domingo, diciembre 26, 2010

NYT & Hon. Carlos Andres Perez

Carlos Andrés Pérez, Former President of Venezuela, Dies at 88
By SIMON ROMERO
Published: December 26, 2010


CARACAS, Venezuela — Carlos Andrés Pérez, the former president who tried to make Venezuela a leader of the developing world during a 1970s oil boom only to have his legacy upended in a tumultuous 1989 return to the presidency marked by civil unrest, coup attempts, impeachment and exile, died Saturday in Miami. He was 88.
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Reuters
Former Venezuelan President Carlos Andrés Pérez celebrated his release from house arrest in Caracas in November 1998.
The cause was a heart attack, his daughter, María Francia Pérez, told the news network Globovisión.

Mr. Pérez burst onto the Latin American political scene in the mid-1970s when a quadrupling of oil prices suddenly enriched Venezuela’s government, opening the way for state-led development efforts and an era of glitzy consumption known here as “Venezuela Saudita,” or Saudi Venezuela.

A gifted orator known for his bushy sideburns and flashy suits, Mr. Pérez nationalized Venezuela’s oil industry and the holdings of American iron-ore companies. At the same time, he secured a vocal role for Venezuela in hemispheric affairs, portending, in some ways, President Hugo Chávez’s more assertive foreign policy.

In his first term, Mr. Pérez re-established ties with Cuba and donated a ship to Bolivia, in support of that landlocked nation’s aspiration to regain sea access. He opposed the right-wing Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua and encouraged Omar Torrijos, Panama’s leftist military leader, in his effort to gain sovereignty over the Panama Canal.

Cultivating an independent streak that sometimes put him at odds with Washington, he tried to strengthen the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, of which Venezuela was a founding member. With that goal in mind, he bought a full-page ad in The New York Times in 1974 to publish a letter to President Gerald R. Ford.

“The establishment of OPEC was a direct consequence of the developed countries’ use of a policy of outrageously low prices for our raw materials as a weapon of economic oppression,” Mr. Pérez wrote.

Mr. Pérez was born Oct. 22, 1922, the 11th of 12 children, to parents who were coffee planters in Rubio, a town near the western border with Colombia. He studied law in Caracas and married his first cousin, Blanca Rodríguez, in 1948, with whom he had six children.

He was imprisoned that year for his opposition to a military coup and went into exile in 1949, roaming between Colombia, Cuba and Costa Rica, where he worked as editor of the newspaper La República.

With the establishment of democratic rule here in 1958, he became a rising star in the government of President Rómulo Betancourt. As interior minister, he oversaw a counterinsurgency against Cuban-backed guerrillas. Later, at the helm of the Democratic Action party, he mounted his successful 1973 bid for the presidency.

That five-year term was marked by the rise of new fortunes in the private sector. Business deals were said to be discussed in the mansion belonging to his mistress, Cecilia Matos, who wore a gold replica of an oil tower on a chain around her neck; she said “Papi,” as she called the president, gave her the necklace.

After his departure from office in 1979 and the bust in the 1980s that shook Venezuela’s economy, Mr. Pérez returned to power in 1989 following a campaign that demonized multilateral institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Yet soon after taking office, Mr. Pérez implemented an austerity program that included a $4.5 billion loan from the I.M.F. He announced spending cuts and raised gasoline prices, triggering the chaotic episode in February 1992 called the “Caracazo”: rioting and suppression by the security forces that took hundreds of lives.

Mr. Pérez faced two coup attempts in 1992, the first of which was led by Mr. Chávez, thrusting the then unknown lieutenant colonel into the national spotlight.

Despite the turbulence of his second term, Mr. Pérez still sought an active role for Venezuela in regional politics. He forged warm ties with Jaime Paz Zamora, the former Bolivian president, and sent a plane for Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former Haitian president, when he was ousted in 1991.

