La nacionalización de hidrocarburos en América Latina no es reciente. Las potencialidades energéticas de la región despertaron el temprano interés de grandes empresas extranjeras desde el comienzo del siglo XX . El poder económico de esas empresas, en algunos casos, influyó fuertemente la sociedad y economía de los Estados productores, causando inestabilidades políticas recurrentes, malas condiciones de trabajo y de pago, y un descontentamiento cada vez mayor de la población. Esos factores influenciaron grandes movimientos de oposición que encontraran en la nacionalización una respuesta que sustentase sus plataformas de cambio.
El resumen del raciocinio era: una vez que nacionalizados los hidrocarburos, la explotación y la mala influencia causada por las empresas extranjeras serian substituidas por la administración del pueblo representado en el Estado. La idea suponía que las grandes sumas de dinero de esa industria tendrían su destino revertido, mejorando la economía nacional y ayudando a acabar con la situación neocolonial causada por la fuerte presencia de capital extranjero. Defendiendo esas ideas el primer país del mundo a llevar a cabo la nacionalización fue Argentina en 1928.
Con esa misma tónica, Bolivia sustenta una larga tradición de nacionalizaciones. Hasta hoy, ese país nacionalizó sus hidrocarburos tres veces, incluyendo la actual. La ultima tiene por lo menos tres pontos positivos diferentes en relación a sus predecesoras: a) cuenta con la experiencia proporcionada por dos nacionalizaciones anteriores, las cuales demostraron muchas desventajas del proceso y, en especial, las debilidades de YPBF – como veremos en el Capítulos 1; b) la ventaja de contar con grandes inversores latinoamericanos como Petrobras, la monopolista de hidrocarburos de Brasil, que permitió una más fácil renegociación de contratos con el gobierno aliado de Lula – como veremos en el Capitulo 2, y; c) el gobierno boliviano de esta vez cuenta con un plan de desarrollo estructurado para reinvertir los lucros provenientes de la industria de hidrocarburos en Bolivia y la YPBF, proporcionando una aparente perspectiva de crecimiento – como veremos en el Capitulo 3.
Los factores anunciados generan nuevas y alentadoras perspectivas, siendo de grande importancia tanto para Bolivia como para Sudamérica. No obstante, los acuerdos regionales y la economía del país dependen en grande parte de la manera como el gobierno boliviano maneja la cuestión. Siendo así, el objetivo principal y más detalladamente relatado en este trabajo, es el análisis de los aspectos económicos del proceso de nacionalización. Como ese proceso todavía no ha llegado al fin, sus consecuencias son todavía nublosas y muy hipotéticas. Sin embargo, tenemos informaciones suficientes para comprender los principales planes del gobierno boliviano para desarrollar la industria y la economía – así como sus críticas –, concluyendo con algunas perspectivas para la economía boliviana.
Visualice el articulo completo aquí.
La mayor contribución de la ONU para el mantenimiento de la paz internacional es el fenómeno que llamamos de “operaciones de paz” . La idea, proveniente de la Liga de Naciones, empezó a ser empleada con ese nombre en los años 1950s y ha evolucionado en uno de los principales recursos de la comunidad internacional para enfrentar las más complejas crisis de la actualidad. Desde el comienzo del siglo, el número de personal militar, policial y civil empleado en las operaciones de paz de las Naciones Unidas ha crecido a niveles sin precedentes. No solamente creciendo en número, pero en complejidad, además de simplemente monitorear en cese de fuego, las operaciones multidimensionales de hoy facilitan los procesos políticos a través de la promoción del dialogo nacional y la reconciliación, protección de los civiles, campañas de desarmamiento, desmovilización y reintegración de combatientes, apoyar la organización de elecciones, proteger y promover los derechos humanos, y asistir la restauración de un eficiente sistema legal .
El objetivo de este trabajo es explicar, de una manera simple y general, un poco de la historia de las operaciones de paz de las Naciones Unidas. Optamos por seguir un camino conceptual en exponer la evolución de las operaciones y la manera como fueron históricamente empleadas. En el Capítulo 1 encontramos las definiciones clave para la comprensión de su funcionamiento, así como su cuadro normativo. En el segundo presentamos algunos de los principales hechos históricos en el contexto internacional, y terminamos con un panorama de las operaciones actuales en el Capítulo 3.
Se puede visualizar completamente el trabajo aquí.
Notes on Journalism and Internet
Probably among the most contested discussions about the destructive effects of the internet is the impact it had on journalism. This noble profession, entitled to bring the truth in a world of disdain, was for centuries credited by many as one of the fundamental elements of our current democracies*.
We the people need information; we need the truth to drive our decisions, especially when regarding public affairs. The need per se is still uncontested, and the people still crave for information. The challenge to journalism has emerged when the internet started to question the drivers of information; the means to reach its final end.
