PEASANT REVOLUTION IN THE PAMPAS

Angry truckers tried to break up a farmers' roadblock in central Argentina on Thursday as an escalating farm revolt over taxes that has emptied meat counters and paralyzed exports entered its third week.

The farm protests against higher taxes on soy and other key exports have become a major crisis for President Cristina Fernandez, who planned to speak at a rally of supporters on Thursday to counter earlier pro-farmer rallies.

Groups of small and large farmers maintained road blocks on key rural highways, preventing farm goods from getting to market, and held marches and protests in cities throughout the country.

The strike has halted grain exports from Argentina and is affecting soy buyers in Europe and China.

The government and farmers have refused to negotiate, despite calls from church leaders and local governments, the first wants the blockade to be lifted before the meeting, and the others doesn´t want to step down if the economical measures are not reviewed.

Truck drivers fed up with days stuck at a farmers' barricade tipped over a 4x4 pickup in the central province of Cordoba on Thursday morning, but they were chased off before they could dismantle the roadblock.

In cities, middle class protesters banged pots and pans in the streets for the second night running on Wednesday to support farmers.

Those sounds were eerily reminiscent of pan-banging protests that ousted a president in 2001, but the government responded sending thugs to break the protest, acting like nazi SA stormtroopers of Ernest Rohm in Germany, 75 years ago. A bitter past for a country that was heaven for hundreds of war criminals after World War II, accepted for the founder and leader of the political party now on goverment (Juan Peron).

The farmers are protesting a new sliding-scale tax, which would replace a fixed tax and make levies on soy exports significantly higher at current prices. They say the higher tax would harm smaller farmers.

But they are also expressing frustration with Fernandez' authoritarian style.

Ironically, Argentina has been one of the main beneficiaries of a global surge in commodities prices and the economy has been booming for five years, rebounding from a deep crisis in 2001-2002.

The standoff illustrates the country's deep disagreement over how to spread around the windfall profit -- Argentina's soy receipts totalled $13.47 billion (6.72 billion pounds) last year.

Fernandez says farmers are getting wealthy off cheap labour and subsidized fuel, and argues the higher export taxes on soy and other products will help the 25 percent of Argentines who are poor.

Daniel Scioli, governor of Buenos Aires province, spoke with farm leaders on Wednesday night and although the government denied he will lead negotiations, some media said he is the choice to bridge the divide between the two sides.

Scioli is an ally of the Kirchners, but he is trying to keep his own agenda becacause wants to run for next president election on 2011. His province contains much of the country's rich farmland and is also home to 40 percent of Argentines and almost half the country's economy.

President Cristina Fernandez refused to ease tax hikes on agricultural exports Tuesday, facing down angry farmers embroiled in a nationwide strike that has all but halted production in one of the world's biggest beef-exporting nations.

At least 9,000 cattle normally enter this capital's sprawling stockyard each day for slaughter, yet not a single animal arrived this week due to the farm and ranch strike.

South America's second-largest economy — a leading exporter of soybeans, beef and wheat — is in full farmbelt rebellion over a new sliding-scale increase in export taxes. Soybean taxes are being hiked from 35 percent to 45 percent, with smaller increases on corn and other farm products.

"Bad policies by the government are leaving people without food, without beef," complained Mario Llambias, one of the farm protest organizers who announced Tuesday a 13-day old strike would now continue "indefinitely."

But Fernandez appeared undeterred as she delivered a televised address later in the evening. Vowing not to "give in to extortion," the new president declared that her government will not grant any concessions to the striking farm and ranch workers.

Fernandez said farm producers have profited from a boom in commodity prices and it is only fair to tax them more to redistribute wealth to poorer parts of society. "This seems like ... comedy," she said.

Late Tuesday, thousands of angry middle-class residents of Buenos Aires and other cities responded to her speech by banging pots in a raucous, spontaneous outpouring of support for the farmworkers.

"Argentina! Argentina!" some 5,000 people, including mothers with strollers and others banging on pots joined a surging and unexpectedly strong challenge to the government.

Other protesters in farm-dependent cities and hamlets across Argentina's farmbelt waged similar pot-banging protests.

"This is a pretty ugly wakeup alarm for the government after just a few months in power," said one angry protester Hector Bernardino, among the 5,000 who thronged the main Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires.

He said middle class Argentines, like the farmers, are weary of taxes and double-digit inflation he said the government has sought to conceal behind praise for years of robust recovery.

