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The Graphic Truth: How does El Salvador's prison rate stack up?
El Salvador made headlines in recent days after President Nayib Bukele released photos of gang members being corralled into the country’s new mega-prison – a sprawling complex that will eventually hold 40,000 inmates. It’s the latest development in Bukele’s massive – and very popular – crackdown on gangs, in which Salvadoran authorities have locked up almost 2% of the adult population. (Never mind that US officials have recently accused Bukele of colluding with the very gangs he says he’s trying to stamp out!) El Salvador now has the highest prison rate per 100,000 people in the world – but how does that compare globally? Here we take a look at the countries with the highest official prison rates.
Ukraine anti-corruption moves won't hurt war effort
Will resignations and a political shake-up in Ukraine negatively affect its war efforts?
No, not at all. This is anti-corruption efforts, getting rid of a bunch of people that are seen as problematic in terms of skimming money within the government. Russia's been more corrupt than Ukraine historically, but actually, it's quite close. There's a lot of work to be done, and as people start thinking about Ukraine attracting major funds from the Europeans, the Americans, others, multilaterals to rebuild the country, they really need to make sure that the money is going where it needs to, and that means running the economy well. So this is the effort that's being tried here, but it doesn't really matter with the war effort at all.
How will Kevin McCarthy's planned visit to Taiwan further escalate tensions with China?
Well, the Chinese won't be happy about it, of course. I think that the level of Chinese retaliation will be lower than what we've seen with Pelosi, in part because Pelosi is seen as close to Biden and aligned with Biden policy. Even if Biden didn't want her to go with McCarthy, I think the Chinese understand that's not what we're talking about here, and also the Chinese are trying not to have escalation and creation of crises with the Americans. So specifically, I'm sure you'll see a bunch of military activities that'll occur, training exercises, missiles and the like in response to a McCarthy trip, but I don't think you would see the economic retaliation against Taiwanese entities on the ground. In fact, quietly, the Taiwanese are saying that they really don't need this McCarthy trip, and I also don't think you'll see a break in negotiations in diplomacy between the United States and China, as you saw after the Pelosi trip.
Pipe dream or real possibility: a common South American currency?
Pipe dream. This was the Argentine and Brazilian presidents getting together and saying that they're working on a currency, a common currency. They actually aren't, especially because the Argentine president is almost certain to lose upcoming elections and the opposition is going to come in, and the opposition opposes this. That makes it a dead letter, but there's so many other reasons why it's not plausible that you're going to get a common currency anytime soon. The chances of real movement in that direction in the foreseeable future are functionally zero.
- What We’re Watching: Armored combat vehicles for Ukraine, Biden’s border move, Bibi’s team vs. High Court, Assad’s new friends ›
- As inflation nears 100% in Argentina, the political class struggles to respond ›
- Hard Numbers: RIP wages in Argentina, Japan's missile arsenal, Mogadishu attack, Singapore’s big LGBT move ›
- What We're Watching: Sri Lanka's shrinking military, McCarthy's ... ›
- What We’re Watching: Israel’s mass anti-corruption protests, Sweden’s NATO own goal, Germany's mixed signals ›
- The Graphic Truth: Where corruption is rising, falling ›
The Graphic Truth: Whose World Cup is it anyway?
Yes, it’s the World Cup. But only a small part of the world actually gets to have it: Since 1930, every edition of the tournament has been won by a team from Europe or South America. Indeed, no country from any other part of the world has even been a runner-up. The last non-European or non-South American team to make it to the semifinals was South Korea in 2002, when it was host along with Japan — unless you count Turkey as part of Asia, which FIFA does not. We explore the World Cup’s winners and runners-up throughout history, showing how two regions dominate the Beautiful Game.
Brazilian politics: surprisingly stable
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here. A Quick Take to kick off your week. There's so much that we could talk about, but we just had elections in Brazil, and as expected, Lula will be the next president of the largest economy in South America. We haven't yet heard anything from Jair Bolsonaro. That, of course, is an open question, just how much he wants to be an election denier, how much disruption he wants to bring about. But there's no question that we are going to see that transition.
Now, not a big surprise here. Lula's been polling ahead consistently over the course of the past months, though it was a tighter race, ultimately only a 1.9% split between the two candidates, a couple million votes, which had been tightening over the course of the last few weeks. In part, that's because Bolsonaro did a better job towards the end of electioneering. In part, the economy was getting a little bit better in Brazil. But also, keep in mind, generally speaking, polls underestimate the support you'll get for anti-establishment populace. And one big reason for that is because if you really don't believe in institutions, you are not likely to tell pollsters who you're going to vote for. You know why? Because you don't trust them. Now, the good news is a lot of people that really believe in conspiracy theories don't even bother to vote. But nonetheless, if they are going to vote, they're probably not going to talk to pollsters about it. So you do get a bit of that shy, radical populous turnout that did happen this time around, but not enough to make a difference.
