms are air-conditioned, neat and comfortable. Nearby are shared television rooms and games rooms with pool tables and subutteo. A film is shown every night and at weekends there are religious services.

In education, however, the gains have been more halting. State governments are making an effort. Ceará has already opened 130 professional and technical schools, and has 100 more in the pipeline. The idea is that high-school students will attend classes in the morning as normal and then spend the afternoon learning a trade. If you travel around the interior of Ceará, says Adail Fontenele, its infrastructure secretary, in many towns the nicest building you see will be its new professional school. The state government is also building a Centre for Technical Training at Pecém that is scheduled to open in 2013, and will eventually graduate 12,000 workers a year.

There is so much work to be done, however, that the private sector is trying to fill in the gaps itself. Vale, a big mining firm, runs one programme that takes on 1,200 high-school graduates each year and gives them a year of full-time training: three months of basics, mostly mathematics and Portuguese, and then more job-specific technical preparation. Although there were 50,000 applicants last year, many did not fulfil the basic requirements. In the end the company had to look outside the two states where these employees would be working, Pará and Maranhão, to fill the slots. Another Vale scheme sponsors 170 high-school students each year to go to private school in the morning and technical college in the afternoon. These well-trained young people will end up benefitting the company, either directly if they end up working for it or one of its partners or suppliers, or indirectly, simply by increasing the pool of well-qualified labour. Vale’s regular workers also double as instructors. Americo (nicknamed Capitão—Captain, naturally), who sat in a crane cabin 25 years ago but now operates two machines remotely from an air-conditioned room, supervises 40 trainees a year on the use of the equipment.

The region’s younger workers are also trying to make up for the deficiencies of their schooling and move up a rung in life themselves. Over and over again during my week in the north-east I heard plans to participate in cursinhos, or “short courses”, from everyone from construction workers to drivers to hotel staff. Erica, a civil engineer in charge of quality control at Petrobras, the state-controlled oil company, has been working since age 16, but is on her first job in booming Pernambuco state. Asked about her future, she laughs and says: “I’m at the top now!”, and then tells me that there are two things she wants me to know: that she is proud to be a woman in this job, and proud to be a north-easterner.

Nordestinos are on average poorer, blacker and less educated than natives of the south-east, and prejudice against them is commonplace. One acquaintance in São Paulo to whom I said I had heard that nordestinos were starting to return home because the economy was doing so well up there exclaimed: “Go! Go! Good riddance to them!” Well, they are going—and I feel happy for them and privileged to have witnessed it.

FOR the nearly 4m people that Colombia’s judiciary has officially recognised as victims of right-wing paramilitaries, leftist guerrillas and rogue government forces, there was never any doubt that the country has long been mired in an armed internal conflict. However, Álvaro Uribe, the president from 2002-10, staunchly refused to apply that label to the fighting in Colombia. Instead, he insisted that the country only faced a “terrorist threat”.

His defence minister and successor, Juan Manuel Santos, is proving to be more open-minded. On May 24th the Senate passed a government-sponsored bill recognising the existence of an armed conflict in Colombia and offering compensation and reparations to those who have lost land, lives and limbs in the war since 1985. “There has been an armed conflict in this country for some time,” Mr Santos said, hailing the law as “historic”.

The law calls for returning or granting land titles to the millions of internally displaced people who were forced off an estimated 6.6m hectares (16.3m acres) during the fighting, and offers monetary compensation for those who lost loved ones. It is carefully phrased to avoid giving any recognition or legitimacy to the FARC. But to Mr Uribe’s dismay, its classification of the victims of the conflict—distinguishing them from those of common criminals—includes those targeted by state actors. During Mr Uribe’s presidency, some army units gruesomely shot innocent civilians and dressed their corpses in guerrilla uniforms to inflate their body counts.

But Colombians who have always known there was an armed conflict also know it is not over. Although Mr Uribe’s tough security policies crippled the FARC, the guerrillas still have about 8,000 members and retain their ability to conduct attacks. Earlier this week they opened fire on a boat in the remote department of Chocó, killing three civilians and trapping more than 200.

Mindful of the ongoing threat, on the same day that the victims law was approved, Rodrigo Rivera, the defence minister, unveiled an ambitious new security plan to break up criminal gangs, finish off the guerrillas and reduce drug trafficking by the end of Mr Santos’ term in 2014. Just in case, however, the law will accept new victims until 2021.

THE ever-increasing body count in Mexico’s drug war has focused Americans’ attention on the gangs south of the border. When it comes to shipments of ecstasy, however, they are looking in the wrong direction. Because the drug is a synthetic compound that can be manufactured anywhere, Latin America’s warm climate does not provide the same advantage that it does for cocaine or opiates. Instead, it is Canada that has an edge, because its large population of Asian immigrants gives its organised-crime groups easy access to Chinese suppliers of ecstasy’s precursor chemicals. In the year to October 2010 American customs officers seized 1,460 pounds (662 kg) of ecstasy at the northern border, and just 24 pounds at the southern one.

