Fausto Zapata: The Question Mark

Fausto Zapata: The Question Mark

Como sigo siendo un nulo para este Underwood inalambrico, solo puedo esperar que la buena suerte nos acompanie y que

recibas este mensaje para reabrir el dialogo que recordamos

con tanto afecto. Cada vez que hemos regresado a Washington

continuamos en contacto con el antiguo ocupante de Los Pinos por lo menos por telefono. Un fuerte abrazo,

Wendy y Henry

De Cura Animarum: Fr Ed Tomlinson Announces His Intention to Resign ...

De Cura Animarum: Fr Ed Tomlinson Announces His Intention to Resign ...: After consultation with the Bishop of Rochester, and with his blessing, I can now publically announce that it is my intention to resign as...

De Cura Animarum: Fr Ed Tomlinson Announces His Intention to Resign from the C of E to Join Ordinariate

Are you the same Ed Tomlinson of Latin American fame?

Remember, somos muy pocos y hacemos bastante falta. There

is, of course, a whole new batch of young people interested in the region--but I still believe that we 'old hands' from the wire services and the NYT along with a small group of brethren from the academy have the necessary 'Fingerspitzgefuehl' as Tad Szulc used to say, for an 'in depth' understanding--and the necessary empathy. Which requires a love for literature and the arts--because it is through their culture that Latin Americans best communicate.

Cheers,

Henry Raymont

De Cura Animarum: Fr Ed Tomlinson Announces His Intention to Resign from the C of E to Join Ordinariate

De Cura Animarum: Fr Ed Tomlinson Announces His Intention to Resign from the C of E to Join Ordinariate

Are you the same Ed Tomlinson of Latin American fame?

Remember, somos muy pocos y hacemos bastante falta. There

is, of course, a whole new batch of young people interested in the region--but I still believe that we 'old hands' from the wire services and the NYT along with a small group of brethren from the academy have the necessary 'Fingerspitzgefuehl' as Tad Szulc used to say, for an 'in depth' understanding--and the necessary empathy. Which requires a love for literature and the arts--because it is through their culture that Latin Americans best communicate.

Cheers,

Henry Raymont

From my friend Oppy........helping me sell my book......

Posted on Thursday, 11.11.10

• THE OPPENHEIMER REPORT

Region ignoring Venezuela coup threats

 

BY ANDRES OPPENHEIMER

AOPPENHEIMER@MIAMIHERALD.COM

What a sham! While the Venezuelan military announces it will not accept an opposition victory in the 2012 elections, thousands of people are dying in Mexico's drug wars and Haiti is suffering from a deadly cholera epidemic, the Organization of American States -- supposedly in charge of addressing the region's biggest problems -- is nowhere to be seen.

FULLY IMMERSED

Well, actually, let me correct that: An official Nov. 9 OAS statement informs us that the Washington-based 34-country organization's Permanent Council is fully immersed in a special session aimed at resolving a ``disagreement'' between Nicaragua and Costa Rica exacerbated by a demarcation error in a Google map of the border between the two countries.

The Google error, which has since been recognized and corrected by the Internet search giant, apparently prompted Nicaragua to dredge a portion of a border river claimed by Costa Rica. An act of ``aggression,'' charged Costa Rica, and sent armed police, but, as far as we know, not a single shot has been fired in the dispute.

Meantime, arguably much more dramatic events are taking place all over the region.

Earlier this week, Maj. Gen. Henry Rangel Silva, head of the Venezuelan armed forces Operational Strategic Command, was quoted by the Caracas daily Ultimas Noticias as saying that ``a hypothetical opposition government in 2012 would amount to selling away the country, and that's not going to be accepted by the National Armed Force.''

Days earlier, President Hugo Chávez, who got fewer votes than the opposition in Venezuela's recent legislative elections, had warned that if an opposition candidate wins in 2012, there will be a ``violent revolution'' in Venezuela. Opposition leaders denounced Chávez's and Rangel Silva's statements as unconstitutional, and as pre-announcements of a self-coup.

In Mexico, more than 30,000 people have died in the war on drugs over the past four years. Many public figures, including former presidents Vicente Fox and Ernesto Zedillo, are calling for reassessment of regional anti-drug strategies.

In earthquake-battered Haiti, nearly 600 people have died and 9,123 have been hospitalized in recent weeks as a cholera epidemic sweeps the nation. The death toll is expected to keep rising.

``I have been watching the OAS for half a century, and there have been moments of great significance and moments of absolute silliness. This is certainly one of the latter,'' says Henry Raymont, a former New York Times correspondent and author of Troubled Neighbors, a book on U.S.-Latin American relations.

