Fujimori guilty

Washington, DC, April 7, 2009 – As a special tribunal in Peru pronounced former president Alberto Fujimori guilty of human rights atrocities, the National Security Archive today posted key declassified U.S. documents that were submitted as evidence in the court proceedings. The declassified records contain intelligence gathered by U.S. officials from Peruvian sources on the secret creation of “assassination teams” as part of Fujimori’s counterterrorism operations, the role of the Peruvian security forces in human rights atrocities and Fujimori’s participation in protecting the military from investigation.

Cocaine Trade Helps Rebels Reignite War in Peru

Police officers arrested a man who was caught transporting 2.3 kilograms of cocaine, which was hidden inside an electrical transformer.

Photographs Inside Peru’s Cocaine War

Latin America and Caribbean see Obama's win

An article in the Miami Herald discusses reations in Latin America and the Caribbean to Obama's election.


Trinidad & Tobago's Guardian


















Lima's Correo

Mysterious Machu Picchu

A magnificent place, the lost city of the Incas. A slide show accompanies the article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on 1 November 2008.

McCain, the Media, Money, and Montesinos (and Obama Too)

Fascinating analysis of money in politics. And of money and politics.

So Barack Obama continues to raise millions upon millions of dollars, and if he wins the election a lot of people will certainly attribute his victory, at least in significant part, to this money. But should they?

It seems obvious that money wins elections.

What really matters for a political candidate is not how much you spend; what matters is who you are.

The money Obama is spending is staggering: $160 million on TV ads, easily dwarfing every other expenditure. Staff salaries, for instance, were $44 million; campaign events cost $16 million. And $21 million on TV in the first week of October alone, and is buying up prime-time network space at the end of October to run a 30-minute infomercial.

That is a lot of money. But our argument is that money is more a symptom of a winning campaign than a cause.

How so?

In other words: it’s not that raising a lot of money helps a candidate become more appealing and therefore do better; it’s that better candidates raise a lot of money because they are so appealing. Just remember: about a year ago, Mitt Romney was loaded and John McCain was just about broke. If money is so central to elections, why couldn’t Romney put McCain away? And how on earth did McCain end up winning the G.O.P. nomination?

That's convincing: Romney was supposed, by some, to be a shoo-in, or a favorite, because he had business savvy, a pretty family, a solid record. But he tanked.

So what is the right way to think about the relationship between money, the media, and campaign outcomes? Is it wise for Obama to spend so much on media? Is it wise for McCain to risk alienation of the media? Would all that money and energy be better spent on something else? There may be some wisdom to be gleaned from a strange incident in the not-too-distant past in Peru. A few years ago, the economists John McMillan and Pablo Zoido wrote a fantastically interesting paper about Vladimiro Montesinos, who ran the Peruvian secret service under President Alberto Fujimori.

I well remember Fujimori. Late in his presidency, and after he fell, Montesinos emerged as a sleazeball. Fuji's sleazeball.

Of the four main categories of bribe beneficiaries — police, judges, politicians, media owners — whom do you think Montesinos paid off the most?

Here’s the answer, as summarized by Richard Morin in The Washington Post:

It wasn’t even close. “One single television channel’s bribe was four times larger than the total of the opposition politicians’ bribes,” [the economists] found. “By revealed preference, the strongest check on the government’s power was the news media.”

The power of media. One fascinating detail about Palin's tete-a-tete with the NY Times is that she began to quote the Times.

Cellphone Data Track Our Migration Patterns

Fascinating story highlighting the efficacy and ease of using available data, as well as its dangers and potential abuses. I particularly enjoy that the focal point is Flushing.

The one stat that jumps out at me is how significant the percentage of calls to Porto, Portugal is: 9% of calls from Flushing.

Cellphone users are spiders of the electromagnetic spectrum, spinning intricate, invisible threads of data about themselves as they walk and talk throughout the day.

Physicists, urban planners and social scientists are eagerly weaving millions of these electronic threads into patterns of people on the move, through studies that until now were all but impossible.

What makes things possible is that all calls are in the phone companies records: number dialing, number called, minutes spoken. The phone company also knows who owns the calling number, and might known the called number, too.

More than 3.3 billion wireless-phone subscribers world-wide have, in effect, voluntarily adopted devices that record their daily movements in the same way satellite sensors monitor migrating birds, whales, bears and other wildlife. Such precise positioning data, automatically collected by cellphone companies, makes privacy advocates queasy but has social scientists dazzled by the research possibilities.


3.3 billion people voluntarily, perhaps unknowingly or oblivious or indifferent to the consequences of their calling habits being known, allow their privacy to be available. It does, surely, also provide intriguing possibilities.

Amazonian tribe "found"

Found this picture in El Universal - Mexico. Una tribu que no ha tenido contacto con la 'civilización' hasta ahora, fue descubierta en la selva del Amazonas, en los límites entre los países sudamericanos de Brasil y Perú (Foto: AP) Ver nota Fotogalería


The organization Survival International, "The Movement for Tribal People", terms it Uncontacted Tribe photographed near Brazil-Peru border. Ebrl Universal's story has it Hallan tribu desconocida en el Amazonas (Unknown tribe found in the Amazons)

Fujimori vive en cárcel dorada

El rey? A Peruvian newspaper reports that ex-dictator, extradited prisoner Alberto Fujimori is living in a golden jail.

El cuartel de la Dinoes, más que una cárcel, parece un hotel de recreo para Fujimori.