Bolivian constitutional vote set

The date for Bolivia's latest political showdown is set: May 4. That's both when Bolivians will vote on a new constitution proposed by President Evo Morales and his indigenous followers and when the opposition-led province of Santa Cruz, this 9.1 million-person country's richest and second most populous, will vote on whether to declare themselves "autonomous." Bolivia's opposition-controlled Senate approved the constitutional vote last night while Morales' supporters surrounded the Congress. News reports said the activists prevented opposition legislators from entering the building. If that's indeed the case, that will surely endanger an already-fragile political situation here.

High times for Brazilian cinema

A scene from the Brazilian documentary "Santiago."

The best Brazilian film of last year wasn’t "Elite Squad," or "Tropa de Elite" in Portuguese, the controversial action flick that either denounces or celebrates, depending on your perspective, Rio de Janeiro’s violent anti-gang police force. That film just won the top prize at this year’s Berlin Film Festival and will come out in the United States in May.

I’m serving as a judge for Rio’s foreign correspondents film awards and have seen some two dozen Brazilians films so far from last year, and I’m happy to announce Brazil is in the midst of a cinematic gold rush. "Elite Squad" had some fierce competition, especially from a big batch of sophisticated, beautifully shot and often incisive documentaries that talked about Brazil with a raw honesty I rarely find among Brazilians themselves.

Despite all the hoopla "Elite Squad" kicked up, the biggest achievement last year (in my opinion, but since I’m a film awards judge, my opinion matters, so there) was a quieter affair, a documentary, in black and white, about an eccentric butler. You still with me? I hope so, because "Santiago" will tell you a lot about Brazilian society and more than that, about people, period. It’s already opened in a few locations in the United States.

The film lets you into the fascinating world of one of the most memorable film characters I’ve ever met - an eccentric Argentine butler who worked for the wealthy family of the film’s director, Joao Moreira Salles. The butler, Santiago, spent his life celebrating the aristocracy he could never join, writing reams of histories about famous families that he piled up in his home while learning, or more appropriately, self-teaching himself how to sing opera and perform other high-class arts.

Since he was young, Salles began interviewing the butler, asking him to describe his obsessions, to sing and to in essence to perform for the camera. Watching the film, I started picking up on the class tensions (that are ever-present in Brazil’s highly polarized society) between the butler and Salles, who after all is the boss’ son and is poking his nose into someone else’s life, although in this case, that someone else is under pressure to play along. Look at Santiago’s face as Salles barks at him to repeat some story he told the director in private once or to sing, and you’ll learn all you need to know about how the haves and have-nots all over the world co-exist.

Toward the end of the film, Salles admits what the viewer has felt. He says he’s embarrassed now watching this footage shot decades ago by a rich Brazilian kid having his way with the help. That embarrassment is important, because it’s a sign that something’s changing in this country. I think the fact that so many films of this caliber and honesty are coming out of Brazil is another sign. Brazil suffers one of the world’s highest rates of income disparity, but people are being honest about it now.

Bolivia nears the edge again

With Christmas and Carnaval behind them, Bolivians have picked up where they left off in mid-December, which means fighting over how to reform their deeply divided country. The opposition-led province of Santa Cruz, this 9.1 million-person country’s richest and second most populous, has scheduled a May 4 vote on a proposal that would unilaterally declare the province “autonomous,” which basically means enjoying the status of a U.S. state with powers to form state police and control finances. The eastern Bolivian province of Beni plans to hold a similar vote June 1.

That directly challenges President Evo Morales, who in December received a new constitution approved under controversial circumstances by his mostly indigenous followers. That document would give the country’s indigenous majority more power and resources, allow Morales to be re-elected once and give the government more control over natural resources, among other measures.

Morales has called the autonomy referendums illegal, and his activist followers have surrounded the country’s opposition-led Senate and promised to stay there until it schedules a vote on the new constitution, preferably before Santa Cruz’s referendum. Another two provinces, Tarjia and Pando, have yet to schedule their own referendums, and Bolivians must also approve a constitutional clause that would limit the size of private land holdings. Morales has also proposed holding a referendum on his mandate and that of all of nine of the country’s governors.