After a searing 2002 economic meltdown, the government replenished its coffers through taxes on surging grain exports and soaring commodity prices. The cash influx powered an economic growth rates topping 8 percent annually.

Argentina's economy is back on track — and agriculture remains one of its most profitable sectors. It's only fair that farmers and ranchers be taxed on more of that wealth, according to Economy Minister Martin Lousteau, who announced the controversial tax overhaul on March 11.

Growing demand for foodstuffs in China and other teeming nations, high oil prices and other shifts in the global economy have all helped pushed grain prices to new highs in recent months.

But the agriculture industry is howling at having to pay more.

The farmers are demanding to sit down and negotiate a rollback on the new taxes, which Buzzi calls "extortion" against farmers. The government says it won't start talks until the protests stop.

And so the daily demonstrations have continued, with belching tractors and giant harvesters blocking rural highways nationwide, occasionally sowing monstrous traffic jams.

During the long Easter holiday weekend on routes from the capital to South Atlantic beaches, many Argentines stuck in the traffic applauded the demonstrators, saying they too are fed up with government taxes.

The protests have spread far beyond the capital, with sugarcane workers beating cane stalks along highways in north-central Tucuman province and soybean farmers dumping mounds of beans near the border with Uruguay.

Police have managed to keep the most important routes open without widescale arrests or violence. But the confrontations have been tense.

And now Argentina's consumers are beginning to feel the pinch. In the country's main stockyard Tuesday, the Liniers market, a lone cowhand galloped on his horse past empty cattle pens where thousands of cattle usually jostle.

More than two years of tensions between Argentina's government and the country's powerful farm sector have exploded as farmers have set up roadblocks and refused to release their production to protest an export tax increase on some products.

On Tuesday, farmers had mounted some 150 roadblocks throughout this 40 million-person country, snarling traffic on some of the country's principal highways. They also have refused to release much of their production, leading to shortages at markets.

President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner added fuel to the fire Tuesday night by strongly denouncing the farmers and accusing them of ingratitude for protesting while earning record profits. Farmers and their supporters reacted immediately, filling streets around the country condemning the speech.

''I will not yield to any extortion,'' Fernández de Kirchner said in the televised speech from the presidential palace. ``I can understand the interests of the sector, but I want them to understand that I have to govern for the interests of all Argentines.''

According to TV reports, cars honked and thousands of protesters poured into the streets in several areas of Buenos Aires and in front of the presidential palace, banging pots and pans, waving flags and holding signs denouncing the speech.

The demonstrations, which will hit the two-week mark Wednesday, target a new system of export taxes on soybeans and sunflowers that farmers say would bankrupt small- and medium-sized farms. The new system also slightly lowered taxes on wheat and corn exports.

Government officials counter that farmers have earned record profits as international commodity prices have soared over the past two years and can afford to pay the higher taxes. The new system raises taxes when prices rise and reduces them when prices fall.

The new taxes now claim 40 percent of revenue from soybean exports, according to the Argentine Agrarian Federation. Soybean production is booming and accounts for almost 60 percent of all land used in Argentina for agriculture.

Manufactured farm products and raw materials, which include agricultural products, constituted 64 percent of the country's exports in January, according to government figures. Much of the country's farm products go to China, Europe and the United States.

''There's a threshold that's been crossed and expectations that haven't been met,'' said Argentine political analyst Felipe Noguera. ``The farmers feel like they haven't been listened to, and it's fed into this outburst of anger.''

Tensions have simmered since former President Néstor Kirchner began imposing export bans two years ago on some cuts of beef to control rising prices. Price controls and export bans on wheat and other products followed, further enraging farmers.

Kirchner's wife, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, became president in December promising to build a social pact among farmers, workers and other sectors to contain prices. Economists estimate inflation hit almost 20 percent last year in Argentina, more than double the widely questioned official numbers.

Farmers, however, said Fernández de Kirchner had unilaterally raised taxes instead of negotiating and that enough was enough. Nearly all of Argentina's soybean production is exported.

''The tariffs were the drop that overturned the entire glass,'' said Nicolás Bossio, a spokesman for the agrarian federation. ``The government is doing this purposefully to concentrate everything in their hands and take away resources from the sector. They're not interested in dialogue.''

Farmers said Tuesday that they would continue with the blockades and production strike until the government canceled the tax hike but would send milk and other more perishable goods into the market.

