Is There A Principal/Agent Problem With Guerillia Fighters?

Megan McArdle has a good post elucidating the principal/agent problem as it relates to unions and workers. Although the interests of workers and unions coincide most of the time, ultimately, the principal concern of a union is the survival or the union. And it’s that interest that will always win out. I’m not trying to union bash, this is true about every type of organization - government, corporation, private charity, etc - and most interestingly, guerrilla groups.

I’m talking about the recent attack in Omdurman, Khartoum’s sister city, by the Darfuri rebel group, Justice and Equality Movement. Eric Reeves has a great post at TNR explaining the implications of the attack, especially how it’s likely to set back the cause of actual Darfuris, who are only going to face more repression as a result of the Sudanese government coming under threat. What’s odd about JEM’s attack is that they very likely know that their actions will result in their purported constituents - Darfuris - becoming very much worse off. Not surprisingly, according to Reeves, JEM is one of the least representative guerrilla groups and is mostly concerned with advancing its leader’s political and personal agenda.

So, the question becomes, how do we make guerrilla groups more accountable? I imagine that one of the main problems is that many people in the JEM are fighters first, and representatives of their people and their interests later. There are lots of way to advocate for a group of people, and even in a place as hostile as Sudan, violent resistance isn’t always the best answer. In this case, all JEM’s attack did was let the Sudanese petition the UN to condemn the attack, which they did. And now Khartoum gets an extra chance to brutalize the Darfuris.

This is reminiscent of the situation in Guatemala in the 1980s. Anthropologist David Stoll argued that the conflict was not lead by indigenous Mayans who were oppressed by the government, but instead was stoked by communist radicals who wanted to foment revolution. The government harshly cracked down on this - the communist revolutionary aspect - and then subsequently radicalized the Mayan populace and lead to the long, drawn out civil war. Stoll argues that Mayans were actually experiencing modest improvements in their well being until “the guerrillas committed the first political executions, of nonindigenous landowners, in the hope that these would galvanize Indians into joining the insurgency.” What we had in Guatemala, according to Stoll, was that the guerrillas who were supposedly “on the side” of Guatemalan peasants were more on the side of their own ideology, and the peasants were something of an afterthought - or more cynically, cannon fodder. Of course, it was these peasants that suffered the great brunt of the civil war, just as Darfuris are most likely to suffer as result of JEM’s actions.

So how are we to make guerrillas more responsive to their constituents? The usual proscriptions - more information and transparency - hardly seem feasible considering the conditions most guerrilla insurgencies operate under. If I were an enterprising political scientist or anthropologist, this would seem like a fertile area of research, Of course, if there’s any scholarship here that I’m missing - which is overwhelmingly likely - I’d love to be pointed in the direction of it.

Not Totally Unreasonable

I should put this out there before I defend some of Chavez’s antics:  I think he is a demagogic, authoritarian minded, wannabe-dictator who, while opening up Venezuela’s politica culture in a good way, is likely to leave Venezuela’s isntitutions damaged and economy poorer.  But I think Megan is wrong to say that his warning of the US intervening in the Colombia-Venezueula-Ecuador squabble is totally off-the-wall and stupid.

McArdle, having attended an American, four year university, surely knows of the signs, posters, and t-shirts listing dozens of American military and political interventions into Latin America in the last 100 or so years.  Even listening to a Rage Against the Machine album would give you the bare bones history.  Surely I don’t need to recount how many coups we’ve staged, rebellions we’ve helped squash, corporate interests we’ve supported and just all the general crap we’ve afflicted on Latin America.  And for Chavez, fear of US intervention isn’t all that unreasonable.  There are plenty of well-respected voices in the conservative world (Rick Santorum, for instance) who think that Venezuela is the staging ground for Red Dawn II. There’s also the little incident of American recognizing and maybe supporting an attempted coup against Chavez perpretrated by oil oligarchs and the military in response his oil nationalization push in 2002.

Now, I think that the probability of real US intervention in this squabble is about nil, not counting the billions of dollars we give in military aid to support Colombia’s counter-insurgency efforts against the FARC.  And Chavez is certainly talking about US intervention so that he can rally the Venezuelan populace against a foreign enemy.  But the reason such appeals are effective is because the history of US intervention in Latin America is very real.

WOLVERINES!