Where is the OAS? I asked OAS Secretary General Jose Miguel Insulza. To his credit, while stating that the OAS is very active in Haiti and has a duty to try to solve the Nicaragua-Costa Rica dispute, he didn't stay silent on the Venezuelan military's threat.

`UNACCEPTABLE'

Referring to Rangel Silva's statements, he told me that ``the fact that an army commander threatens with an a priori insubordination is unacceptable. Venezuela's ruling civilian authority should correct that.''

Insulza added that ``I have recently denounced an intended coup in Ecuador because an armed [police] corps rose against the democratically-elected civilian authority. It would be inconsistent to remain silent when another armed corps threatens with an insubordination against a hypothetical future civilian authority.''

Asked what he is going to do about Venezuela's military threat, Insulza said that for the OAS to move on the issue, it would have to be raised by a member country. ``I hope that a member country will bring it up at the Permanent Council,'' he said.

My opinion: Insulza is right on this one. He can't do much unless member countries officially raise issues at the OAS. That hasn't happened yet: El Salvador, which chairs the Permanent Council, and the region's biggest countries are ignoring their OAS commitments to collectively defend democracy in the region.

And, to be fair, the OAS is not the only regional group to be looking the other way at the region's major problems. The Union of South American Nations, UNASUR, is even more nonexistent than the OAS. Its frequent summits are most often nothing but political tourism.

If OAS member countries don't denounce Venezuela's Chávez-backed military threat to ignore the results of the 2012 election, their claims to defend multilateralism and regional diplomacy will continue sounding like a joke.

Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/11/11/1919823/region-ignoring-venezuela-coup.html#ixzz14ySASuUs

Dear Anne Midgette

It is barely 6am, my Wendy is fast asleep and Placido's timely adieu has fired me up.  In Spanish we say 'ya era hora'.  First, to establish my bona fides:  I first heard Placido as a very young singer in a Verdi Requiem conducted by Pablo Casals at the Festival in Puerto Rico.  He was superb.  Then, on an assignment in Asuncion, Paraguay, when I was the NYT's  South American correspondent I spent a sleepless night in a hotel room watching a broadcast of his Lohengrin.  Again, quite extraordinary.  I also applaud his efforts to promote young singers--though that, as we learned in Marlboro, VT., sometimes is as problematic as it may be helpful--good for some, terrible for others.

Now,  I grew up in Buenos Aires and became a newspaperman at 17--some (las malas lenguas) say I took a job with the United Press in order to attend the rehearsals at the Teatro Colon.  Indeed, I made some that would profoundly influence my life:  Fritz Busch, Erich Kleiber, Emanuel List, Salvatore Baccaloni, Rose Bampton, Elsa Cavelti, but, above all, Willy Kapell.  The latter spent four weeks in BA in the 1940's and we must have watched every movie in town.  The fact that Newsweek published my cables about his success at the Colon opened the door to my adding occasional (frequent) pieces on artists to the daily U.P. report to the US (B.A. was Latin American HQs).

When I was transferred to Washington back in 1949 two things struck me:  the only symphony orchestra of the nation's capital, known as National Symphony had a fourth-rate conductor named Howard Mitchell (Alexander Schneider of the Budapest String Quartet would exclaim, 'look how well he wears his tuxedo') and an atrocious home known as Constitution Hall owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution--the outfit that prevented Marion Anderson from singing there.  (tell that to the kids who doubt that the country hasn't made much progress).

Last but not least, I asked somebody yesterday to forward to you a suggestion (an opportunity):  the board should audition Julien Salemkour.  He is currently the assistant conductor at the Berlin Staatsoper with Daniel Barenboim.  Had he been in Chicago he would have become an international star the night he took over from Daniel when the latter was hospitalized with a bad fever 15 minutes before a concert, a celebration of a Mozart Year that was to be televised world-wide.  Julien kept the same program which included accompanying Quastoff and Dorothea Roschmann, playing and conducting a Mozart concerto, as well as a symphony and an overture.  

I mentioned Busch.  During a quick tour of Scandinavia (UP) in 1949 I stopped over in Stockholm where the conductor's son, Hans Busch, a stage director, had staged a Barber of Seville--in Swedish.
Can you imagine the recitativo secco sung in a Scandinavian language?  I was rolling in the aisle--and
wrote a story that was published in Buenos Aires as part of that unfailing formula 'local boy makes good'.  Lest you wonder, we old agency hands were past masters at finding a 'local angle'.