Still, resentment here festered against Mr. Pérez, culminating in his impeachment and removal from office in 1993 on corruption charges involving a secretive fund used in part to pay for the bodyguards of Violeta Chamorro, the former Nicaraguan president.

“When the country’s future seemed promising, his power seemed immense; when conditions deteriorated, he was abandoned even by his own supporters,” said Fernando Coronil, a Venezuelan anthropologist at the City University of New York. “His trajectory illustrated the transient nature of power.”

Declaring his innocence, he was locked for 10 weeks in a 12-by-9-foot cell in a prison in one of this city’s slums. Then he was put under house arrest for two years in his hillside estate, where he would receive visitors in a chamber decorated with the framed gold pen he used to sign the papers nationalizing Venezuela’s oil industry.

After Mr. Chávez’s election to the presidency in 1998, Mr. Pérez again went into exile, moving to the Dominican Republic, where he faced accusations from officials here of conspiring to oust Mr. Chávez. In 2003, Venezuela temporarily cut oil exports to the Dominican Republic, forcing Mr. Pérez to move to the United States, where he eventually settled with Ms. Matos, with whom he had two daughters.

From the United States, he faced extradition proceedings in connection to his crackdown during the 1989 riots. Venezuelan prosecutors claimed that security forces unleashed unnecessary force on rioters.

Despite his deteriorating health in recent years, Mr. Pérez remained a vocal critic of Mr. Chávez, describing his government as “illegitimate.” He chastised the president for what he described as “unbecoming behavior” at a 2007 political summit in Chile during which King Juan Carlos of Spain publicly told Mr. Chávez, “Why don’t you shut up?”

State media here quietly took note of Mr. Pérez’s death. In a brief article which refrained from calling Mr. Chávez’s 1992 military revolt an attempted coup, the official news agency said, “Eighteen years have passed since the civilian-military rebellion that occurred as an expression of discontent during the second government of then President Pérez.”

jueves, diciembre 23, 2010

USA allows trade with restricted countries...

U.S. Approved Business With Blacklisted Nations
By JO BECKER NYT Dec 23/10

Despite sanctions and trade embargoes, over the past decade the United States government has granted special licenses allowing American companies to do billions of dollars in business with Iran and other countries blacklisted as state sponsors of terrorism, an examination by The New York Times has found.
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At the behest of a host of companies — from Kraft Food and Pepsi to some of the nation’s largest banks — a little-known office of the Treasury Department has made nearly 10,000 exceptions to American sanctions rules, approving deals involving countries that have been cast into economic purgatory, beyond the reach of American business.

Most of the licenses were approved under a decade-old law exempting agricultural and medical humanitarian aid from sanctions. But the law, pushed by the farm lobby and other industry groups, was written so broadly that allowable humanitarian aid has included cigarettes, Wrigley gum, Louisiana hot sauce, weight-loss remedies, body-building supplements and sports rehabilitation equipment sold to the institute that trains Iran’s Olympic athletes.

Hundreds of other licenses were approved because they passed a litmus test: They were deemed to serve American foreign policy goals. And many clearly do, like deals to provide famine relief in North Korea or to improve Internet connections — and nurture democracy — in Iran. But the examination also found cases in which the foreign-policy benefits were considerably less clear.

In one instance, an American company was permitted to bid on a pipeline job that would have helped Iran sell natural gas to Europe, even though the United States opposes such projects. Several other American businesses were permitted to deal with foreign companies believed to be involved in terrorism or weapons proliferation. In one such case, involving equipment bought by a medical waste disposal plant in Hawaii, the government was preparing to deny the license until an influential politician intervened.

In an interview, the Obama administration’s point man on sanctions, Stuart Levey, said that focusing on the exceptions “misses the forest for the trees.” Indeed, the exceptions represent only a small counterweight to the overall force of America’s trade sanctions, which are among the toughest in the world. Now they are particularly focused on Iran, where on top of a broad embargo that prohibits most trade, the United States and its allies this year adopted a new round of sanctions that have effectively shut Iran off from much of the international financial system.