Gordon Chang is very worried about *gasp* Iran establishing diplomatic and economic ties with Latin American countries.  He links to this San Antonio Express News article about Iran in Nicaragua, which features this hilariously overblown passage:

What worries state department officials, former national security officials and counterterrorism researchers is that, if attacked, Iran could stage strikes on American or allied interests from Nicaragua, deploying the Iranian terrorist group Hezbollah and Revolutionary Guard operatives already in Latin America.

Sound familiar?  That’s because it’s the plot from Red Dawn.  Just switch out the USSR for Iran and Gordon Chang for Patrick Swayze and there you go.

Artificially Narrow Margins

Did anyone think it was odd that A) Chavez’s referendum failed so narrowly and B) just how sanguine he was at accepting the results?  Well, if Jorge Castañeda is right, then those suspicious were probably justified:

But by midweek enough information had emerged to conclude that Chávez did, in fact, try to overturn the results. As reported in El Nacional, and confirmed to me by an intelligence source, the Venezuelan military high command virtually threatened him with a coup d’état if he insisted on doing so. Finally, after a late-night phone call from Raúl Isaías Baduel, a budding opposition leader and former Chávez comrade in arms, the president conceded—but with one condition: he demanded his margin of defeat be reduced to a bare minimum in official tallies, so he could save face and appear as a magnanimous democrat in the eyes of the world

Hmm, this is obviously unconfirmed and no doubt Chavez and his allies in both Venezuela and the American press will deny this, but it does have an air of plausibility about it.  The involvement of Baduel, Chavez’s former Defense Minister, is interesting.  He has become something of a lodestar for the opposition to gather around.  He effectively symbolizes the anti-Chavez forces move from a collection of disenfranchised plutocrats who either tried to actively subvert the democratic process or refused to engage in it to a more broad based group who doesn’t want the inegalitarian Venezuela of the past and instead insists on the maintenance of democratic norms in the face of Chavez’s increasing power.

It’s also heartening to see that within the Venezuelan government, there are those who are willing to stand up to Chavez and refuse to enable his worst instincts.  While I’m sure some contributors to the Nation would see the military’s prevention of Chavez disregarding the referendum defeat as just reactionaries subverting the people’s will , there has to be some sort of institutional countervailing power to the executive.  Of course, Chavez and his supporters don’t have much ground to stand on, seeing as he first came into prominence in a failed military coup.

Via Dan Drezner

Overcoming Bias: Hugo Chavez and The Nation

What follow are my thoughts on Venezuela, Chavez and the referendum. They are poorly organized, hastily written and may be self contradictory. All the fun is below the fold.

Robin Hanson on the Virtues of Selling Babies

In debates about in-vitro fertilization, stem cell research and organ payments,  a trump card often pulled by conservative bioethicsts is that if you pay women for their eggs or organs, it will lead to exploitation of those women, who would then be exploited and “forced” to undergo risky surgery.  While intuitively, it seems wrong to pay poor people for their organs/eggs/stem cells, upon further thinking, it’s hard to see how its different than paying poor people to do any demeaning work — or work that others don’t want to do.  So while we may feel like we’re being benevolent by prohibiting poor people from selling their bodies, we are probably just limiting their already limited opportunities to participate in the labor force.

This is all a long way of introducing Robin Hanson’s screed on Western adoption from Guatemala;

It is in general a good thing if willing women are induced by money to have babies families want to adopt.  Not only do the woman and the family benefit, but the baby gets a life!  Positive externalities don’t get much larger than this.  We need lower, not higher, barriers to such exchange.

To lower the lawyer’s cut, simplify the law and lower barriers to entry.  And why begrudge the mother $3000 when US agencies take a $6000 cut for “paperwork”? How does it help her to limit her options?  Do we really have good reasons to think mothers systematically misjudge such options?
On my way to visit Tikal in Guatemala, my tour guide proudly noted how development agencies had helped the local village switch to producing art, rather than the usual exports.  It seemed such agencies valued art production well beyond the income it brings.  Their priorities, art over bananas over babies, are the opposite of mine.

The alternatives to Western adoption seem to be that Guatemalan women would have the same number of children, because birth rates are high for cultural, economic and developmental factors, but instead would have to raise all of them, meaning that the average Guatemalan child’s welfare is reduced in two ways.  One, there are more children for the woman to raise, meaning that their average attention and resources devoted to them would be reduced.  This effect is compounded by the fact that, ideally, women would receive payments, meaning they could invest more in their remaining children.