The challenge was set when the internet allowed people to “self-publish”, turning “regular people” into scalable peers of information . Journalists were considered direct targets of this surge. They had the monopoly of confidence, and their word was a fundamental piece of social validation in the basis of what is considered truth. Now, blogs, websites of all sorts, forums and even Wikipedia generate information that manages to reach its final audience many times faster than the traditional media, and sometimes even more accurate.
Now we have a world of blogs that share individual’s information, and Google can fetch information that traditional journalists took a long time to find. Even further, some tools such as Narrative Science are being used more and more to write standard and repetitive stories that many times don’t require human interaction (e.g. sports).
But that means that journalism is living its final days?
That might not be quite the case. Dave Winer describes that quite the opposite might be happening. In his views, the internet has created a fantastic opportunity for journalists to “reboot” their profession, giving them the privilege to focus on journalistic pieces what “really matters”. Even while criticizing the power of blogs, Peter Daou describes how this surge might be changing journalism for the better. In his view, through blogs, media and political leadership, journalism has an important role to play in building a powerful triangle that drives public narrative.
Essentially, the change has been misdirected.
What is being challenged are institutions and not professional journalist. The traditional media has grown in a world of massive institutions. These are the ones struggling to survive while maintain their empire. Dave Winer describes this painful process in his Reading From the News Execs piece. In this sense, journalists are now even more important than before.
Let the algorithms, blogs and regular Google searches clean the noise and let the journalists to write what they are good at: unique human pieces that build upon a thesis or an argument that challenges a particular element of reality.
However, this will not come without struggle.
——–
*Moyers, Bill. Journalism and Democracy: on the importance of being a ‘public nuisance’. Reached at http://www.vhstigers.org/ourpages/auto/2010/10/5/48888002/Journalism%20and%20democracy.pdf in November 5th of 2011.
After spending some (many) years studying at the Federal University of Ceará (UFC), I have finally stumbled upon with its English Wikipedia article. Amazingly, the article, created in February of 2005, still couldn’t be considered more than what is known in Wikipedia as a stub. The so-called “credible sources”, demanded to prove relevance in the realm of Wikipedia, are populated in the current article by a single article on a different topic; its “History” section contains a single and shallow paragraph; and the whole work only marginally respects one of Wikipedia’s most valuable sources, the Manual of Style.
Probably one of the most important elements missing in the article is the explanation of the role Federal Universities share in the Brazilian educational system. Governmentally owned and run, the compendium of universities are tuition-free and share a model of public education in which the State is responsible for providing quality high education for its citizens, especially the ones without resources to pay. This set of information is publicly available at the Brazil’s Ministry of Education webpage, and in several UNESCO publications that compare different Latin American educational systems[1]. This particular characteristic is so important that it sets the Brazilian Federal universities in a unique position, and thus should not be left out of Brazilian Federal University’s articles. UFC’s article, however, makes no reference to these factors. One of the reasons why this might have happened in six years of existence of the present article is that these supplementary elements are not present at all in Wikipedia English. However, this should probably be considered as an indication that other secions of Wikipedia need improvement beyong the present article.
Furthermore, the “History” section of the article has no references, and hardly presents a stub with information hard to verify. In fact the only reference present in the whole work is a 6-page publication on “Energy Efficiency in the Rectory of the Federal University of Ceará” cited right after the first appearance of the University’s name. The Federal University of Ceará has now almost 60 years of history which arguably could be present in the current article, expanding it and making it a bit more trustworthy, especially for the English speaking public seeking to get more information on the University.
Last but not least, something important to add is the fact that the Federal University of Ceará is now undergoing an intensive expansion process under the auspices of the Brazilian economic surge. Along with many other federal universities, it has increased radically its local and national capacity[2], and aims to be one of the main developers of innovations in science and technology under the current presidential mandate[3]. This in particular should not be left out of the article in question. Even further, it is very appropriate to create a section explaining how the newly created national programs affect Federal University of Ceará’s[4] within the expected Brazilian development.
In general, one of the things that struck me the most with this article was the fact that is has undergone very few transformations after its creation in February of 2005. The “bait” or “temptation” usually offered by newly created Wikipedia articles is commonly enough motivation for other users to improve these articles. In this case, however, it seems that the concept has failed terribly. After six years, the article couldn’t be considered more than a simple “starter”; a “stub” that is only worth as a very light reference to the Federal University of Ceará.
This article, as many others, might be considered as a great example of Wikipedia’s most popular jargon: “knowledge through collaborative effort”. The arguable challenge emerges, in this case, when the knowledge part misses its collaborative counterpart.