“No one can doubt that we are serious about this,” Mr. Levey said.

But as the administration tries to press Iran even harder to abandon its nuclear program — officials this week announced several new sanctions measures — some diplomats and foreign affairs experts worry that by allowing the sale of even small-ticket items with no military application, the United States muddies its moral and diplomatic authority.

“It’s not a bad thing to grant exceptions if it represents a conscious policy decision to give countries an incentive,” said Stuart Eizenstat, who oversaw sanctions policy for the Clinton administration when the humanitarian-aid law was passed. “But when you create loopholes like this that you can drive a Mack truck through, you are giving countries something for nothing, and they just laugh in their teeth. I think there have been abuses.”

What’s more, in countries like Iran where elements of the government have assumed control over large portions of the economy, it is increasingly difficult to separate exceptions that help the people from those that enrich the state. Indeed, records show that the United States has approved the sale of luxury food items to chain stores owned by blacklisted banks, despite requirements that potential purchasers be scrutinized for just such connections.

Enforcement of America’s sanctions rests with Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which can make exceptions with guidance from the State Department. The Treasury office resisted disclosing information about the licenses, but after The Times filed a federal Freedom of Information lawsuit, the government agreed to turn over a list of companies granted exceptions and, in a little more than 100 cases, underlying files explaining the nature and details of the deals. The process took three years, and the government heavily redacted many documents, saying they contain trade secrets and personal information. Still, the files offer a snapshot — albeit a piecemeal one — of a system that at times appears out of synch with its own licensing policies and America’s goals abroad.
In some cases, licensing rules failed to keep pace with changing diplomatic circumstances. For instance, American companies were able to import cheap blouses and raw material for steel from North Korea because restrictions loosened when that government promised to renounce its nuclear weapons program and were not recalibrated after the agreement fell apart.
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Mr. Levey, a Treasury undersecretary who held the same job in the Bush administration, pointed out that the United States did far less business with Iran than does China or Europe; in the first quarter of this year, .02 percent of American exports went to Iran. And while it is “a fair policy question” to ask whether the definition of humanitarian aid is overly broad, he said, the exception has helped the United States argue that it opposes Iran’s government, not its people. That, in turn, has helped build international support for the tightly focused financial sanctions.

Beyond that, he and the licensing office’s director, Adam Szubin, said the agency’s other, case-by-case determinations often reflected a desire to balance sanctions policy against the realities of the business world, where companies may unwittingly find themselves in transactions involving blacklisted entities.

“I haven’t seen any licenses that I thought we should have done differently,’” Mr. Szubin said.

For all the speechifying about humanitarian aid that attended its passage, the 2000 law allowing agricultural and medical exceptions to sanctions was ultimately the product of economic stress and political pressure. American farmers, facing sharp declines in commodity prices and exports, hoped to offset their losses with sales to blacklisted countries.

The law defined allowable agricultural exports as any product on a list maintained by the Agriculture Department, which went beyond traditional humanitarian aid like seed and grain and included products like beer, soda, utility poles and more loosely defined categories of “food commodities” and “food additives.”

Even before the law’s final passage, companies and their lobbyists inundated the licensing office with claims that their products fit the bill.

Take, for instance, chewing gum, sold in a number of blacklisted countries by Mars Inc., which owns Wrigley’s. “We debated that one for a month. Was it food? Did it have nutritional value? We concluded it did,” Hal Eren, a former senior sanctions adviser at the licensing office, recalled before pausing and conceding, “We were probably rolled on that issue by outside forces.”

While Cuba was the primary focus of the initial legislative push, Iran, with its relative wealth and large population, was also a promising prospect. American exports, virtually nonexistent before the law’s passage, have totaled more than $1.7 billion since.

In response to questions for this article, companies argued that they were operating in full accordance with American law.