This is speculative, but large scale rich-country adoption of developing nation children could in fact accelerate them through the demographic transition.  The demographic transition model holds that in pre-industrialized socities, both birth and death rates are high meaning population growth is very low.  In industrialization, death rates crash due to medical and economic advances, but birth rates remain high and come down much slower.  During this period, population growth is massive.  The third stage of the transition is when birth rates — often due to increased economic and educational independence and opportunities for women — fall to very low levels, and population growth again slows down.

If large scale adoption were to occur, developing countries with high birth rate to death rate ratios would initially still have high fertility, but the effective fertility would drop and women could raise fewer children with more money. As that happens, women would have an independent source of income, meaning they could pursue other educational and economic opportunities, which would then lead to a decrease in total fertility.  Sure, it may not be an ideal way to generate income for women in the developing world, but it’s not like there are a whole lot better ideas out there.

Venezuela Follow UP

My post on Hugo Chavez and the left wing response to him looks a little overexcited in light of his referendum not winning even a bare majority of votes.  Both Yglesias and Klein impishly point that the case for Hugo Chavez being a dictator is looking thin considering that A) He lost the vote and B)it appears like he is going to accept the results.

But that doesn’t change the fact that even putting up such radical changes like getting rid of presidential term limits, increasing presidential control over selecting local leaders, allowing indefinite declarations of a state of emergency for as long”the causes that motivated it remain” and eliminating central bank autonomy are the type of radical institutional reforms that shouldn’t be put up to a simple, 50+1 vote.  Especially when Chavez has defenestrated most opposition media and controls much of the branches of the Venezuelan government, it would have been folly to assume that this referendum was a legitimate operation.

He is still an illiberal leader with both an outized personality and a prominent authoritarian streak who remains in power and shows no signs of ever leaving. I’m still very sceptical that he will ever vacate power in a legal fashion. His defeat this past weekend doesn’t change that opinion.

Chavez Loses

The Times is claiming that Chavez had admitted defeat in the referendum on his set of constitutional amendments. As they say, developing…

UPDATE: BBC is running a more complete story, “Voters rejected the sweeping reforms by a margin of 51% to 49%, the chief of the National Electoral Council said…Correspondents say the defeat means that Mr Chavez will have to step down as president when his current term in office expires.”

We’ll see if Chavez will actually step down when the term, but at least if Chavez makes moves towards dictatorship, he will have to drop the pretense of popular support.

Chavez and History

It’s becoming abundantly clear that Hugo Chavez is nothing more than self aggrandizing, institution destroying, soon-to-be dictator who is fast creating a personality cult  in Venezuela.  While he doesn’t appear to be particularly pernicious leader, as far as dictators go, we on the Left would do well to quickly distance ourselves from him and openly call him out for his authoritarian, repressive nature.  Yes, conservatives often use Chavez as a cudgel to bash us, and while I don’t want to sound like Jamie Kirchick or Nick Cohen, crying crocodile tears over the fall of the “decent left”, I’d prefer that in 20 or 30 years, when Chavez is still  in power and has fully devolved into a Venezuelan Castro, we’re not remembered for being taken in by another charismatic Latin America populist.  The guy is not very much different from Putin, Musharraf, Mubarak or any other sundry dictator.

Of course, this doesn’t mean we have to turn into Rick Santorum and go around claiming that Chavez is part of deadly anti-American alliance whose goal is “the destruction of our civilization.”  We’ve done great damage to ourselves by turning a blind eye to Stalin in the 30s, Mao in the 60s and, in some corners, still hedging on Castro (just don’t talk about the Cuban health care system, ever). Should we try to destabilize Chavez or meddle in the upcoming referendum? Of course not.  And we should eschew brinksmanship or anything resembling our Cuba policy.  But none of this makes Chavez remotely palatable.  Let’s not get this one wrong.