What this means is Bolivians will have a busy 2008 trying to settle their differences at the voting booth rather than in the street, which is a political tradition in this impoverished country. Street protests have ousted two presidents since 2003, and dozens of protesters have died in the political mayhem. This year will present a real test for Bolivia’s fragile democracy, one that the system was probably never designed to handle. At least for now, Bolivians are trying to solve their problems through ballots and not bullets.

Rumble in the jungle

Hundreds of Brazilian police poured into the town of Tailandia in the eastern Amazon forest this week as a flashy first strike against rising deforestation all across the region as described in my story from earlier this month. Last week, town residents blocked the main highway there and attacked government buildings to protest what they saw as an unfair crackdown on the many sawmills in town that eat up illegally cut wood.

It's an important first test of the government's resolve in stopping the cycle of illegal logging, burning, planting and grazing that's already destroyed a fifth of the world's biggest rain forest.

I was in Tailandia last June and saw the widespread lawlessness firsthand. Armed loggers were openly chainsawing and burning forest everywhere, with zero law enforcement around to stop the destruction. One ranch was practically abandoned as loggers overran it. The town suffers Brazil's sixth highest homicide rate in 2006, with 96 out of every 100,000 people murdered every year. That's 17 times the U.S. rate.

The question now is whether Brazil can keep up this kind of pressure all over the Amazon, which covers an area about the size of the western United States. Establishing the rule of law in what's now a lawless free-for-all will be crucial. The stakes are high, and the planet's future hangs in the balance. Deforestation has made Brazil the world's fourth biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, according to the U.S.-based World Resources Institute, so what happens in places like Tailandia is of global concern.

Another twist in Argentine trials

Yet another mysterious death has hit Argentina's ongoing trials of former military and police officials accused of human rights violations during the country's brutal 1976-1983 dictatorship. The body of retired army Lt. Col. Paul Alberto Navone was found Monday in the town of Ascochinga with a gunshot to the head and a handgun near his body. People believe Navone committed suicide, but human rights activists are skeptical. Navone was called to testify next week about what happened to twins who were born to imprisoned and later disappeared dissidents during the dictatorship.

This comes after the December poisoning death of former Coast Guard officer Hector Febres, who was on trial for torturing four imprisoned dissidents, and the 2006 disappearance of witness Jorge Julio Lopez, whose testimony helped convict former police Officer Miguel Etchecolatz. The trials only began in 2006, after Argentina's Supreme Court canceled amnesties that had protected many from prosecution. Many are wondering where the process is heading now.

Snapshots of the new Brazil

As I've written in a previous article, Brazil is undergoing an economic revolution as credit cards, bank loans and other financial tools commonly used by Americans are finally becoming accessible to ordinary Brazilians.

I saw that revolution in action firsthand this morning when a taxi driver I last worked with about a year ago showed up at my apartment in a brand new $25,000 car (that runs on any combination of regular gas and ethanol, by the way). He had driven his last taxi for 12 years and chalked up about 300,000 miles on it.

Now, he's taken out a four-year loan and finally managed to replace the old scrap heap and yes, make a much-needed business investment. His monthly payments are $700 a month, pretty steep but that would have been unthinkably low just a few years ago. His dad, who also worked as a taxi driver, financed the purchase of my driver's old car, but at half the term and at a much higher interest rate. Another sign of changing times here.

Spy vs. spy

The Venezuela-U.S. diplomatic spat has taken an intriguing turn over the past few weeks, revealing the odd machinations going on in the shadows of this hemispheric power struggle.

First, in December, U.S. prosecutors accused four Venezuelan citizens and one Uruguayan of illegally entering the United States to threaten a U.S.-Venezuelan citizen, Guido Antonini Wilson, so that he wouldn't reveal who gave him about $800,000 in cash, which he was caught trying to smuggle into Argentina in August. The apparent source of the money, U.S. prosecutors say, was Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's government, and the apparent recipient was then-Argentine presidential candidate and first lady Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, who won the election.

Last week, the U.S. government got snared in its own embarrassing intelligence trap. A U.S. Fulbright scholar, Alex Van Schaick, working in Bolivia told reporters a U.S. embassy official in Bolivia asked him to keep an eye on Venezuelans and Cubans working in the country. Leftist Bolivian President Evo Morales is close to both Venezuela and Cuba and has invited thousands of nationals from those countries to provide medical care, reduce illiteracy and even serve as presidential security.