Henry Lapidos, export manager for the American Popcorn Company, acknowledged that calling the Jolly Time popcorn he sells in the Sudan and Iran a humanitarian good was “pushing the envelope,” though he did give it a try. “It depends on how you look at it — popcorn has fibers, which are helpful to the digestive system,” he explained, before switching to a different tack. “What’s the harm?” he asked, adding that he didn’t think Iranian soldiers “would be taking microwavable popcorn” to war.

Even the sale of benign goods can benefit bad actors, though, which is why the licensing office and State Department are required to check the purchasers of humanitarian aid products for links to terrorism. But that does not always happen.

In its application to sell salt substitutes, marinades, food colorings and cake sprinkles in Iran, McCormick & Co. listed a number of chain stores that planned to buy its products. A quick check of the Web site of one store, Refah, revealed that its major investors were banks on an American blacklist. The government of Tehran owns Shahrvand, another store listed in the license. A third chain store, Ghods, draws many top officials from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which the United States considers a terrorist organization.

The licensing office’s director, Mr. Szubin, said that given his limited resources, they were better spent on stopping weapons technology from reaching Iran. Even if the connections in the McCormick case had come to light, he said, he still might have had to approve the license: the law requires him to do so unless he can prove that the investors engaged in terrorist activities own more than half of a company.

“Are we checking end users? Yes,” he said. “But are we doing corporate due diligence on every Iranian importer? No.”

A McCormick spokesman, Jim Lynn, said, "We were not aware of the information you shared with us and are looking into it."

Beyond the humanitarian umbrella, the agency has wide discretion to make case-by-case exceptions. Sometimes, political influence plays a role in those deliberations, as in a case involving Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii and a medical-waste disposal plant in Honolulu.
On July 28, 2003, the plant’s owner, Samuel Liu, ordered 200 graphite electrodes from a Chinese government-owned company, China Precision Machinery Import Export Corporation. In an interview, Mr. Liu said he had chosen the company because the electrodes available in the United States were harder to find and more expensive. Two days later, the Bush administration barred American citizens from doing business with the Chinese company, which had already been penalized repeatedly for providing missile technology to Pakistan and Iran.
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By the time Customs seized the electrodes on Nov. 5, waste was piling up in the sun. Nor did prospects look good for his application to the licensing office, seeking to do an end run around the sanctions. On Nov. 21, a State Department official, Ralph Palmiero, recommended that the agency deny the request since the sanctions explicitly mandated the “termination of existing contracts” like Mr. Liu’s.

That is when Senator Inouye’s office stepped in. While his electrodes were at sea, Mr. Liu had made his first-ever political contribution, giving the senator’s campaign $2,000. Mr. Liu says the timing was coincidental, that he was simply feeling more politically inclined. Records show that an Inouye aide called the licensing office on Mr. Liu’s behalf the same day that Mr. Palmiero recommended denying the application. The senator himself wrote two days later.

Mr. Inouye’s spokesman, Peter Boylan, said the contribution had “no impact whatsoever” on the senator’s actions, which he said were motivated solely by concern for the community’s health and welfare.

The pressure appears to have worked. The following day, the licensing office’s director at the time asked the State Department to reconsider in an e-mail that prominently noted the senator’s interest. A few days later, the State Department found that the purchase qualified for a special “medical and humanitarian” exception.

The license was issued Dec. 10. Two months later, Mr. Liu sent the senator another $2,000 contribution, the maximum allowable. Mr. Levey said he could not comment on the details of a decision predating his tenure. But he noted that sanctions against the Chinese company had since been toughened, and added, “Certainly this transaction wouldn’t be authorized today.”

Mr. Liu’s license is hardly the only one to raise questions about how the government determines that a license serves American foreign policy.

There is also, for instance, the case of IRISL, an Iranian government-owned shipping line that the United States blacklisted in 2008, charging that because it routinely used front companies and misleading terms to shroud shipments of banned arms and other technology with military uses, it was impossible to tell whether its shipments were “licit or illicit.”