~~~~User:Luiscape
In the Plex by Steven Levy – book review
Steven Levy’s In the Plex is a quasi-fiction story-telling of the already giant child of the internet age: Google. Written mostly in first hand, Levy’s style is easy to read and often resembles a fiction novel in which the author, a spectator of a great leap in history, shares his visions, anecdotes and thoughts on a still-hard-to-understand company.
Google emerged as a successful initiative from the internet age in a time where the internet had already consolidated many of its current values. It’s now famous funders, Larry and Page, created the company in a time in which computer giants like Microsoft and IBM had turned into rusted and conservative influences. These giant’s model, still pervasive, wasn’t able to handle the great potential brought by the big network, and seemed stuck while databases and servers where getting full by the day. Page and Larry understood this limitation while failing in trying to find information among the current sea of almost-infinite amount of content. The founders thought that by reflecting accademic article’s h-index, the masses of people, ideas and links in the internet could turn into the best judges of relevance. They wanted to gather the multitude of opinions present in the internet, random and disconnected by nature, to point what was the most relevant piece of information on a certain subject, and build the largest reference on the world’s information ever existed.
And they did in September 4, 1998.
Google’s foundational concept was fairly simple: the pages were ranked according to how many links pointed at them. However, it embodied what Clay Shirky’s understands as the core element of the internet: Everybody. Google was now looking at the vast interconnected information of the internet and using its assets to provide its services that now stretch from the classic “search” to financial services. “Everybody”, from the day it was founded, was Google’s main power and asset. And from that point on Google was set to challenge every system it got itself into.
Apart from the search, Google’s main revolution was on the internet advertisement system that gave the company enough resources to expand globally and to many, many other areas. But, as Paul Boutin states in his excellent Wall Street Journal article on “In the Plex”, this might be precisely Google’s main challenge: it is growing too big. Boutin’s arguments focus Google’s administrative challenges — like managing 24 thousand employees –, and how the company is growing less-innovative which harms what he understands as the Google essence. To me, however, it seems that the search monster has found some more complex limitations.
Google’s iconoclast nature, what Sharky understand as the anti-institutionalism element of the internet culture, is being buried deeper and deeper with each of Google’s new ventures. From Google Voice to Google TV, Google is present and increasingly more active. On one side, the competition brings a positive side especially if we consider the Google’s innovative inclinations. The problem emerges when we consider the disadvantage given by Google’s massive data collection, storage and presence in our everyday lives. The company has now collected an incredible amount of data in its databases that it mainly uses to serve, for the time being at least, the objective of Google’s official categorization: profit. Basically, this means that “Everybody”’s opinions, ideas and links could be now controllable by one enormous company. This phenomenon might create a great disparity in the markets where the company is currently acting and trying to act in the future, and has already brought the company many times to court under anti-trust allegations.
Google still has a great deal of innovation to do in this planet. The internet has changed due to its efforts, and it is continuously changing following the pace of its innovations. It would be particularly interesting to see the company focusing more deeply in sharing its human capital and capacity with the world in a more pro-active way than it has done with Google.org, a tiny attempt to create a “philanthropic arm”, as they call it. For the time being, we are left with little indications that this will happen any time soon. Hopefully, Google Ideas, shamefully hiding at the corner, could somehow initiate this process in the future. And once again Google would change the way we think.
Here Comes Everybody very quickly became one of the most important books about the “effects of the internet on society”, in Shirky’s words. From IRC to modern Wikipedia, Shirky describes in his example-filled way or writing how some innovations brought by technology have behavioral effects in the way we organize, share information and — probably his most important assumption — think.
Clay Shirky is a renowned long-time expert on the sector, and is regarded as one of the great thinkers when trying to understand how the internet affects our lives. Shirky is a professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU, a gigantic laboratory that mainly studies and develops innovations in information management; but is very well known for taking his ideology to the political front and where he is often seen challenging institutions with his “digital activism”.
Here Comes Everybody draws in very general lines what Shirky believes are the main elements of the new culture currently taking shape particularly around the internet. Interconnection, free information, at some extent non-institutional, with a great sense of community are some of the core elements present in Shirky’s book to describe this mental shift.
For Shirky the internet allows the ones connected not only to be receivers of information, but to be constant generators of it; constant participants of all and everything we interact with in the internet. It might be an article with a comment session, a chat platform meant to communication or an article on Wikipedia in which users decide to share their thoughts on a polemic subject. The entire internet – now even more than the time Shirky published his book – is subject to such interactions. Sites, institutions and communities are opening more and more their systems for inputs from their users with the basic idea that today is much more interesting to stimulate – and eventually harvest – the generation of knowledge from everyone, a phenomenon that Shirky often describes as an avalanche of amateurism. In other words, Shirky expresses that this massive amount of user-generated knowledge, non-dependent on institutions, and much less managed by anyone, is not only flooding the internet with useless thoughts, but actually creating some of the most important innovations we have today.