Stemming the flow of ecstasy—which sells for two to three times more in the United States than in Canada—along an 8,891-km (5,525-mile) border has proven to be extremely difficult. The frontier, long called the world’s longest undefended border—although it has recently been rechristened as unmilitarised—runs through vast tracks of wilderness, over mountains, through the middle of the Great Lakes, and down the main streets of some small towns. Moreover, because Canada and America are each other’s biggest trading partner, a balance must be found between securing the border and impeding the 35m vehicles that cross each year.

The United States beefed up its border controls after the September 11th attacks. Although its measures were principally aimed at fighting terrorism, they have made life more difficult for traffickers as well. It increased the number of customs agents along the Canadian frontier from 300 to 2200 and brought in new technology, including Predator drones and surveillance balloons in the air, and thermal imaging cameras and remote video-surveillance systems on the ground. It has also sought greater cross-border cooperation: Canada recently agreed to give the United States 22 additional radar feeds to help detect smugglers crossing over on low-altitude flights. Alan Bersin, the commissioner of America’s Customs and Border Protection agency, told a Congressional committee on May 17th that information-sharing with Canada had increased significantly. It is likely to improve further under the agreement signed in February by Barack Obama and Stephen Harper, Canada’s prime minister, to explore deeper continental security ties, and as a result of a law passed in January requiring America’s government to produce a “Northern Border Counternarcotics Strategy”.

Yet while the United States may be clamping down at the 122 land border crossings with Canada, patrolling the gaps between them remains difficult. Traffickers in Quebec ride snowmobiles in winter and all-terrain vehicles in summer, while those in British Columbia make use of helicopters and boats. Indian reservations that straddle the border, allowing residents to pass freely into either country, are particularly porous: American authorities estimate that 20% of all high-potency marijuana smuggled from Canada passes through New York’s St. Regis Mohawk Reservation, which is known as the Akwesasne Reserve on the Canadian side. The more America tries to crack down, the more ingenious the smugglers become.

“I AM confiscating your driving licence. You can collect it at the police station on Monday, but you will have to wait all day, maybe longer. Shall we settle the matter here?” Your correspondent is by no means the only person to have been approached for a bribe in Mexico (he declined). Households paid around 200m backhanders to companies and public officials last year, according to a report published on May 10th by the Mexican branch of Transparency International, an anti-corruption outfit, which we have plotted as a map (above) in this week’s print edition. At 165 pesos ($14.10) per bribe, officials are charging 20% more for their corrupt services than they did in 2007.

The survey quizzed 15,000 homes on whether they had paid bribes in the course of completing 35 tasks, from installing a phone line (2% had) to running a street stall (23% had). Mexico is only averagely corrupt by Latin American standards. But corruption varied widely by state: if stopped by traffic police in Tamaulipas, nine times out of ten motorists were expected to cough up; in Quintana Roo, “only” a quarter of such stops result in palms being greased. Overall, the most corrupt places were Mexico City and the adjacent state of Mexico, whereas the cleanest was the peninsular state of Baja California Sur.

Not coincidentally, they are respectively the most- and least-densely populated parts of the country. Eduardo Bohórquez, head of Transparency’s Mexico office, reasons that in over-populated places there is excess demand for public services, which allows officials to auction off the scarce resources they manage. The poor are especially likely to be targeted for demands for bribes and acquiesce to them, he says.

It is not all bad news. Since Transparency’s first survey in 2001, it has become easier to access government aid programmes without having to pay people off, which Mr Bohórquez believes reflects a strengthening of the country’s democracy. The postal service and electricity market are cleaner, thanks to reforms in both sectors. Most federally-run programmes have been getting less corrupt. The mixed performance of the states has no obvious link to which party runs them.

But overall, things are little better than they were a decade ago. Traffic police, the worst offenders, have got even greedier. Hospitals are more open to speeding up appointments with a little financial encouragement; more school certificates are being bought than before. Justice is still for sale: nearly a quarter of those who had dealt with state prosecutors said they had paid to influence their case. Transparency reckons that the public paid some 32 billion pesos in bribes last year. As long as policemen and judges are for sale, the cost to society will run much deeper.

MICHEL MARTELLY, a bawdy singer turned politician, swept to victory in Haiti’s presidential election this year as the candidate representing youth and change. “Haiti has been sleeping,” he shouted at his inauguration on May 14th, addressing a crowd of dignitaries including Bill Clinton; various Haitian leaders; and, outside the palace gates, a few thousand ordinary Haitians crammed together under a blistering sun. “Today she will wake up, stand up!” It was only the third peaceful democratic transition in the country’s history, which is replete with coups, interim governments and dictatorships. And it was the first time ever that a democratically elected Haitian president fitted the red-and-blue presidential sash on a successor from the opposition.