Less than nine months earlier, the licensing office had permitted a Japanese subsidiary of Citibank to carry out the very type of transaction it was now warning against. Records show that the bank had agreed to confirm a letter of credit guaranteeing payment to a Malaysian exporter upon delivery of what were described as split-system air conditioners to a Turkish importer. Though the government had yet to blacklist IRISL, sanctions rules already prohibited dealings with Iranian companies. So when the bank learned that the goods were to be shipped aboard the IRISL-owned Iran Ilam, it sought a license.

The license was granted, even though the Treasury Department’s investigation of IRISL was well under way and the United States had reason to be suspicious of the Iran Ilam in particular; that summer, the ship had attracted the attention of the intelligence community when it delivered a lathe used to make nuclear centrifuge parts from China to Iran, according to government officials who requested anonymity to speak about a previously unpublicized intelligence matter.

Mr. Szubin said that since the blacklisting of IRISL, his agency had forced banks to extricate themselves from such transactions. But at the time the Citibank license was issued, his agency regularly issued licenses in cases like this one, where at the time of the transaction, the bank had no way of knowing that IRISL was involved and where the shipping line would be paid by a foreign third party anyway. To depart from the norm, he said, risked facing a lawsuit charging unfair treatment and tipping IRISL off that it was under investigation.

But if the government has sometimes been willing to grant American businesses a break, some companies have recently decided that the cost to their reputations outweighs the potential profit.

General Electric, which has been one of the leading recipients of licenses, says it has stopped all but humanitarian business in countries listed as sponsors of terrorism and has promised to donate its profits from Iran to charity.

As Joshua Kamens, the head of a company called Anndorll, put it, he knew from almost the minute he applied for a license to sell sugar in Iran that “it would come back to haunt me.” And although he received the go-ahead, he decided in the end to back out of the deal.

“I’m an American,” he said. “Even though it’s legal to sell that type of product, I didn’t want to have any trade with a country like Iran.”

miércoles, diciembre 22, 2010

Lideres en acción.....

Pararse frente a un público, que en varios casos no se trata de amigos ni familiares, puede ser una ardua tarea. La que se complica aún más cuando junto con el nerviosismo se debe lograr que un cliente acepte una propuesta o llevar adelante la exposición de un tema.

Y si bien a estas alturas programas como el Power Point les hacen la vida más fácil a quienes deben llevar a cabo una presentación, no es suficiente. Siempre se requiere de un buen orador. “Tengo una premisa. Antes de una presentación uno tiene que prepararse, prever y practicar, de esta forma se pueden desarrollar mejores opciones de reacción en caso de que las cosas no sucedan como se han planeado inicialmente”, afirma Maureen Boys, actriz y secretaria académica de la Escuela de Teatro de la Universidad Católica de Chile.

Existen aspectos que se deben tener presente a la hora de ponerse en campaña para realizar una presentación perfecta.

Apoderarse del tema:

Antes de cualquier técnica lo vital es conocer de qué se hablará: apasionarse tanto como para convencerse de lo que se dice. “Creo que si no estás convencido sólo das a conocer ideales, frases, datos y el proceso de comunicación se ve fracturado. Cuando tenemos el convencimiento real es el primer paso para comunicar frente a la audiencia en cualquier formato”, explica Fernando Gómez, licenciado en actuación y jefe de departamento de difusión Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Unidad Cuajimalpa.

A esto se suma, que la exposición habrá que hacerla considerando las preguntas y, lógicamente sus respuestas. En este caso, el nivel de convencimiento del tema entregará la ventaja de poder comunicar asertivamente.

Contacto visual:

Fingir observar a la audiencia, mirar un punto perdido en el espacio, o fijarse en alguien específico, pueden ser estrategias de un orador entrenado. Sin embargo, Boys aconseja que lo ideal es observar a un individuo en particular, porque de esta forma “se puede actuar dependiendo de su gestos. Por ejemplo, si la audiencia coloca cara de interrogación se puede repetir la información o invitar a que hagan alguna consulta”.

