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A daily brief about the world's most dangerous places from international war correspondent Chuck Holton
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Thursday Jan 03, 2019
Thursday Jan 03, 2019
Oil Prices threaten Iraq's recovery, Border Battles over the New Year and the Media has it's panties in a wad over Brazil's new President. We'll break it down in fifteen minutes here on the Hot Zone.
Hi Everybody. I'm Chuck Holton. It's thursday, the 3rd of January, and the new year is already off to a great start. Two presidents took office in Latin America - in Mexico and Brazil, and they are pursuing two radically different agendas. In Brazil, former paratrooper Jair Bolsonaro was inaugurated monday and is immediately ready to make a decree that will make it easier for Brazilian citizens to protect themselves with a firearm. He is also committing his administration to eradicating what he calls the marxist influences from brazilian government and academia. All of this is causing the liberal media to practically set their hair on fire. The Huffington Post is running an article which claims that democracy has failed in Brazil, even though the elections there were free and fair and there are no claims otherwise.
Brazil has suffered under marxist ideology in the past - it's recent left-wing president Luis Ignacio Lula de Silva is currently serving a twelve-year sentence for corruption, and under his administration the government pursued the policy we see so often from the left of making it's citizens more vulnerable and then claiming that doing so makes them safer. Under Lula's administration hundreds of thousands of legally-purchased guns were confiscated and destroyed, which left only criminals armed and led to one of the highest murder rates outside of an active war zone anywhere on the planet. Gangs took over the poorer communities and extracted a terrible price on the people who live there. Medical clinics closed in many communities because the streets were too violent for doctors to get to work, and tourism suffered greatly. I visited Rio De Janeiro last april and this is what I found:
[rio beach stand up]
Brazil was really the poster child for all of the restrictions on private gun ownership that are routinely called for here in the United States. All those "common sense gun laws" like universal background checks, age restrictions, standard capacity magazine bans and high taxes on ammunition failed to stop the bloodbath that has become the norm on the streets of Rio de Janeiro. Now, Brazilian citizens have been rushing to get firearms training in anticipation of finally being able to protect their families from the out of control crime in their neighborhoods. But they are going to need some new gun ranges with some new guns - I visited a gun range outside of Rio de Janeiro when I was there. Here's what that looked like.
[gun range stand up] C0004.MP4
One would hope that once President Bolsonaro loosens restrictions on gun ownership in Brazil, he'll also make it easier for guns to be imported, because the high cost of the guns in circulation means that currently guns are a rich man's sport - that is, only people with plenty of disposable income can afford to purchase one. Whether or not that was the intent of the previous administrations, the upshot is that the people who most need self-protection - the single mothers and people who live in poorer neighborhoods - are least able to get a gun for self defense.
One interesting side note is that one of the architects for Brazil's failed gun confiscation scheme was a guy named Pedro Abramovay, who served as the Brazilian minister of justice under the corrupt administration of Lula da Silva. It's worth pointing out that Abramovay's new job is working for none other than George Soros, the billionaire financier whose open society foundation funds lots of left-wing causes, from unfettered migration to gun control in the United States.
President Bolsonaro has committed to eradicating the Marxist influence from Brazilian society. But those Marxists aren't going away. Instead, they appear to be, at least in some sense, setting their sights on the United States and other countries in the Western Hemisphere.
Now let's turn to Mexico. Their new president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is a mirror image to Jair Bolsonaro. While he's also a populist, but on the other side of the spectrum. AMLO is the first leftist president Mexico has elected in almost 70 years. And he ran on a pro-migrant platform, raising the minimum wage and going easier on criminals accused of drug trafficking. From what I understand about Mexican politics, that last one might just be why he was allowed to win. There are a lot of experts who believe that the Mexican government is in reality just an arm of the drug cartels. At any rate, AMLO has had his hands full with tens of thousands of Central American Migrants camped out on both his southern border and his northern border. On New Year's eve there was a different kind of fireworks show in Tijuana as another group of migrants tried to cross the fence illegally into the US, then threw rocks at border patrol agents when they were unsuccessful. The Border patrol then used tear gas and pepper balls to discourage the rock throwers. And a good time was had by all.
Really, I think the Border Patrol should sell tickets to these events. Like hunting permits, only with pepper balls. I know a bunch of good old boys in West Virginia who would pay real money to go to the border and play "tag" with Honduran migrants trying to enter this country illegally. I'm not advocating injuring anyone, but paint balls with a little extra zing to it sounds like good clean fun, and maybe it'd help pay for the wall!.
No in all seriousness, it's a really unfortunate situation these migrants find themselves in. I traveled with them for a couple of days, and most of them were sold on the idea that it'd be an easy thing to hop the fence into the United States and get a job paying fifteen bucks an hour. There were many Christians who helped this group on their way, and without their help, these migrants could not have made it to the US southern border. This is why I believe Christians especially need to be very thoughtful about who we help and how we employ that help, because we have to ask ourselves whether it's actually loving to help someone do something that will likely break up their families, perhaps cause their children to die on a dangerous trek, and in the end, facilitate someone's breaking the law. I don't believe that is loving. Sometimes love has to be tough.
Okay, Lastly, real quick let's talk about the middle east. Iraq is slowly trying to recover from almost two decades of war, and that recovery isn't going very well. Not only has the country paid a tremendous price because of the precipitous pullout of US troops in 2011 which gave rise to ISIS, now plunging oil prices have cut the government's budget by almost a quarter. So while low gasoline prices might be a boon for American travelers, they could lead to further instability in the middle east, venezuela, and even hurt the job market in Texas.
Donald Trump has done a great job of encouraging job growth in the oil sector in the United States by approving pipelines and making strides to help fracking take off. Most people think that Saudi Arabia and Venezuela hold the world’s largest oil reserves. But the United States is actually number one. The problem is most of that oil is too costly to get out of the ground at current prices, and so the lower prices go at the pump, the more pain is being felt in the US oil industry. But while that might lead to some fracking companies laying people off or even going bankrupt, those low prices could lead to government instability in Iraq, which gets more than 95% of it's budget from oil revenues. That leaves the country more vulnerable to influence by countries like Turkey and Iran, because it can't cover even it's basic budget to run the country, much less begin to address the colossal challenge of reconstruction after years of war. Some 1.8 million people in Iraq are still internally displaced from their homes, according to the United Nations, several of it's major cities, like Mosul have been left in ruins by ISIS, and so low oil prices - today below 44 dollars a barrel, down from over 75 in October.
It will also be interesting to see how this affects two other hot zones, Russia and Venezuela. Russia has huge oil and natural gas reserves, but it's petroleum infrastructure is in serious need of repair and that won't happen at these prices. Venezuela is already a complete clown show, so maybe the silver lining here is that it's government will just do everyone a favor and collapse more quickly as their main source of income suffers. We shall see.
That's all for today. I'd love to get some feedback from you if you are liking the podcast. What would you like to hear more about? Should I have more guests on the show? Please like and subscribe wherever you get this podcast and head over to Patreon.com/hotzone to subscribe and support what we are doing. We've got some great things in store this year. I look forward to sharing them with you. I'm Chuck Holton, and you are listening to the Hot Zone.
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