So first of all, what do we think Bolsonaro is going to do? I mean, it would be good for the country, it'd be good for his legacy if he could just accept the fact that this was a free and fair election. Everyone around the world understands that. And as a consequence, conceding gracefully. He can run again in the future. He can certainly set himself up to be the leader of the Brazilian opposition. A lot of his allies have done comparatively well in elections, both in the Brazil's Congress, as well as in key governorships. He could be well set up for that.
His personality does not imply that's what he's going to do, much more about him than it is about his party, or it is about the country. And as a consequence, and maybe this is a problem with a lot of people that go into national elections in this environment, but it clearly appears that Bolsonaro is likely to say that this was fake news. That's a big lie. That the election really was his and not prepared to accept the outcome. Of course, if he does that, there is going to be a lot of internal dissent in the country. We'll certainly see big demonstrations, truckers for example, bikers for example, that can cause economic damage and disruption, dislocation, that could cause violence in capital cities across Brazil. But it won't change the outcome, and there's no ability for Bolsonaro to stop what will be a peaceful and on-time transition in the country. The military generally supports him but would not support a coup against democracy. The judiciary is not independent. It's actually increasingly politicized, but it doesn't support Bolsonaro. So that's not going to help him. And a lot of his allies, including in Congress, have already made clear that Bolsonaro actually lost what was a free and fair election.
So could there be a January 6th type moment in Brazil? I hope not. It's possible. But ultimately, like in the United States, it doesn't change the trajectory of this election. What it does do is continually undermine and erode the institutional legitimacy itself. That, of course, is a longer-term danger, not just in Brazil and the United States, but in many democracies around the world.
Finally, what about Lula himself? Certainly, you're now going to have a country that is more oriented towards assertive response on climate change. He's already talked about bringing deforestation down to zero in Brazil, which is going to be hard to do, but he'll be more welcomed on the international stage as a consequence of that. Economically, this is going to be a strongly left-leaning president, though the fact that he has talked a lot more about trying to tack to the center in past months, in part, to position himself to win. But in part because he understands that Congress is going to be much more divided with a lot of conservatives that aren't going to support a strongly populist economic position. That he's going to have a hard time dramatically changing the economic trajectory to the country, or significantly spending a lot of money on the fiscal side without figuring out how to pay for it.
So I suspect that this is... Even though the markets have taken a hit on the basis of Lula's win, ultimately this is going to be more stability in transition than a lot of people think. So I've never been super concerned about this election. I continue not to be super concerned about it. There's more stability in Brazil than a lot of people want to believe, and we'll watch where it goes. That's it for me, and I'll talk to you all real soon.
Chilean presidential candidates Gabriel Boric, of left-wing coalition 'Apruebo Dignidad' (I Approve Dignity), and Jose Antonio Kast of the far-right Republican Party, pose for pictures before a live televised debate ahead of December 19 second round presidential elections in Santiago, Chile, December 13, 2021.
Chile is no longer boring
My Chilean friends won’t love this, but I’ll say it anyway: for a long time their country’s greatest virtue was that it was sort of boring.
A stable, prosperous, reasonably centrist country surrounded by perennial economic or political basket cases, Chile was the staid uncle with the nice watch. The khakis-and-a-button-down country with the green mountains and the unexpectedly good soccer team.
Goodbye to all of that. This Sunday, 19 million Chileans face one of the most extreme choices that any Latin American presidential election has thrown up in years.
In the left corner: Gabriel Boric, a 35-year-old lawmaker and former student activist who has an expansively progressive vision of what Chile should look like. He wants to raise taxes to fund social programs, impose fresh levies on mining companies (Chile is the world’s leading copper producer,) nationalize the pension system, protect abortion and same-sex marriage, and give Indigenous communities more rights.
In the (ultra) right corner: former congressman José Antonio Kast, an ultra-conservative Catholic who wants to slash taxes, clamp down on immigration, and roll back what he and his supporters see as an assault on traditional family and gender roles. He opposes same sex marriage and abortion. He openly admires former dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Right now it’s a dead heat. Although public surveys are banned two weeks out from the vote, the latest private polls show just a four-point lead for Boric, down from eight points in late November. A quarter of those polled were still undecided.
Once-boring Chile is in the grip of three big challenges.
The first is deep inequality. Yes, the country’s famously business-friendly policies helped to slash poverty by 25 points after 2000, but Chile is still one of the most unequal countries in the OECD. Back in 2019, the country saw massive — and occasionally violent —protests over that inequality, which led to a referendum in which 80 percent of Chileans voted in favor of rewriting the country’s Pinochet-era constitution. A few months later, they elected a left-leaning assembly to draft a document that will be finished next year.