Within this basic idea, even if knowingly a very small number of people develop the main part of the initiatives, the majority will contribute with something and this precise interaction is what makes the system alive and, even more important, extremely productive. Linux, born as a simple invitation to collaboration, grew into one of the most important domestic operational systems in the planet and arguably the most important webserver platform in the internet precisely because it doesn’t rely on a paid team of developers to create innovations. “If you know how to, just do it” is probably the most common tagline in Linux development forums. Linux developers gather online from the most distant geographical locations to figure how to bridge problems and answer other members’ questions. In comparison with the traditional model of some organization, Shirky challenges stating that this collaborative system is more reliable, fast and therefore, efficient.
Wikipedia is another cornerstone in Shirky’s book. Wikipedia was born with the same concept, after reshaping by one of its founders Jimmy Wales. The basic concept behind it was that anyone can edit any articles in the database, using a system called wiki. If that article was approved by the community, after many community reviews, it would continue to grow and consolidate many relevant parts of the communities’ knowledge in a particular subject. Today, with thousands of users, articles and edits, Wikipedia’s articles have a practically infinite cycle of editions. This sense of continuous effort is what best represents the adaptation in human knowledge; a constant motion between what we know and what we have yet to discover.
This same rationale can be applied to the most varied of endeavors. Ushahidi, a Kenyan-based mapping platform has connected the dots between online maps (e.g. Google Maps) and SMS messaging system to create an incredibly fast crisis mapping tool. What’s the most revolutionary characteristic of it? People everywhere in the planet can join the mapping effort. As described by Patrick Meier’s, one of the most important authorities in technology usage in humanitarian settings, Ushahidi is one of many simple initiatives made possible as a result of how connected we are.
However, Here Comes Everybody is a product of a collection of ideas rather than a thesis by itself. Shirky uses a large number of fragmented examples to prove often distant principles of what he considers to be changing in human behavior, but rarely states what in fact is changing. It is common to stumble upon a conclusion drawn from simplistic stories that do well in painting a panorama of an optimistic world in which the “tools” brought by the internet empower humans to change the world, but lack a bit of the necessary skepticism in social sciences. Very likely, if Shirky had opened the “source code” of his book before printing, the community that studies the same subjects would rush in to improve his outcomes.
Drawn in this sometimes eccentric optimism, Shirky misses how massive companies are using these same principles to build and consolidate their institutions. Google’s Chrome and Android are just a few of the most powerful “open source” driven initiatives mainly developed inside an institution with the ultimate objective of empowering it – not to mention Canonical’s power over Ubuntu, the most popular distribution of Linux, proudly registered as a for-profit company. Plus, Shirky ignores the organic systems of monitoring and control, more and more common in the internet driven by the basic concept that institutions can tell users what they want over any questionings — what Eli Pariser calls the “Filter Bubble”.
To wrap up, Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody is an extraordinary book that rightfully states that the internet alone will not change society, but that society will change using the internet. At some points the book seems often dated, making references to things that, since the last update, have changed radically. However, Shirky manages to describe many of the most important elements of the new culture in the midst of catharsis. In this sense, worldwide collaboration with the objective of building something better for everyone is one of the most pervasive ideas of the internet. That must be understood and used widely, especially to find solutions for humanity’s most demanding challenges. The big question for me now is how we can find the balance between people’s will to contribute and the institution’s need to grow and profit when both allow these interactions to take place.
Com a árdua tarefa de escrever sobre alguma coisa relevante decidi monografar sobre a relação do Brasil com a Missão das Nações Unidas para a Estabilização do Haiti (MINUSTAH). Sem embargo, no inicio dos trabalhos, não poderia prever que o tema iria me levar a entrevistar diplomatas de alto patente, embaixadores, haitianos revolucionários e políticos americanos, em uma onda de sorte que moveu 4 continentes. As conclusões não poderiam ser mais evidente: com uma parcitipação insuficiente, o Brasil degrada a operação e, consequentemente, a situação no Haiti, mas isso já era previsível. A questão, no entanto, é tentar entender quais foram as motivações que levaram o Brasil a comandar a MINUSTAH para podermos, então, vislumbrar as concequências dessa participação.
Para os que tem interesse em ler a versão preliminar da monografia ela pode ser baixada aqui. Porém, aviso, ela é grande e ainda está na versão Beta 3.3.57 (uffff! são muitas correções!!).
Para aqueles que já decidiram que estarão presentes, vocês podem encontrar o mapa aqui.
E para os amantes de futebol, confira aqui os jogos que vocêm correm o risco de, digamos, chegarem atrasados (NÃO SE PREOCUPE. São de pouquíssima importância.).
Quer ver o convite? Clique aqui.
Obs: Se encontrarem erros na monografia ou têm sugestões para dar, enviem um e-mail com urgência para luiscape@gmail.com
Muito obrigado!