Operation Pincer

This story is pretty big on Digg, and has appeared on Counterpunch, venezuelanalysis.com andHuffPost - apparently the Venezuelan government has uncovered a CIA memo outlining a plan to destabilize the government:

an internal CIA memorandum has been obtained by Venezuelan counterintelligence from the US Embassy in Caracas that reveals a very sinister - almost fantastical, were it not true - plan to destabilize Venezuela during the coming days. The plan, titled “OPERATION PLIERS” was authored by CIA Officer Michael Middleton Steere and was addressed to CIA Director General Michael Hayden in Washington. Steere is stationed at the US Embassy in Caracas under the guise of a Regional Affairs Officer. The internal memorandum, dated November 20, 2007, references the “Advances of the Final Stage of Operation Pliers”, and confirms that the operation is coordinated by the team of Human Intelligence (HUMINT) in Venezuela. The memo summarizes the different scenarios that the CIA has been working on in Venezuela for the upcoming referendum vote on December 2nd. The Electoral Scenario, as it’s phrased, confirms that the voting tendencies will not change substantially before Sunday, December 2nd, and that the SI (YES) vote in favor of the constitutional reform has an advantage of about 10-13 points over the NO vote. The CIA estimates abstention around 60% and states in the memo that this voting tendency is irreversible before the elections.

I’m conflicted.  While the historical trend is that the US will meddle in Latin America almost as a matter of habit, it’s also very easy to believe that the Chavez government is lying to deligitimize any opposition to his referndum or to the government in general by calling them American stooges.  If the US is doing this, it’s stupid and won’t work, and will only entrench Chavez (see Castro, Fidel).  But we should all be sceptical.  The “copy” of the memo floating around the net is in Spanish, with only an English translation.  My inclination is to think this is BS, but highly plausible BS.

Glories of Free Trade

Bloggingheads TV honcho Bob Wright has long talked about how membership in international organizations like the WTO could be a powerful carrot and stick to force countries to reform their political and economic systems.  In many cases, our policies of economic isolation of countries we don’t like haven’t  been effective at being an impetus for political or economic reform (see Iraq, Cuba, Myanmar, Iran).  It’s mostly because we haven’t been credible in offering these countries a light out of the tunnel, for Iran and Iraq, there never was (or will be) a free trade deal to sign, so the leaders don’t have a large incentive to give up their power in the hope of improving their economic situation.  Robert Novak’s recent column, however, reports that Democratic pressure on Colombia, in advance of voting on their proposed FTA with the US, has lead to Uribe to start cleaning up his corrupt military:

The forced resignation two weeks ago, under pressure from President Alvaro Uribe, of three prominent officers accused of drug trafficking is not likely to end the shakeup in Colombia’s army and navy. More heads will roll in a long-overdue purge of corruption in the military. The credit has to go to the left-wing members of Congress who have taken over the Colombian account on Capitol Hill since the Democratic victory in the 2006 elections.

A conservative American with close, longtime ties to Colombia put it to me bluntly: “The firing of these officers is seen as President Uribe’s way of clearing the decks to make the Democrats in Congress happy, in order to secure the free-trade agreement. There are plenty more generals and admirals to get the heave-ho.”

Can I say how much I love Congressman McGovern, who’s leading the pressure on Colombia to clean up their corrupt, cartel infected military?  I mean, we get to relive the glory days of congressional opposition to militant right wingers in Latin America and do it as a pretext to a FTA?! Fantastic!

As a side note, this is a great example why union, environmentalist and general left wing opposition to small, bilateral FTAs is so counterproductive.  Even if  free trade was such a bad thing for manufacturing jobs, wages and the living standards of the United States (I don’t think they are, but roll with me anyway) an FTA with Colombia or CAFTA wouldn’t do anything to exasperate that (dubious) trend, instead, FTAs are a way of integrating small countries into the global financial system, allowing them to access a large export market and a great incentive for political reform.  Of course, being a committed (yet liberal) globalist, I want to see a WTO round complete with a deal to sign that cuts down on Western and Japanese agricultural subsidies, but until then, these regional FTAs are the way to go.

PS - There’s an interesting study that the Atlantic wrote up showing how CAFTA has improved the living standards of small time rural farmers - “The study finds that although rural incomes will likely decline as protective tariffs are phased out over the next 20 years or so, food prices in those countries will drop enough in almost every scenario to make up the difference—often with extra cash to spare. The typical rural household in CAFTA countries devotes a substantial chunk of its earnings to buying basic food items, and import tariffs (some as high as 154 percent) inflate their cost. As a result, the authors find, “lower food prices would mitigate and, in most cases, reverse the negative effect that lower incomes would have on rural welfare.””