Police have cleared a few of the road blockades, while truck drivers allied with the government have confronted some farmers on highways.

Government officials said they imposed the new tax to protect the domestic market from international price fluctuations as well as to contain the growth of soybean cultivation, which they said was crowding out other crops.

The government has refused to negotiate with farmers until they stop the strikes. The protests effects have been felt in Buenos Aires, where 40 percent of butcher shops were closed Tuesday for lack of business and 90 percent of supermarkets also reported meat shortages, according to the nonprofit Consumer Education Center.

''In 30 years, I have never experienced an impact this severe, '' said Daniel Ramondy, owner of a Buenos Aires butcher shop.

Farmers in Argentina have pledged to continue a nationwide protest after the government refused to back down on tax rises on agricultural exports.

Two weeks of blockades by farmers have left many shops in the main cities short of meat and dairy products.

Amid the shortages, thousands of Argentines, banging pots and pans, took to the streets to back the farmers.

President Cristina Fernandez, in office since December, says the increased taxes on farm exports are justified.

Protesters have been stopping lorries carrying farm produce and either turning them back or dumping their goods on the road.

Speaking on national television, President Fernandez said the agricultural sector was one of the country's most profitable with global demand growing for Argentine beef, corn, wheat and soybeans.

"I'm not going to submit to extortion. I understand the industry's interests but I want them to know that I'm the president for all Argentines," she said, making it clear there would be no talks while the farmers' strike continued.

Soon after her address, demonstrators in Buenos Aires and other cities gathered on the streets to stage pot-banging protests.

"This is a pretty ugly wake-up call for the government after just a few months in power," protesters Hector Bernardino told Reuters.

He said middle-class Argentines, like the farmers, were tired of taxes and double-digit inflation.
Flashpoints

Argentina is one of the world's top exporters of soya, wheat and beef and any prolonged conflict will have a major effect on vital export earnings, says the BBC's Daniel Schweimler in Buenos Aires.

The farmers' strike is the biggest crisis faced by Ms Fernandez since she took office more than three months ago, succeeding her husband Nestor Kirchner, our correspondent adds.

The government has been using taxes on grain and commodity exports to boost state revenues.

Taxes on a range of goods including soybeans, sunflower oil and beef are being raised by up to 45%, increases that farmers have described as crippling.

"We will continue the strike for as long as necessary," said Eduardo Buzzi, president of the Argentine Agrarian Federation (FAA).

Trade at Argentina's largest grain and cattle markets has ground to a halt while many shops are reporting shortages of supplies.

There have been disputes between farmers and truck drivers, and armed police have been deployed at potential flashpoints.

OLYMPIC DICTATORSHIP

MUSIC FOR PEACE

Some of Latin music's biggest stars plan to join Juanes to perform a free concert atop a bridge linking Colombia and Venezuela in a show of unity among neighboring South American countries still recovering from a diplomatic crisis.

Others scheduled to perform: Juan Luis Guerra, Miguel Bose, Carlos Vives and Alejandro Sanz.
Juanes, the Grammy-winning Colombian rocker, said the "Peace Without Borders" concert — scheduled for Sunday — is an effort to ease tensions caused by a Colombian raid into Ecuador to kill a top rebel leader on March 1. In response to the attack, Ecuador and its ally Venezuela briefly sent troops to their Colombian borders.

"We want to consolidate the union between our peoples," he told reporters Tuesday by telephone from the Dominican Republic. "We are brothers and sisters, we are equals. We just have to raise one flag together, the flag of peace."

The artists will perform on the Simon Bolivar Bridge linking Cucuta, Colombia, and San Antonio del Tachira, Venezuela, while fans from both countries line the banks of the narrow Tachira River that marks the border, local officials said.

NOT SO HAPPY BIRTHDAY

Sometime soon, the U.S. military will suffer the 4,000th death of the war in Iraq. When the 1,000th American died in September 2004, the insurgency was just gaining steam. The 2,000th death came as Iraq held its first elections in decades, in October 2005. The U.S. announced its 3,000th loss on the last day of 2006, at the end of a year rocked by sectarian violence.

The 4,000th death will come with the war further out of the public eye, and replaced by other topics on the front burner of the U.S. presidential campaigns.

Last year was the deadliest for American troops in Iraq, with 901 troops killed. As of Sunday, at least 3,988 Americans have died in Iraq.

