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Latin America is shifting a bit to the right at the moment and Panama's president is one of the notables in that trend, but the cheers he's getting come mainly from Italy and the United States, not the other countries in the region. The results he got on behalf of a far-right politician in Honduras were a muted defeat at the Ibero-American Summit, muddled progress in his direction at the OAS and an embarrassing rebuke in the Latin American Parliament, which met here in Panama while Martinelli was traveling in Europe.

Shifting currents, but no clear tide in the region

The shifts can be noticed in this year's elections in El Salvador, Panama, Ecuador, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Honduras and Bolivia, plus in the trends ahead of upcoming votes in Chile, Colombia and Brazil.

In El Salvador, power passed from the hands of ARENA, the political party that arose from the right-wing Mano Blanco death squads in the civil war of the 1970s and 80s, to the FMLN, the political party rooted in the left side of that conflict. The FMLN won not with a guerrilla leader, but a former CNN reporter, at its head.

Panama shifted a bit to the right, from the corrupt neo-liberal PRD that's a member of the Socialist International to an alliance of Panama's wealthiest businessmen headed by supermarket baron Ricardo Martinelli. This election had ideological implications, but was the result of corruption, rigged internal elections and sometimes murderous political violence on the part of the PRD.

Ecuador, having passed a new constitution late in 2008, held new elections that were won by leftist President Rafael Correa in the first round. It was the first time that a president had been elected in the first round in 30 years, but Correa lost his supportive legislative majority. The right-wing parties fared poorly in legislative races, but Correa's faction lost votes and seats to indigenous and leftist splinter parties, whom the president will have to woo to get many of his programs passed.

Mexican voters went to the polls on July 5 to elect the lower house of the national legislature, and on this and other dates for some state and local offices. The general trend was a resurgence of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had ruled Mexico as a semi-dictatorial and usually corrupt one-party state for more than 70 straight years until losing to the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) in 2006. Essentially Mexico is disintegrating into chaos under President Felipe Calderón, who holds office due to a combination of illegal use of public funds for his party's campaign and widespread election fraud in 2006. The leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), from whom the 2006 and 1988 presidential elections were stolen, seems also to have lost much of its appeal. The PRI's legislative gains at the expense of both the PAN and the PRD were still not enough to give it an absolute majority in the Chamber of Deputies.

In Argentina left-leaning President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner's alliance lost its absolute majorities in both legislative houses and would have been totally routed had the opposition not been divided. Economic woes, a crime wave and public corruption were the issues there. A lot can happen in the meantime, but at the moment it appears that Argentina is headed to the right in the 2011 presidential elections.

Uruguay's ruling Frente Amplio coalition shifted farther left with the choice of former Tupamaro guerrilla and political prisoner José Mujica as its standard bearer, but held the presidency and both legislative chambers with reduced majorities.

In Bolivia voters passed a new constitution and confirmed leftist Evo Morales as president in the first round with more than 60 percent of the vote in an eight-way race, giving him absolute domination of the legislative branch as well. In the December 6 voting Morales made surprising gains in the wealthier and mostly non-indigenous "Media Luna" lowland departments. It appears that with the growing importance of lithium for electric cars and other devices that need efficient batteries, and because Bolivia owns most of the world's lithium reserves, Morales is leading his country toward a level of prosperity unprecedented in living memory.

Chile votes for president and legislators on December 13, with runoffs in January in races where nobody gets a majority. The ruling Concertacion coalition moved slightly right with its alternation from Socialist Michelle Bachelet to Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle at the top of the ticket. But two leftist tickets split off from Concertacion, and the right-wing Alianza por Chile is bound for the right's best showing since the fall of the Pinochet dictatorship. Polls are predicting a slight Frei lead but less than a majority in the first round, followed by his election in the second round, possibly without a majority to count upon in the legislative branch.

Coming up next year the right-wing president of Colombia, Álvaro Uribe, will probably win a referendum allowing him to seek a third term as president. Although his political faction and he himself are dogged by scandals related to their relations with drug cartels and right-wing death squads, early indications are that he will also win the referendum and a third term next year. Most likely, however, he will have a serious legislative opposition that he does not now have.

Brazil will hold general elections next October, in which moderate leftist President Lula da Silva can't run for a third term. At this time polls indicate a close race between Lula's coalition and an alliance led by the conservative Social Democratic Party of Brazil, and if that narrow margin maintains then even if Lula's Workers Party candidate Dilma Rousseff wins the left will suffer setbacks in legislative and state elections.

All told, there are currents and counter-currents, but it seems that overall Latin America is edging to the right. Ricardo Martinelli is in various international forums now asserting himself as a spokesman of a Latin American right that shows the signs of revival that have been noted.

And in Honduras...

Then there is Honduras, where the Army, backed by the courts and legislature, stepped in and overthrew President Manuel Zelaya last June, and in elections with little support in the world and no credible international observers, right-winger Porfirio Lobo was declared the landslide winner against the previously ruling but shattered and mostly subservient to the military Liberals. In his election night speech Lobo swore fealty to the Army and Police, essentially guaranteeing a formal return to de facto military rule through civilian figureheads, for the benefit of US-based banana companies and a tiny group of wealthy families.