Yet the day’s festive spirit—fuelled by expenditures estimated between $2m and $4.5m—was tempered with reminders of how little progress has been made since a devastating earthquake struck Haiti in January 2010. Mr Martelly’s inaugural mass was held at the National Palace, which looks much as it did the day after the quake: a jumble of collapsed roofs, deflated domes, and splayed windows revealing dusty office furniture. Some of the tent cities housing the more than 600,000 Haitians who still have not found new homes after the quake were visible from the palace lawn. And just as Mr Martelly prepared to take the presidential oath at the temporary Parliament building, the power went out. Some Haitians saw the outage as an ill omen, while others accused the opposition-dominated legislature of trickery.

Mr Martelly addressed many of the country’s woes, including both the slow pace of rebuilding and the country’s longstanding poverty, unemployment and poor infrastructure. He said he would emphasise security, court investments, help to expand the middle class and make education free and universal—an oft-repeated campaign promise that won wild cheers. He also pledged to fight to make primary education compulsory.

Many other leaders have made similar vows. But Mr Martelly actually has a reasonable plan to start paying for his education plans: by taxing the Haitian diaspora. He hopes to raise the cost of calls to Haiti from the United States by $0.05 per minute, and levy a $1 flat charge on remittances, which account for $1.8 billion a year—a quarter of Haiti’s GDP. Those levies would raise $86m per year, according to his aides. With taxation also comes representation: last week Parliament amended the constitution to allow the 2m-4m members of the diaspora to vote and hold lower political office. Getting the proposal through the opposition-controlled legislature will be a stiff test for the president, a political novice.

Mr Martelly’s biggest strength is his popularity. Although turnout was low, at just 23% in the run-off, he won by an overwhelming margin. In the days preceding the inauguration, the rubble-choked streets were strung with banners and streamers, and the walls filled with murals of Mr Martelly’s smiling face and shiny pate. One was captioned “Bienvenue au Pouvoir, President Martelly!” And Godspeed, too.

MEXICO'S schools are among the best in Latin America. Sadly that is rather faint praise, as a powerful teachers' union and an inefficient bureaucracy have kept the country's education system ranked last among its OECD peers. The current issue of The Economist recounts how greater parental involvement is helping the next generation to learn. It also reports from the close count in Ecuador's constitutional referendum, looks at the tension between conservation and development in Canada's boreal forest and reviews the expansion into India of Cinépolis, a Mexican cinema company.

FOLLOWING the crushing defeat of Canada's Liberal Party in the country's recent federal election, many political strategists have urged the proud centrist party to merge with the leftist New Democrats, who replaced the Liberals as the official opposition. The Economist's readers, however, oppose this recommendation: 58% of them said the Liberals should remain an independent party.

This week's question addresses Ecuador's May 7th referendum on constitutional reform, whose result will be announced on May 17th. The president, Rafael Correa, has said it is crucial for the advance of his socialist "revolution", but critics warn it will give him a dangerous amount of power. How would you have voted? Let us know.

CUBA’S recent crackdown on corruption has just claimed its most prominent victim. On May 5th Granma, the state newspaper, announced that a court had given a 20-year sentence in absentia to Max Marambio, a Chilean businessman and sometime close friend of Fidel Castro. Mr Marambio made a fortune through a stake in Rio Zaza, which has long held a near-monopoly selling fruit juice and long-life milk on the island. The report did not spell out the specifics of the conviction, but said said that Mr Marambio and Alejandro Roca Iglesias, the former food minister, had caused “considerable damage to the nation’s economy” and “impaired the ethical behaviour of various officials and subordinate workers”.

Mr Marambio was once the chief bodyguard for Salvador Allende, Chile’s socialist president. He accepted Fidel Castro’s invitation to take refuge in Cuba after Allende was toppled and died in a 1973 coup. The two men got on. In the 1990s he reinvented himself as a businessman, and was one of the first individuals allowed to form a joint enterprise with the Cuban government.

In 2006 Mr Castro fell ill and handed the country’s day-to-day leadership to his brother Raúl. Two years later Raúl formally became president, and promptly began attacking Cuba’s endemic corruption. In 2009 he started sending officials to inspect the books at the country’s state companies. Soon several executives—all of whom supposedly earn a state salary of around $20 a month—were jailed or placed under house arrest. Rogelio Acevedo, who fought alongside the Castro brothers in the 1959 revolution and was thought to be incorruptible, was sacked as head of the aviation regulator following allegations that he had leased the state airline’s planes off the books, and that millions of dollars in cash were found at his home. Pedro Álvarez, who for many years headed the government agency that buys food from the United States, fled the island before an investigation against him was completed, and is currently believed to be living in Florida. The former CEO of the national cigar producer and several of its senior executives are in prison.

