A new archbishop for Sao Paulo

Catholics in São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city, on Sunday welcomed a new archbishop, Odilo Pedro Scherer. Dom Odilo, as he is known, will soon be hosting Pope Benedict XVI on his first visit to the Western Hemisphere as pope.

The pontiff is scheduled to arrive to São Paulo May 9 for a four-day stop in the world’s most populous Catholic country. The pontiff is to meet with Brazilian youth, political and church leaders and canonize a Brazilian Franciscan, Blessed Antonio Galvão. The Brazilian media this week reported the advance arrival of a pair of ``pope-mobiles’’ to ferry the pontiff about.

Banners proclaiming that Brazil was to be ``blessed’’ by the papal visit were hoisted inside the neo-gothic cathedral where Archbishop Scherer, 57, assumed his new duties. Police were out in force in the adjacent plaza, a litter-strewn and dodgy island of green amid São Paulo’s gray downtown.

The new archbishop replaced Cardinal Claudio Hummes, who now heads the Vatican’s Congregation for Clergy, and was himself a papal candidate before Benedict XVI was named.

Like Hummes, Scherer is the descendant of German settlers in southern Brazil whose offspring hold considerable influence in the Brazilian church.

Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell and Marcel Soares in Sao Paulo.

Higher and Higher

Credit the Mexicans with smuggling most of the marijuana into the United States and now, apparently, with making it stronger than ever. The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy reported this week that the potency of marijuana sold in the United States has reached record levels. “This isn’t your father’s marijuana,” said John Walters, President Bush’s drug czar.

The University of Mississippi’s Potency Monitoring Project found that samples from around the country averaged 8.5% in THC, pot’s active ingredient, with some batches reaching a brain-numbing 32%. Your father’s dope averaged around 2% to 3% back in the day.

Mexican gangs in central California are using select seeds from back home to grow more powerful marijuana, according to the U.S. State Department’s 2007 National Drug Threat Assessment. Their counterparts in Mexico also are using strains that yield more THC-enriched buds. Canada’s new expertise in high-potency pot, with some 800 metric tons exported to the U.S. each year, also figures in the change.

Posted by Sam Enriquez in Mexico City

South American University?

Ever since Simon Bolívar (aka The Liberator) and his allies freed South America from Spanish rule in the 1820s, various politicians have dreamed of uniting the continent under a single economic or political system.

The idea of forming a kind of United States of South America, akin to the European Union, resulted in the founding of the Mercosur trade bloc in 1991.

Now the leaders of two countries of the so-called Southern Cone, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil and Chilean president Michelle Bachelet, are taking a step toward educational integration of the continent by kicking around the idea of a South American university.

"For a long time I have dreamt of constructing a Mercosur university, but I don't think that is enough," a story in the Santiago Times of Chile quotes Lula as saying. "We need to create various universities so that our young people can freely travel up and down the continent." But La Plaza wonders: Will classes be in Spanish, Portuguese or both?

Posted by Reed Johnson in Mexico City

México Arte Contemporáneo

Art fairs are becoming as ubiquitous as film festivals. Sometimes it seems as if every city in the world has one. Mexico City's MACO, or México Arte Contemporáneo, is a relative latecomer to the scene.

But a visit to Wednesday night's opening festivities in the swishy Lomas de Chapultepec neighborhood indicated that MACO, now in its fourth year, already has the basics down: a buzzing atmosphere, ambient music, lots of dressed-to-kill young people, and, yes, an interesting global cross-section of contemporary art.

Some 700 artists and 80 galleries representing 15 different countries, including regular attendees The Happy Lion gallery from L.A.'s Chinatown, have their wares on display through Sunday at the Residencial Palmas Park, a massive new upscale housing development that's still under construction.

On Wednesday night, browsers strolled the concrete labyrinth taking in witty "industrial sculptures" made of felt by Chilean artist Johanna Unzueta; Daniela Edburg's fantasy-realist photos, with neo-feminist subtexts that are simultaneously amusing and disturbing (my favorite, "Death By Cotton Candy," shows a pink funnel cloud chasing a young woman); Gabriel Orozco's iconic Mexican cardboard flags; and Simon Vega's "Caseta de vigilancia," a mock "guardhouse" cobbled together with scraps of wooden packing crates and other found materials.

Vega's fake security station, complete with "surveillance cameras" made of plastic water bottles, was the perfect symbol for an event where everyone seems to be watching everyone else.

Posted by Reed Johnson in Mexico City

Brazil considers satellite jails

In a bid to reduce chronic prison overcrowding, Brazil is considering a novel alternative: satellite technology.

Legislators are contemplating approving the use of satellites to monitor the movements of persons convicted of minor, non-violent crimes, Brazilian media reports.  That way, offenders deemed non-threatening wouldn’t have to be locked up.  Instead, eligible violators would be outfitted with wrist or ankle bracelets equipped with communication devices linked to satellites. Authorities could then monitor their movements.

The idea is to reserve prison space for violent offenders.

“The costs are less than maintaining a prisoner in a jail unnecessarily,” said Sent. Demóstenes Torres.

Brazilian jails are notoriously overcrowded and have become bases for gang leaders who send out orders to subordinates in the field. Violence by a prison-based gang virtually shut down the city of São Paulo for a day last year.

Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell and Andrés D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires

Vicente Fox visits San Diego

Mexico’s globe-trotting former president, Vicente Fox, visited San Diego yesterday for an awards ceremony where he talked tough against the proposed U.S.-Mexico border fence and took a veiled swipe at his old nemesis, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Fox has kept a busy public schedule since leaving office five months ago. He came to San Diego after giving a speech at the European Parliament. At the U.S. Grant Hotel ballroom downtown, Fox got several standing ovations and accepted an award from the Institute of the Americas for his commitment to democratic principles.

Fox plans on building the first Mexican presidential library and said he will “ride his horse of democracy” to South America to promote social policies. Though he praised some South American leftist presidents, he criticized “messianic, dictatorial” leaders.

“I don’t accept demagoguery as an easy answer to poverty,” said Fox, in an obvious reference to Chavez, with whom he had tense relations. The former president saved his most impassioned remarks for U.S. plans to build a fence along the border.

He noted that his own grandfather, a Cincinnati-born U.S. citizen who moved to Mexico, embodied the immigrant experience that enriches nations. “I can’t understand why a democratic nation, the champion of democracy and freedom, is building a wall,” said Fox.

Posted by Richard Marosi in San Diego

Hollywood has Bolivia abuzz.

News that Warner Brothers has scooped up the feature rights to an acclaimed documentary about Bolivia’s contentious 2002 presidential elections has caused a stir. La Razon newspaper, La Paz.

The trade publication Variety reported this week that George Clooney’s production company, Smoke House, would remake “Our Brand Is Crisis,” the riveting 2005 documentary by Rachel Boynton.

The original film examines the hotly contested 2002 Bolivian elections and the candidacy of the much-criticized Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, a longtime U.S. resident nicknamed “Goni.” On Sanchez de Lozada’s behalf, a team of Democratic political consultants — including James Carville, the ex-campaign aide to Bill Clinton — superimposed U.S.-style electoral tactics in the impoverished South America nation.

Bolivian critics called Sanchez de Lozada a U.S. henchman who spoke Spanish with a North American accent. He was elected president in a congressional runoff after receiving less than 25% of the popular vote. Sanchez de Lozada resigned in 2003 and fled the country amid a popular uprising.

The current Bolivian government, led by leftist President Evo Morales, who finished second in the 2002 balloting, is seeking Sanchez de Lozada’s extradition from the United States in connection with dozens of deaths during protests that chased the former leader from Bolivia.

Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell and Andrés D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires.

Final tally names Calderon winner

Mexico’s highest election court took a big step this week toward resolving the remaining controversy from last July’s presidential election. The final count gave conservative Felipe Calderon a margin of victory of less than 1 percentage point over leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

The leftists demanded a recount of all 41 million votes, but Mexico’s election court refused to grant one. After the final court decision that named Calderon the winner, John Ackerman, an American-born law professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and other academics and writers then filed suit in an attempt to gain access to the ballots. Their aim was to study the ballots, and perhaps conduct a partial recount, arguing that such an exercise would increase public confidence in the result.

On Wednesday, the court ruled in a 7-0 decision that the marked ballots are not public documents and need not be made available to the public. The court gave the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), the government body charged with running the country’s elections, 48 hours to rewrite the initial ruling that denied Ackerman access to the ballots, saying the officials had failed to provide adequate legal arguments for denying the petition.

But the judges’ ruling made it clear that after IFE officials comply with that formality, they can destroy the ballots, as required by Mexican law.

Posted by Hector Tobar in Mexico City.

Subtlety takes a holiday from Argentina's politics

Noticias, the leading Argentine news-weekly, regularly assails Argentine President Nestor Kirchner as a bullying populist who tolerates little opposition to his way of doing things

But, for its cover story this week on Kirchner’s governing style, Noticias chose an unusual illustration: two giraffes in the act of mating.

The inspiration, Noticias explained in an editor’s note, was a celebrated 1994 edition of the British weekly The Economist. Beneath the headline, ``The trouble with mergers,’’ that Economist cover featured an illustration of two camels in a similar predicament.

``Discarding photos of lions, turtles and penguins, Noticias opted for the stylized image of the male giraffe on top of the female giraffe, which reflects with such brutality and beauty our chief of state’s way of relating,’’ the magazine explained. ``And that of those who opt to submit themselves, out of  pleasure or necessity.’’

Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell and Andrés D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires

Translating the words of love

How do you say "I love you" in Chile? Let us count the ways. Or wait, there are just too many, especially if you're a poet.

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), Chile's most famous maestro of meter and a national icon, penned some of the 20th-century's most stirring verses about love (among many other themes). Much of his work is so inherently musical that modern bands have set it to haunting rock and folk arrangements. 

But there's lots more to Chilean poetry than Pablo, as one contributor to this exchange at Harvard's indispensable Global Voices Online project points out. You can start, as one blog poster does, with Gabriela Mistral, another Chilean Nobel Prize winner for literature. And let's not forget Nicanor Parra, or his younger sibling and musical wordsmith Violetta Parra, the Joan Baez of the Southern Cone.

Global Voices, which provides English-language translations of blogs across the world, allows you to read many comments in the original Spanish side by side with English, including some lines from Neruda's famous "Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada" ("Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair").

Posted by Reed Johnson in Mexico City