The number killed in Iraq is far less than in other modern American wars. In Vietnam, the U.S. lost on average about 4,850 troops a year from 1963-75. In the Korean war, from 1950-53, the U.S. lost about 12,300 soldiers a year.

A 2006 Duke University study found that it was 100 times as likely that an American knew one of the 292,000 Americans killed in World War II than someone today would know a service member slain in Iraq.

Soldiers and analysts alike say the impact of the deaths in Iraq has been largely lost on many Americans who have no personal connection to the war.

Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey said during a recent speech at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York that the situation for U.S. soldiers in Iraq is "infinitely better" now that during 2006, when Americans were losing the equivalent of a battalion - about 600 to 1,000 soldiers - a month to deaths and injuries.

Pope Benedict XVI issued one of his strongest appeals for peace in Iraq on Sunday, days after the body of the kidnapped Chaldean Catholic archbishop was found near the northern city of Mosul.

The pope also denounced the 5-year-long Iraq war, saying it had provoked the complete breakup of Iraqi civilian life.

"Enough with the slaughters. Enough with the violence. Enough with the hatred in Iraq!" Benedict said to applause at the end of his Palm Sunday Mass in St. Peter's Square.

On Thursday, the body of Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho was found near Mosul. He had been abducted on Feb. 29.

Benedict has called Rahho's death an "inhuman act of violence" that offended human dignity.On Sunday, Benedict praised Rahho for his loyalty to Christ and his refusal to abandon his flock despite many threats and difficulties.

Benedict said Rahho's dedication to the Catholic Church and his death compelled him to "raise a strong and sorrowful cry" to denounce the violence in Iraq spawned by the war that began five years ago this week.

"At the same time, I make an appeal to the Iraqi people, who for the past five years have borne the consequences of a war that provoked the breakup of their civil and social life," Benedict said.

He urged them to raise their heads and reconstruct their life through "reconciliation, forgiveness, justice and coexistence among tribal, ethnic and religious groups."

The Vatican strongly opposed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. In its aftermath, Benedict has frequently criticized attacks against Iraqi Christians by Islamic extremists. Last year, he urged President Bush to keep the safety of Iraqi Christians in mind.

Benedict is due to preside over a memorial service at the Vatican on Monday in honor of Rahho. Typically, the pope only presides over such services when a cardinal dies.


Five years ago today, Britain stood on the brink of war. On 16 March 2003, United Nations weapons inspec-tors were advised to leave Iraq within 48 hours, and the "shock and awe" bombing campaign began less than 100 hours later, on 20 March. The moment the neocons around President George Bush had worked so long for, aided by the moral fervour of Tony Blair, was about to arrive.

Within barely a month, Saddam's bronze statue in Baghdad's Firdaus Square was scrap metal. But every other prediction by the Bush administration's hawks proved wrong.

No weapons of mass destruction have been found. The Pentagon acknowledged last week that a review of more than 600,000 captured Iraqi documents showed "no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida terrorist network".



In 2008, there are still more American troops in Iraq than during the invasion, with no exit yet in sight. Britain's Ministry of Defence has just admitted that it has been unable to withdraw as many British troops as it planned – there are 4,000 still based just outside Basra. So far 3,987 American soldiers and 197 British troops have died in Iraq.

So, five years on, who can be said to have won the war?. Certainly not Iraqi civilians, at least 90,000 of whom have died since 2003. Other studies have multiplied that figure by five. Two million have fled the country, and at least as many are displaced. Baghdad households suffered power cuts of up to eight hours a day in Saddam's time; now they can expect less than eight hours of electricity a day on average. The US troop "surge" has cut the number of murders, but there are still 26 a day in the capital.

Nor have the eager promotors of the war fared well. The most arrogant of them all, Donald Rumsfeld, the ex-secretary of defence, was reluctantly dropped by Mr Bush in his second term. His former deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, who famously said that WMD had been used as the excuse for war because it was the only topic Washington's bureaucracy could agree on, was forced to resign as president of the World Bank after arranging a pay rise for his girlfriend. The Senate refused to confirm John Bolton as US ambassador to the UN.

George Bush is the most unpopular President in US history, mainly because of Iraq. Tony Blair has already gone; those in a position to know believe he would still be Prime Minister had it not been for the war.