Otro aspecto que hay que tener presente es la dirección hacia dónde se mira, porque no es lo mismo fijar la atención en el techo que hacerlo en el piso. Si bien centrarse en estos por largo rato no es conveniente, debido a que el público tiende a seguir la mirada del expositor y estos destinos no suelen ser muy inspiradores. Lo peor, en todo caso es mirar únicamente hacia una pizarra o lo que refleja el retroproyector. ¿Por qué? Puede reflejar falta de conocimiento y es casi como si el presentador se dijera: 'aquí no soy necesario'.



(Forografía: Kimberlee Kessle,www.sxc.hu/)

“Lo interesante, entonces, es que generamos una doble retención: visual y vocal. Y en caso de no ser capaz de mirar, buscar un punto medianamente fijo”, dice Boys.

No temer a las pausas:

Quedarse en blanco a veces no es tan grave. Uno de los más temidos miedos de cualquiera en medio de una exposición es no saber qué decir en el minuto justo o qué responder ante una consulta. Si el temblor de piernas resulta ser la repuesta a este complicado escenario hay que saber que ese puede ser el momento perfecto en que la audiencia decante el contenido que se les ha explicado o se haga un recuento de la información. Muchas veces los más complicados son los que están oyendo, ya sea porque no han entendido bien algunos puntos o porque la presentación lleva un largo rato. En estos casos hay que aprovechar las instancias de pausa sin miedo.

“Muchos creen que esta instancia los va a dejar como que no saben. Algunos ejecutivos creen que las van a robar la palabra en este espacio y no es tan cierto”, relata Boys.

Autenticidad por delante:


Compartir

Es cierto que puede ser tentador cambiar la actitud en los casos en que la persona sea muy tímida o, por el contrario, hiperventilada. En ambos casos se recomienda que prime la esencia del individuo y manejar aquellas habilidades que se encuentren poco desarrollados.

También es práctico conocer que -al igual que la muletillas verbales típicas- también existen las gestuales, que deben evitarse. El dar una presentación con un lápiz o papeles en la mano puede resultar ser molesto para el público, tanto por los movimientos que se puede hacer como por los ruidos.

Éstas demuestran nerviosismo y hacen que el público se acostumbre a la rutina que generan este tipo de oradores.

Transmitir seguridad:

Aunque el dominar el tema sobre el que se hablará dará inmediata seguridad al expositor, hay aspectos de locución que pueden ayudar a estar más tranquilo.

Para ello existen técnicas de respiración, pero lo primero recomienda Gómez es identificar qué tipo de respiración se tiene. El ideal es poseer una respiración completa la que comprende la abdominal, toráxica y clavicular.

“Si inhalo de forma correcta permito que mis pulmones tengan mayor capacidad y así emitir el sonido. Muchas veces por la presión ponemos tensión en los hombros. Hay mucha gente que apretar el abdomen dificulta la respiración”, dice Gómez.

Entonces, lo fundamental es ser consciente de cómo funciona el cuerpo y dónde está el bloqueo corporal que provoca las tensiones.

Moldearse según la audiencia:

“Uno debe enfocarse en quienes se va a dirigir y así realizar un parámetro. Se tiene que conocer la historia y eso facilitará el elegir el tono adecuado según quienes sean”, dice Gómez.

"No es lo mismo dar a conocer un resultado de un proyecto que transmitir la misión y visión. Frente a ambas circunstancias el cuerpo se comporta naturalmente de manera diferente, y hay que seguirlo", dice Gómez.

miércoles, diciembre 08, 2010

VIVIENDA y HABITAT Master Plan de ALIANZAS en Finanzas y Tecnología para un mejor presente en el Continente



GRUPO CORPORATIVO ALBA en Alianza con Constructores de Venezuela y el Caribe; con el acompañamiento institucional de UNIAPRAVI Venezuela; inicia en el año 2011 una serie de Alianzas estratégicas en las areas de tecnología y FINANZAS, con la finalidad de asumir acciones productivas en el area de VIVIENDA y HABITAT.