Boric’s answer to inequality is to rejigger Chile’s economic engine in a way that asks more of private capital in order to ensure social harmony – but at the risk of stalling the motor altogether. Kast, meanwhile, wants to double down on a model that has “worked”, but which risks failing — again — to address the explosive problem of inequality.
The second big issue is immigration. In recent years more than a million migrants — largely from Haiti and Venezuela — have fled violence and hunger at home to seek opportunity in Chile. This has provoked a backlash among “native” Chileans that Kast seized upon in the final weeks of the campaign. He wants to build trenches at the borders, restrict legal migration only to highly educated professionals, and offer bonuses to Chilean women for having children. Boric, meanwhile, says that migration should be orderly and secure, but he places human rights and humanitarian conventions at the center of his platform.
The third is democratic disillusionment. A recent Latinobarómetro poll showed that while a huge majority of Chileans support democracy in principle, only 18 percent say that democracy is working in their country right now. That frustration with the system is in part what drove Chileans to settle on these two diametrically opposed outsider choices in the final round.
The upshot: Chile is struggling with deeply divisive questions about what its economy should look like, and what “Chileans” should look like, and what Chile’s democracy should look like. This Sunday will be a decisive lurch in one direction or another.The Graphic Truth: South America's COVID catastrophe
South America has emerged as the world's hardest-hit region by the pandemic, suffering about one-third of all global COVID deaths despite accounting for less than 6 percent of its population. A slow vaccine rollout in some larger countries such as Brazil is part of the problem, though as a whole the region is still inoculating people faster than Asia, where the mortality rates are much lower. The situation in South America is so dire that the World Health Organization recently called for wealthy nations to prioritize donating vaccines to South American countries, rather than to the global COVAX facility. We take a look at global COVID death rates per 1 million people and vaccination levels.
A demonstrator holds a placard reading "New Constitution now" during a protest against Chile's government in Santiago.
How much (constitutional) change will Chileans get?
A year and a half after millions poured into the streets of Santiago to protest inequality and the vestiges of the Pinochet dictatorship, Chileans voted this weekend to elect the 155 people who will rewrite the country's constitution.
The question now is not whether the people want change — clearly they do — but rather how much change their representatives can agree on. Overall, the new text is widely expected to beef up the role of the state in a country where a strong private sector made Chile one of Latin America's wealthiest yet also most unequal nations.
Here are a few things to bear in mind as the constitutional rewrite process kicks off.
Voters punished the right — and the broader political establishment. Sunday night was a shock for Chilean conservatives: the ruling center-right coalition got fewer delegates than their traditional leftist rivals, and failed to secure the one-third of the vote necessary to veto any radical changes. Meanwhile, independent candidates, most of them left-leaning, won a surprising majority in a similar rejection of the entire political class.
In theory, this shift to the left should pave the way for bold reforms in Chile's next constitution. But getting so many independents, many of whom are single-issue advocates, to agree on a wide range of reforms with delegates from the establishment leftist parties they no longer support, will be an uphill climb that adds uncertainty to the process. And if no consensus is reached within 12 months, the charter will stay as is, setting up the country for fresh unrest.
So, where can they find common ground? Most delegates want Chile to have a more robust social safety net. That means spending a lot more on education, healthcare and pensions, which until now have been mostly privatized alongside other essential public services like water. They will also push for the new constitution to enshrine equal rights for women, and to recognize the land rights of indigenous Chileans, who make up about 10 percent of the population but are not even mentioned in the current charter.
It may be harder, though, to get the needed two-thirds majority support on more radical proposals such as mandatory royalties on mining — which is a big deal for the world's top copper producer — or imposing minimum spending thresholds on social programs. Allowing the state to nationalize most private corporations is also unlikely to pass.
And more elections are coming... In late November, Chileans will go to the polls for the third time in little over a year, this time to vote for president, with the deeply unpopular incumbent Sebastián Piñera unable to run for another four years because of term limits. So far no major party has yet decided on a candidate, but constitutional reform will probably be a major campaign issue, especially if little progress has been made on the text by then.
Meanwhile, the rest of South America will be paying close attention. The results of Chile's constitutional election show that the pandemic has done little to calm the wave of social unrest that swept the continent months before COVID. There have been protests about socio economic issues across the Andean region, and strikers in Colombia are currently demanding a lot of the same things as the Chileans did.
What Chile has done is somewhat unique: the people wanted change, and they were given the opportunity to have their say. Chile's constituent assembly was entirely elected by popular vote, and the first ever in the world with gender parity. If the delegates get the job done on time and the text is ratified in a second referendum sometime next year, it'll send a clear message that change can be pursued through the democratic system without having to resort to permanent upheaval.
Quick Take: Bolsonaro lashes out, Brazil could suffer
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
Hi everybody, Ian Bremmer here, kicking off the week. I hope everyone's doing well. As well as can be expected, snowing yet again here in New York City, we'll get through it. March, I feel March is coming. It doesn't mean spring, but it means something. But anyway, thought we'd talk about Brazil. Haven't spoken about Brazil in some time here and making some news.