Postlude:  That first year in the States (1948-49) I worked the overnight (graveyard) shift at the UP in New York and attended Columbia U during the day. (Jewish families were sticklers about degrees).
Sure enough, it did not exactly build up my muscles.  So one day I get a phone call--in Spanish with an atrocious German accent:  "Henry, es tu amiiiigo Hans...."  A week later, having secured a leave of absence from the UP, I was on my way to Bloomington, Indiana, to be his assistant at the Opera Workshop.  There I got my degree--and a dose of Americana that greatly helped me understand US politics by the time I came back to the Washington bureau--and was given the Latin beat, that included Puerto Rico (we had a big client, El Mundo, whose owner loved music) so guess where I went every time the weather got blustery.;.....to develop client relations, of course.  And, by the way, to visit Don Pau.

Abrazos,

Onkel Heinz

Winnicott--Joe Goldstein's guru

DONALD WOODS WINNICOTT

(1896-1971)

Donald Woods Winnicott was born into a prosperous middle-class family in Plymouth, England, in 1896. Deciding to become a doctor, he began to study medicine in Cambridge but broke off to serve as probationer surgeon on a British destroyer in World War One. He completed his medical studies in 1920 and in 1923, the same year as his first marriage, got a post as physician at the Paddington Green Children's Hospital in London. Also in 1923, Winnicott entered into a personal analysis with Freud's English translator, James Strachey. In 1927 Winnicott was accepted for training by the British Psycho-Analytical Society, qualified as an adult analyst in 1934 and as a child analyst in 1935. He was still working at the children's hospital and commented later that "at that time no other analyst was also a paediatrician so for two or three decades I was an isolated phenomenon." The treatment of psychically disturbed children and their mothers gave him experience on which he would later build his most original theories. And the short time he could spend on each case led to his development of "therapeutic consultations." (See below, Innovations in clinical practice.)

Another child analyst, Melanie Klein, moved to London in 1926 and soon had many followers: Winnicott had further analysis with one of them, Joan Rivière. The Kleinians' belief in the paramount importance, for psychic health, of the first year of a child's life, was shared by Winnicott. But this view diverged somewhat from that of Freud and his daughter Anna (herself a child analyst!) who both came to London in 1938, refugees from the Nazis in Austria. A split within the British Psycho-Analytical Society was threatened between the orthodox Freudians and the Kleinians; but by the end of World War Two in 1945 a typically British compromise established three more or less amicable groups: the Freudians, the Kleinians and a "Middle" group, to which Winnicott belonged.

However, for Winnicott the war years were more important for the opportunities they gave him to work with seriously disturbed children who had been evacuated from London and other big cities, and separated from their family. His experience as a psychiatric consultant to the Government Evacuation Scheme provided an impetus towards new thinking about the significance of the mother's role. He also became aware of the fact that therapy was more than a case of "making the right interpretation at the right moment" and of the importance of what he called "management". His second marriage, in 1951, was to Clare Britton, the psychiatric social worker with whom he had collaborated during the war years.

After the war Winnicott was physician in charge of the Child Department of the Institute of Psychoanalysis for 25 years; he was president of the British Psycho-Analytical Society for 2 terms; a member of UNESCO and WHO study groups, and lectured widely and wrote as well as having a private practice. He continued to work at the Paddington Green Children's Hospital into the 1960's.

He died in 1971 following the last of a series of heart attacks and was cremated in London.

Repetimos la Historia? o 'La Historia de un Olvido"

Henry Raymont
WASHINGTON--Un tema perenne para la comunidad diplomatica latinoamericana en esta capital, tema que parece no tener fin, es la queja del poco interes que prestan a los asuntos del hemisferio el gobierno de los Estados Unidos asi como la prensa de este pais.  
Efectivamente, si uno lee The New York Times y el Washington Post, la impresion que dejan estos dos influyentes periodicos es que el hemisferio sur solo padece de desastres--violencia callejera en Mexico, guerrillas en Colombia, terremotos en Chile y Haiti, desgobierno en la Argentina y Ecuador.  
Pareciera que apenas Brasil y Costa Rica son los dos paises bien gobernados y de un futuro politico, economico y cultural mas bien asegurado.    El resto del continente--como si no existiera.