Despite Mr Marambio’s ties to the elder Mr Castro, his turn was bound to come. The government accused Rio Zaza of bribing staff and ministry officials, taking a lax attitude towards theft and overcharging the Cuban government for payments to its suppliers—some owned by Mr Marambio. He has not been seen on the island since 2009, and refused to comply with the government’s order for him to return last year, telling a Chilean radio station that “there's a new government in power made up of people with few ethics and scruples” and that he was “being persecuted by a bunch of thugs". He did not send a lawyer to represent him at the trial. The Cuban authorities instead provided him with one of their own, making the verdict a foregone conclusion.

For the president, an even harder task than rooting out corruption may be replacing the crooked officials he ousts. So far, Mr Castro has mainly drawn on his former colleagues in the Cuban army. GAE.SA, a holding company that functions as the military’s business arm, has been a prime beneficiary, and is now thought to control around 40% of the country’s economy. Its president, Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja—who is also Raúl Castro’s son-in-law—was appointed to the Communist Party's Central Committee at the recent party congress. Whereas Fidel Castro would occasionally trust somewhat maverick businessmen, General Raúl Castro is sticking to what he knows.

HONDURAS has been struggling to end its political limbo since its president, Manuel Zelaya, was ousted in a coup backed by the courts and legislature in 2009. Despite holding reasonably free and fair elections later that year, the country remains barred from the Organisation of American States (OAS), an important regional talking shop. Porfirio Lobo, the new president, has decent approval ratings at home but cannot settle into the job while his government is unrecognised by many Latin American countries. Mr Zelaya remains in exile in the Dominican Republic.

On May 2nd Honduras took what may be an important step in the road to rehabilitation. A court decided to drop the last of the charges that were levelled against Mr Zelaya following his removal. Some, relating to his alleged attempt to prolong his time in office, had already been ditched; the latest and final ones to be dropped concerned straightforward corruption. Prosecutors will appeal the decision, but if the court’s ruling stands, a major obstacle has been overcome. The head of the OAS, José Miguel Insulza, said in a statement that “the main condition for readmitting Honduras has therefore been fulfilled.”

Later this month another landmark will be reached, when a truth commission publishes its delayed report into what happened on the morning in 2009 when the president was bundled out of his home in his pyjamas. Though Mr Zelaya has refused to co-operate with the commission, labelling it a stitch-up, I’m reliably told that its report will find that the events of June 28th did indeed constitute an illegal coup d’etat. Free of charges and partially vindicated by the truth commission, would Mr Zelaya make his return?

Not necessarily. For a long time, Mr Zelaya’s position was that he would not re-enter Honduras as long as he risked arrest for the various charges against him (now lifted), which he has always claimed were politically motivated. But as it became more likely that those charges would be dropped, Mr Zelaya changed his position slightly: in an interview in March, he seemed to imply that he would not return under any circumstances, claiming that “there are people who want to liquidate me and are still alive, and they have great power.” He has yet to respond to the court’s decision to drop the remaining charges against him.

Were Mr Zelaya to return to Honduras, it might unite the opposition movement, which has so far been badly split. But coming back down to earth in Tegucigalpa, the capital, would also force Mr Zelaya to engage with the day-to-day politics of the country, which is grappling with a weak economy and an appalling crime wave, among other problems. While in office, he did not always show much aptitude, or even interest, in tackling such issues. A withering, leaked assessment by the United States ambassador—who opposed the coup—stated that Mr Zelaya’s aim was “to enrich himself and his family while leaving a public legacy as a martyr who tried to do good but was thwarted at every turn by powerful, unnamed interests.” If a comfortable life as a martyr really is all that Mr Zelaya seeks, it may be some time yet before he stirs from his Dominican beach.

BRAZIL has deployed a host of measures to stop inflows of foreign capital from strengthening its currency. The Economist's readers think those efforts are misplaced: 71% of them said the country should welcome such investments.

On May 2nd, Canada's leftist New Democrats surged past the centrist, long-ruling Liberal Party in a federal election to become the official opposition to the Conservative government. Do you think the two parties are better off merging or continuing separately? Let us know.

ON MAY 2nd Conservatives are poised to win Canada's general election. This week's print edition looks at how the rise of one left-leaning party may split the centre-left vote more evenly and, ironically, provide Stephen Harper, the Conservative leader, with the parliamentary majority that has eluded him ever since he became prime minister in 2006. It also looks at a fraud scandal in Cuba's cigar industry, the threat posed to Colombia's new government by criminal gangs led by former paramilitaries, and Mexico's unebbing drug-related violence.