The embassy official, Vincent Cooper, allegedly asked 30 Peace Corps volunteers to also spy on the Venezuelans and Cubans. Morales hit back this week by calling Cooper "an undesirable person" and demanding an explanation from the U.S. embassy, which has said that such a request would have been against policy and that the scholar had received the wrong briefing. That, of course, raises the question of whom the embassy is giving such briefings to.

Chavez raised the stakes on Sunday by threatening to cut off all petroleum exports to the United States if U.S.-based Exxon Mobil won international court judgments seizing billions of dollars in Venezuelan assets outside the country. Venezuela, a major oil exporter to the United States, has nationalized the operations of Exxon Mobil Corp. and other foreign companies operating in the country.

Where this is all going looks increasingly dangerous. With hemispheric influence and Chavez's and Morales' vast energy resources at play, it seems the spy games that marked the political struggles of the 1960s to 1980s in the region are back. That tragic episode degenerated into waves of executions, bombings and more. While this go-round is benign in comparison, the tensions are growing.

Freedom of speech?

The much-awaited parade of the Viradouro samba school in Rio de Janeiro's Carnaval celebrations Sunday didn't disappoint. As part of its theme, "It'll give you goosebumps," the school's director Paulo Barros sent down floats full of gold-painted couples bumping and grinding in honor of the Kama Sutra, a float painted like a heap of rotten food with dancers in huge cockroach costumes swarming all over it and rows of people seemingly crucified upside down.

Yet instead of the planned float simulating a pile of corpses with a dancer Hitler on top, in a reference to the Holocaust, the samba school tweaked the courts that had issued a last-minute ban on the float. Instead, the float featured several dozen people dressed in white with white bandages covering their mouths and a big banner reading "Freedom That's Still Late in Coming."

In hindsight, the Holocaust float would have been too much. Although Barros had insisted it was meant as a protest against such violence, mixing thundering samba, dancing, naked models and the Holocaust just doesn't fly. Some groups had argued that previous samba schools had featured slave ships with dancers fighting against their chains, which didn't get banned, so why can't the Holocaust be a part of Carnaval. I don't have a good answer for that, but imagining the original float piled high with corpses parading down the Sambodromo does give me the goosebumps.

The bionic woman

I was waiting to interview Angela Bismarchi - model, lingerie designer and recipient of 42 plastic surgeries (a Brazilian record) - in the beach side apartment she shares with her plastic surgeon husband in Niteroi, a city across the bay from Rio de Janeiro. She had recently surgically elongated her eyes to appear more Asian because she was going to parade this Carnaval with a samba school celebrating a century of Japanese immigration to Brazil.

Her living room featured a motorized pull-down screen on which to watch television, at least a dozen speakers built into the ceiling, a giant puffy soccer ball, rows of liquor bottles and a framed poster of a young Frank Sinatra and the written-out lyrics to the song "My Way." A muscled guy in a red shirt also waited in the living room, but we had silently agreed not to talk to each other.

The surgeon husband Wagner Moraes walked in, plopped down on the sofa and began discussing Angela's surgeries with me. Unlike other women, he said, she wasn't shy about talking about her operations, because she wanted to show the world plastic surgery was a road to happiness, not a cause for embarrassment. He almost made it sound normal, undergoing 42 plastic surgeries.

With the clacking of high heels, in walked Angela, who fit my mental image: Towering, blond, shirt open to reveal her meticulously sculpted cleavage and heavily made up. I also noted the sunglasses and the Band-Aids on her face, remnants of her latest fixes. Otherwise, no scars, no out-of-place cheekbones, no extra limbs. Her surgeons had done a good job. Well, the breasts did look remarkably round and balloonish, but otherwise, I wouldn't have noticed a thing if I saw her on the street.

We talked, I took pictures and Angela told me about the wave of e-mails she said she'd received since her surgeries became international news. People congratulated her, she said, they wanted to meet her. She had just been featured in a full-page spread in a popular Brazilian celebrity news magazine. She was at the peak of her career.

And the best was to come. Just six more surgeries, and she would break the world record for the most plastic surgeries performed on a single person. The current champion, with 47 operations, is American Cindy Jackson. After the parade, Angela planned to get her 43rd operation to remove the wires from her face that pull her eyes to the sides, the Asiafying wires. And then, five more to go! That might sound like a lot to the average mortal, but Angela is planning her road into history incision by incision.