The main winners of the war are not the ones its instigators planned: Iran and al-Qa'ida. No one in Washington appeared to have calculated that to unseat Saddam, whom the US once supported as a bulwark against the Iranians, would empower the majority community in Iraq, the Shias, or that many of them would look to the world's only Shia nation, Iran. The US insists that Tehran retains nuclear ambitions, despite its own intelligence estimate that work on a weapon has stopped, but its occupation of Iraq has given Iran a hostage it could never have imagined having.

As for al-Qa'ida, it never had a foothold in Iraq until the chaos created by the invasion gave it the opportunity to establish one. And while the US is preoccupied in Iraq, the conflict it neglected, in Afghanistan, is getting worse. Al-Qa'ida has re-established itself in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan, while its old host, the Taliban, regains ground on the other side of the Afghan border.

In early 2003, Mr Rumsfeld mused on what might be the cost of the war to come: $50bn (£25bn) or $60bn, he and White House planners thought. Five years on, the bill is already 10 times that, while here the Commons Defence Committee has just warned of a "surprising" 52 per cent increase in the cost of operations in Iraq to nearly £1.45bn in the current financial year, despite the reductions in troop levels. An unprecedented amount has been funnelled to the private sector. The big winners have been the money men.

An estimate last October put the number of private contractors in Iraq at 160,000 from up to 300 companies. About 50,000 were private security guards from companies such as Blackwater. Each Blackwater guard in Iraq, of whom there have been up to 900, costs the US government $445,000 per year.


British firms have also been operating in Iraq. After courting controversy in the Nineties, Tim Spicer – whose previous company, Sandline International, was accused of breaking a United Nations embargo by selling arms to Sierra Leone – has re-emerged with his latest venture, Aegis Defence Services. Aegis won a $293m Pentagon contract in 2004, which has since been extended, and employs more than 1,000 contractors in the country. Another British company, Global Strategies, employs cheaper Fijian contractors for its Iraq operations.

ArmorGroup, chaired by the former foreign secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind, was getting half its revenues from Iraq. It carried out convoy protection at rates between $8,000 and $12,000 a day, and helped to guard polling stations during the country's elections. But the biggest winner of contracts is Halliburton, the oil and services company run by Dick Cheney before he became US vice-president.

The connections with the Bush administration helped to generate $16bn in contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan from the start of 2004 – nine times as much as any other company. Halliburton decided last year to spin off the division operating in Iraq. That business, KBR, has generated half its revenues there each year since the invasion, providing private security to the military and infrastructure projects and advising on the rebuilding of the country's oil industry.

The Washington-based Center for Public Integrity, which tracks Iraqi contracts in its investigation "Windfalls of War", says the total value of contracts tendered by the US government in Iraq rose 50 % each year from 2004 to 2006. After KBR, the security contractor DynCorp secured the most work, worth $1.8bn over the three years to the end of 2006.

Many of the biggest contract winners have lobbying budgets and funds for targeting political donations. Public records show that BearingPoint, the consulting firm appointed to advise on the economic reconstruction of Iraq, has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican Party, including $117,000 to the two Bush presidential campaigns. The company is being paid $240m for its work in Iraq, winning an initial contract from the US Agency for International Development (USAid) within weeks of the fall of Saddam.

Last year, The IoS revealed that a BearingPoint employee based at the US embassy in Baghdad was involved in drafting the controversial hydrocarbon law that was approved by Iraq's cabinet last March. The legislation opens up the country's oil reserves to foreign corporations for the first time since 1972.

Western companies will be able to pocket up to three-quarters of profits from new drilling projects in their early years. Supporters say it is the only way to get Iraq's oil industry back on its feet after years of sanctions, war and loss of expertise. But it will operate through "production-sharing agreements", which are unusual in the Middle East; the oil industries of Saudi Arabia and Iran, the world's two largest producers, are state-controlled.

Major companies such as Shell, BP and ExxonMobil have held back on investing directly in the country while the violence continues – but the war has still contributed handsomely to their record-breaking profits because of sky-high oil prices. As the US prepared to march into Iraq, crude soared $37 a barrel. Last week it reached a record $110.

The Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz estimates that the war has added between $5 and $10 a barrel to the price of oil. The figure could be higher, if one believes that the rise also reflects a big additional premium for the threat of future supply disruptions that might be caused by geopolitical tensions or increased terrorist activity in oil-producing regions – any of which might be traced back to the passions inflamed by the war.