Los Leitmotiv como dirian los alemanes, son refranes como 'no contamos para nada''; "no nos toman en consideracion", 'se olvidan de nosotros'.  
Este corresponsal viene oyendo estas frases desde hace medio siglo.  Cuando fui asignado a cubrir al departamento de Estado al comienzo del gobierno del Presidente Dwight D. Eisenhower, el secretario de Estado era John Foster Dulles, uno de los grandes promotores del concepgto de la Guerra Fria.  Hijo de misioneros protestantes, habia nacido en China.  No era de exgtranar entonces de que hubiera dedicado su vida a la lucha contra el comunismo.  Por consiguiente, su unico interes en Latinoamerica era como crear una franja de hierro alrededor del hemisferio para mantenerlo alejado del contagio de la Marea Roja.
Poco a poco esa obsesion, combinado con una patente apatia por los problemas economicos y sociales por los que atravesaba el hemisferio, llevo a Dulles a consolidar las relaciones con los regimenes militares mas represores de Latinoamerica.  Su unico proposito en el hemisferio era lograr tratados de cooperacion militar y de alianzas politicas para contrarrestar al peligro comunista.  Cualquier gobierno que no participaria en estos tratados era considerado con sospecha, cuando no era tachado de 'filo comunista'.  
El gran aliado de Dulles en esta tarea fue un diplomatico tejano glardonado con el maravilloso nombre de Thomas Mann.  Una de las tantas hazanas de Mann fue prohibirle la entrada a los Estados Unidos al escritor mexicano Carlos Fuentes por considerarlo comunista.  Cuando este corresponsal le exigio pruebas, Mann insistio en que el habia visto 'la tarjeta en que Fuentes se habia inscrito en el Partido.   El tema rapidamente se convirtio en un mini escandalo dado que las novelas de Fuentes, todas traducidas por la prestigiosa editorial Farrar, Straus & Giroux,  recibieron varios premios literarios en Estados Unidos.  Fuentes, que rechaza volar en avion habia tomado un barco desde Londres que tras de cruzar el Atlantico atraco en San Juan, Puerto Rico.  Fue alli que el departamento envio instrucciones al servicio de guardacostas de que no permitieran que Fuentes desembarcara.  Asi el novelista tuvo que permanecer dos dias en la nave sufriendo el calor caribeno mientras que los otros pasajeros gozaban de la playa y el bar del Hotel Caribe Hilton.
Por aquellos anos, ya al final del gobierno de Eisenhower, los corresponsales extranjeros eramos apenas dos docenas (comparados con mas de l,000 hoy dia) lo que significa que Dulles nos conocia de nombre y su vocero de prensa, White, nos pedia las preguntas antes de cada conferencia para que los expertos del departamento pudieran preparar las respuestas al Secretario.  Por eso cada vez que yo me levantaba, Dulles me recibia con su sonrisa torcida exclamando con sarcasmo 'y que pregunta latinoamericana me traes hoy?' 
Su desinteres en Latinoamerica no era de sorprender.  La compartia su jefe,  el Presidente Eisenhower.  Cuando anos despues me dedique a investigar las bibliotecas presidenciales como corresponsal del The New York Times, obtuve acceso a la correspondencia  privada de Eisenhower.  En ella encontre unas anotaciones en su diario personal en la que se refiere a la conferencia de jefes de Esgtado realizada en Panama en 1955.  Su unica referencia a esa cumbre fue:  'La idea de la cumbre en Panama fue genial.  Todos los jefes de Estado vinieron a hablar conmigo aqui asi que ya no necesito hacer ningun viaje por la region."
Con ese poco interes no era de sorprender de que uno de sus ultimos gestos hacia Latinoamerica fue poco menos que desastroso:  otorgarle la condecorarlo con la Congressional Medal of Honor al dictador venezolano Carlos Perez Jimenez--pocos dias antes de que un golpe de estado encabezado por la marina venezolana lo destituyera.
Un elocuente testimonio del deterioro de las relaciones fue el ataque fisico que experimento el vice-presidente de Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon precisamente en Caracas donde una multitud casi dio vuelta el coche blindado en que viajaba.  Nixon en un inicio reconocio publicamente de que el ataque fue causado por la desatencion en que su propio gobierno habia demostrado hacia Latinoamerica.  Sin em bargo, ni bien se volvio a incorporar a sus labores en la Casa Blanca y el Congreso su interes pasajero por las relaciones hemisfericas se esfumaron rapidamente.
Por cierto, el deterioro en las relaciones inter-americanas durante los ocho anios del gobierno de Eisenhower fue frenado de abrupto con la llegada del presidente John F. Kennedy,  quien enarbolo   al final de la decada de los 40 y en la de los 50, Dulles no tardo en enemistarse con una gran mayoria de los paises latinoamericanos,  como especialmente Argentina, Brasil, Peru y Venezuela.    
Como en otra ocasion habiamos observado, el gobierno del presidente Barak Obama trajo consigo un excelente equipo de funcionarios, commo Arturo Valenzuela, el secretario adjunto de Estado para Asuntos del Hemisferio Occidental.  Sin embargo la tonica de este gobierno se ha dado en el ambito nacional y en los problemas energeticos, que orientan su atencion al Oriente Medio asi como a las populosas naciones del Asia donde Estados Unidos compite con China y Europa para conquistar mercados.  Latinoamerica nuevamente ha quedado en la retaguardia.

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