They were making news, significant news, of course, at the beginning of the pandemic, when President Bolsonaro was so badly mishandling the response in addition to some other leaders in this hemisphere, President Trump, President Lopez Obrador in Mexico. But most recently, the sudden sacking of the CEO of Petrobras, the state energy company in Brazil. Roberto Castello Branco is gone, replaced by a general, a former Minister of Defense Joaquim Silva e Luna and my God, the inbound I've seen over the past hours in terms of, does this mean that the state is taking over the economy in Brazil? What do we think about investors? What do we think about pricing? Are they in serious trouble? And the answer is, this is a real hit. This is a real hit.
And it is because the government is under more pressure. There was a potential for a major trucker's strike coming at a really bad time in Brazil, when prices were going up and they haven't yet put in place additional relief for the average Brazilian. There's concerns about fiscal stresses in the economy. And suddenly the CEO of Petrobras, who manages the company pretty well, but also is pretty strong headed, pretty arrogant, says, "Truckers and what the truckers do have nothing to do with my company." And you couldn't say that. It's incredibly impolitic. It put President Bolsonaro in a corner.
And so, he lashed out and removed this guy. And that was clearly not a smart thing to do. It would have been better to have negotiations and not undermine Paulo Guedes, who's in charge of the economy and is the one that's trying to keep sort of everything running in terms of Brazil, and instead now it looks like he's been sharply undermined. And again, I mean the market moves, the investor moves are going to be significant. It's definitely a hit to the credibility of the government in managing the economy and its state-owned enterprises more broadly. Not only because the CEO was himself doing a good job, but also because it sends a very strong message internationally that your company's fuel pricing policy is going to have political limits to it. And while the new CEO coming in was seen as doing a good job as minister of defense, number one, the fact that Bolsonaro is seen as a man of the military and as a consequence, that the generals are supportive of him, that undermines his perception in the markets.
And even though there's a plan to sell refineries, who's going to want to buy refineries if they don't think that they can get market prices for what they're going to be selling? So, this is a big hit to the government's credibility. Having said all of that, there's a difference between what you think about Petrobras and broader privatization. So Electrobras have a harder time getting it privatized than the rest and the reform trajectory for the country as a whole. Guedes is not going anywhere. He's been very quiet about this move and his relationship with the Brazilian president is still actually very strong. I think the real point is that the global economy is going to punish Brazil more as we get through this second phase of the global pandemic.
Brazil is now starting to produce vaccines domestically over the coming month. They are faster in terms of getting vaccines to the population than any country in South America. A lot of countries that did a really bad job responding initially to the healthcare part of the crisis, like the United States, like the UK, like Brazil, actually faster in terms of being able to get vaccines to the population. So, that feels pretty good. But the economic hit to Brazil in the coming year, as you have a president that is not particularly trusted in terms of the international marketplace, and as you have a tougher environment, much less flexibility to navigate for population that's demanding, improved social services, but not a good way to pay for it. All of that is going to be a serious problem as you move towards elections in 2022. And here, I think is the real question mark.
Bolsonaro's approval ratings are in the thirties right now. They're not great though, certainly more than high enough to forestall an impeachment, which some people continue to talk about. And you've got to be in the low twenties before Congress starts to move against you in Brazil. But that doesn't mean he's going to win election. And his reelection is looking challenging. And the alternative to Bolsonaro is not only going to be a return likely to the left, but easily as importantly, he's going to say it was stolen. He's going to say it was rigged. He's going to use social media to undermine support on the part of the average Brazilian of political institutions and processes. And unlike the United States, where the institutions are strong enough to have resilience, even when you have a leader that is doing everything possible to undermine trust in elections and institutions, in Brazil, that's not so clear. The Supreme Court, not quite so independent, the military, professional, but not quite so separate from the leadership. And the potential for this to go very badly in other words, not in the next few months, but in the coming year is growing. Something that I would spend more time watching.
As a consequence, I thought it was worth mentioning this. Not because we think that Brazil has suddenly hit a tipping point, but rather because this entire incident is an example of a Brazilian president that, when times are good, understands that he doesn't know anything about the economy and lets the experts run things. But when times are bad, he doesn't listen to anyone and he lashes out. And Warren Buffet said that when the tide suddenly comes out, you find out who's wearing bathing suits and who isn't. Well in Brazil when the tide starts to come out, President Bolsonaro was the first one to run towards you. And I'm not sure we all want to see that. So, the potential for this to get much worse in the coming year is real. And I think we're going to be talking a lot more about Brazil, not less as we go forward in 2022.
So that's it for me. I hope everyone's doing well. Be safe and avoid people. Talk to you soon.