The United Nations and Organization of American States refused to send election observers. Vice President Juan Carlos Varela's Panameñista Party sent a small cadre of observers, and the US government's National Democratic Institute sent a somewhat larger team of observers. The Honduran coup regime, refusing to announce precise figures, claimed that there was a 62 percent voter turnout and that Lobo had taken 56 percent of the vote. CNN dutifully reported that "While the Honduran government has not released final turnout percentages for last Sunday's pivotal presidential election, a CNN analysis based on official figures shows... [what the coup regime's claims were]." However, the National Democratic Institute figures from 1,000 precincts showed that fewer than half of Honduran voters showed up at the polls and anti-coup labor unions reported that the true turnout figure was less than 22 percent. Nevertheless the US State Department contradicted the US observers and claimed that "turnout appears to have exceeded that of the last presidential election," hailing the process as "a necessary and important step forward."


Meanwhile, Martinelli's was the only Latin American government to formally recognize the Army-installed Micheletti regime, and one of only a few governments in the region --- Colombia, Costa Rica and Peru joined in --- to declare in advance that it would recognize the result of the November 29 process in Honduras.

The Ibero-American summit

On November 29 while the Honduran elections were being held, the leaders or foreign ministers of Spain, Portugal, Andorra and 19 Latin American countries gathered in the Portuguese seaside resort of Estoril for the Ibero-American summit. Panama's Vice President and Foreign Minister Juan Carlos Varela argued in favor of recognizing the inevitable "winner," Mr. Lobo: "The coup was six months ago," he argued. "We need to look to the future."

Varela and Martinelli found very little support. The president of the gathering called for Manuel Zelaya's reinstatement as president, but the delegates could not agree on any joint declaration about the Honduran situation.

Also avoided was a declaration in the dispute between Colombia and Venezuela. Hugo Chávez avoided the summit, while Álvaro Uribe came in search of support. Nobody wanted to listen to war talk of any sort and Uribe went home without any public pledges of backing against his neighbor.

PARLATINO

After the summit in Portugal, dual Panamanian-Italian citizen Martinelli went on to Italy to visit with Silvio Berlusconi and Italian business leaders, while members of legislatures from around Latin America converged on Panama for a session of the Latin American Parliament (PARLATINO), a mostly symbolic body that includes representatives from 12 of the region's democratically elected national legislatures. Among those flying in on December 2 for the occasion was one Amílcar Figueroa, a Venezuelan legislator and vice president of PARLATINO.

Although he was traveling with diplomatic immunity, Migracion officials detained Figueroa on an alleged INTERPOL terrorism warrant at the Tocumen Airport. But actually INTERPOL, urged by Colombia's Uribe regime to issue a warrant, had only put out a bulletin to monitor Figueroa's movements.

This was because, in a March 2008 attack on a FARC guerrilla camp in Ecuador near the Colombian border, the Colombian Army recovered a laptop computer said to belong to slain FARC commander Raúl Reyes and said to implicate the Venezuelan government in the arming and financing of FARC. In the course of its propaganda offensive after the raid, Uribe brought in international computer experts, including some from INTERPOL, who said that they could not detect any tampering with the contents of the hard drive, but that they would not vouch for any interpretation of what those contents mean. Uribe claimed that they showed direct funding and arming of FARC by Chávez and even a plot to get nuclear weapons for the guerrillas. However, the transcripts of those documents and email messages leaked out to the international press and turned out not to match Uribe's claims about them.

Nevertheless the day before the PARLATINO summit Uribe's top prosecutor, Mario Iguarán, went into court and misrepresented that INTERPOL had certified that Figueroa was a "Tino" mentioned in documents in the controversial computer, and on that basis got a Colombian judge to issue an arrest warrant for conspiracy to finance and arm the Colombian rebels. Then the warrant was taken to INTERPOL, which considered it fishy and only issued a "blue circular" to monitor Figueroa's movements rather than the international arrest warrant that the Colombian government requested. The Uribe regime then misrepresented to the Panamanian government that there was an INTERPOL warrant for Figueroa's arrest.

The Venezuelan Embassy here tried to intervene, but eventually it was a phone call by Hugo Chávez in Venezuela to Ricardo Martinelli in Europe that got Figueroa released some six hours after his arrest. Figueroa took his seat at the head of PARLATINO in time for the body to refuse to say anything at all about the Colombia-Venezuela dispute. The region's legislators did, however, unanimously demand that FARC release all of the people whom it has kidnapped, while calling on the Colombian government to fully implement international human rights law in its conflict with FARC.

Colombia's delegation, along with Panama's, then backed a move to support the results of the November 29 election in Honduras.

Instead, PARLATINO voted 103 to 7, with 3 abstentions, to suspend Honduras from the organization. Figueroa called the Honduran voting "a caricature" and warned against "letting the coup d'etat in Honduras stand as a perverse example for the future of Latin America."

The drift

The Honduran coup regime now has the de facto or expressed support of the United States, Canada, Panama, Costa Rica, Colombia and Peru. OAS President José Miguel Insulza is talking in terms of conditionally recognizing Porfirio Lobo as president come inauguration day next January, provided that Lobo ends the persecution of Zelaya and his followers and takes other conciliatory steps. However, Lobo is and will remain a pariah to most Latin American heads of state, and the tacit support that Barack Obama has given to the Honduran coup has alienated many leaders in the region from the United States because now it is perceived that the US president is a partisan of military coups to overthrow elected governments that he finds troublesome. Whether or not Lula's party hangs onto power in next year's elections, look for most Latin American governments to look more toward Brazil and less toward the north for leadership.

But look for the Martinelli administration to be an exception to that trend.