EuroWire January 2007

Transat lant ic Cable

Fifty-two workers associated with Bechtel projects were killed, most of them Iraqi; 49 were wounded. The company recorded this toll at one project, in the southern city of Basra: the site security manager was murdered; the site manager resigned after receiving death threats; a senior engineer resigned after his daughter was kidnapped; 12 employees of the electrical- plumbing subcontractor were assassinated in their offices; and 11 employees of the concrete supplier were murdered. (“Bechtel calls it quits after more than three years in Iraq,” 3 rd November) Cliff Mumm, who ran Bechtel’s Iraq operation, told the Times : “We were told it would be a permissive environment. But to the horror of everyone, it never stabilised. It just went down, down, down, and to this day it continues to go down. I’m proud of what we did, but had law and order prevailed it would be a different situation.” In May 2003, when President George W Bush stood before a giant ‘Mission Accomplished’ sign aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln and declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq, a survey of Iraq’s dilapidated electrical system showed 13 downed transmission towers. Four months later, the total had grown to 623. The deteriorating conditions outpaced Bechtel’s rebuilding effort and eventually overtook it. ”The company expected Iraq to develop from an aid recipient to a customer,” wrote Streitfeld. “The biggest US engineering firm would help one of the world’s most distressed countries into the 21 st Century.”

and the US were expecting US congressional approval of a free trade accord on 22 nd November which would boost his country’s exports to the world’s largest economy. “The US Congress should consider that it is not giving [Colombia] a present with this accord,” President Uribe said. “It should consider that it is a bilateral effort for both countries.”

Immigrants to the US send money back to Latin America in record amounts

According to a report on money transfers by legal and illegal immigrants sponsored by a unit of the 47-nation Inter-American Development Bank, the remittances from the United States to Latin America in 2006 will reach more than $45 billion. That is 51% higher than the total only two years earlier. Moreover, instead of originating from urban centres in four or five states, the money flows south from 48 of the 50 states – even those, like Mississippi and Pennsylvania that had very few Latin American immigrants only a few years ago. Montana and West Virginia were not surveyed because they have statistically negligible Latino populations. About 75% of Latino immigrants surveyed for the study, on which the report is based, said they send money home regularly, up from some 60% in a similar survey conducted in 2004. This may reflect growth in the population of illegal immigrants, who accounted for about 40% of remitters in the recent survey (up from a third in 2004) and tend to send money home more often than others. Writing in the New York Times for 19 th October, Eduardo Porter noted that, “with immigration to the United States a regular part of the life cycle for large numbers of men and women in many parts of Latin America, sending money back to relatives at home has developed into a moral obligation.” Sergio Bendixen, a Miami pollster who surveyed some 2,500 immigrants for the survey, told the Times : “If you don’t send money to your mother, you are a bad son. Remittances companies say this in their TV ads.” The Times article cited the reconstruction of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina as an example of how immigrant populations coalesce around jobs in the US. Latino immigrants have flocked to New Orleans where another study found that, by last summer, they accounted for half the reconstruction force, with 54% of them working in the US illegally. Porter noted an interesting, even poignant, aspect of this influx of Latino immigrant-workers into the sixth-poorest state in the union. “They, too, have begun to send money back. According to the [Inter-American Development Bank] survey, remittances to Latin America from Louisiana should top $200 million [in 2006], a 240% increase since 2004.” Apparently, Latino immigrants in the US are influenced much more by family feeling than by political persuasion. Last spring, nationwide demonstrations were sparked by a House bill that would have made it a felony to be in the country ❈

It was not to be.

Latin America

Colombian leader: peso is too strong, hurting our exporters

President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia has expressed concern that his country’s strengthening currency is making its manufacturers uncompetitive. From July through to October, the Colombian peso had gained 11.8% against the American dollar, the second- best performance against the greenback of all 70 currencies tracked by Bloomberg News . “There is no doubt that the government is worried about the revaluation of the peso,” President Uribe said on 5 th November in Montevideo, Uruguay, where he was attending the 16 th Ibero-American Summit meeting of leaders of 22 countries. The manufacturing sector can make a strong effort to increase productivity and reduce costs, the Colombian leader said in an interview with Bloomberg reporters Carlos Rodriguez and Eliana Raszewski. But, he noted, “If this is not accompanied by a competitive exchange rate, they have serious difficulties in competing in international markets.” Colombia’s trade surplus almost halved to $55 million in July from $103 million in May after the peso began to gain, according to the most recent reports on trade. President Uribe said Colombia

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EuroWire – January 2007