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Bombshell Postal

SOUTH AFRICA

The head of South Africa’s Post Office, Fathima Gany, recently dropped a bombshell on lawmakers. As the Financial Times reported, Gany announced that she needed a $214 million bailout for the service or else it would be forced to shut down. She shed 4,000 of 11,000 staff and closed a third of the postal service’s branches, yet still couldn’t claw out of bankruptcy or the $487 million debt load.

The fate of country’s Post Office, founded in 1792, symbolizes the problems that South Africa faces today. Basic services are decaying. Economic opportunities are tightening. Costs are rising. Poverty is inveterate. The International Monetary Fund listed those and other problems facing the country.

The debt especially concerns many outside of the country. China, for example, has invested heavily in South Africa as well as other countries on the continent. As outlined by the China Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, these deals often involve Chinese financing of extractive industries, like mines; infrastructure to move goods, like new railways, roads, ports, and airports; and diplomatically and politically beneficial projects like sports stadiums.

At the recent China-Africa Summit in Beijing, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, for example, felt moved to refute sentiments that Chinese investors in Africa were setting the stage for a “debt trap” where Africa was forever in hock to the Chinese, Reuters noted. In the same remarks, he said he and Chinese leaders had reached a new energy deal that would benefit South Africans. He didn’t specify details.

But it is clear: Ramaphosa is presiding over a state that is crumbling. A judge recently sent a top official in the country’s national passenger railway system to prison for 15 years for working using forged university qualifications, for instance, the Associated Press reported. The case revealed that he even used a fake job offer to entice railway executives to double his salary to convince him to stay with the organization.

Meanwhile, as Ramaphosa spoke in the Chinese capital, his political standing at home was perhaps weaker than ever. As World Politics Review wrote, Ramaphosa only managed to barely win reelection in the South African Parliament in June after promising to share power with opposition leaders and appointing their handpicked candidates for a few cabinet seats.

He was vulnerable because his party, the African National Congress, which overturned the racist Apartheid regime in the 1990s, had performed poorly at the May polls, losing its parliamentary majority for the first time in three decades. The party had failed to fix the country’s most pressing challenges: high unemployment, inequality and corruption, explained CBS News.

Still, as Chatham House wrote, “South Africa’s election provides an important example (for the region): that leaderships can no longer take power for granted, and that citizens across the region are seeking real change … and are impatient (for it).”

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Stuck in the Middle

JORDAN

The Jordanian government approved an electoral law two years ago, and amendments to it in February, that officials portrayed as a step forward in the kingdom’s slow but steady democratization.

The measure is intended to increase representation for women while lowering the minimum age for lawmakers from 30 to 25, for example. It is also designed to give birth to new political parties and coalitions that reflect the will of moderate Jordanians and temper Islamist tendencies in the population, the Arab News wrote.

Still, when voters go to the polls to elect a new lower house of parliament on Sept. 10, “it will be a moment of truth” for the kingdom’s reform policies, wrote Chatham House, a United Kingdom-based think tank.

The law’s defenders say that expanding the pool of potential elected officials might help the government address Jordan’s poor economy and the instability surrounding events in its neighborhood, namely the Palestinian West Bank and the Israelis who occupy it, Xinhua reported.

But the new system also retains much of the old one in ways that exhibit the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan’s complicated position today in the Middle East.

Jordanian electoral law, for instance, still favors the countryside and tribal provinces – where support for King Abdullah II is stronger compared with urban centers where liberals favor democratic reforms and Islamists related to the main opposition group, the Islamic Action Front (IAF). The latter is the ideological ally of Hamas, now fighting Israel in the Gaza Strip, Reuters explained.

Usually, parties loyal to the monarch win these elections handily. This year, however, the events in Gaza could change things. Many Jordanian voters are the descendants of those who fled their lands in Israel after a series of wars erupted following the founding of the Jewish state in 1948.

“The conflict is likely to have an outsized impact on this year’s election and popular domestic support for the Palestinian cause could help the IAF and other Islamist candidates in their electoral bids,” wrote Washington DC-based analytical group Freedom House.

Recently, for instance, Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said that any Israeli plan to push Palestinians out of the West Bank into Jordanian territory would treated as a “declaration of war,” noted Middle East Monitor. Those comments came after Israeli forces launched major strikes in the West Bank, leaving dozens dead and much destruction in their way, as the Associated Press described.

The pressure between internal and external forces is one reason why US-friendly Jordan, which signed a peace deal with Israel in 1994, is not necessarily a beacon of stability in the region any longer, argued Lancaster University international relations professor Simon Mabon in the Conversation.

In recent weeks, regular demonstrations against the war in Gaza have escalated, with protestors now focusing on the Hashemite court and accusing the king of colluding with the Israelis.

As a result, “Jordan remains on the precipice,” wrote Mabon. “Bringing peace to Gaza is a necessary step in reducing tensions in the Hashemite kingdom, but it alone will probably be insufficient.”

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What It Takes

INDIA

Does India have what it takes to become a great power on the world stage?

University of Chicago political scientist Paul Post wrote in World Politics Review that he is skeptical.

While India’s population and economy are growing and the country appears ready to invest more to make its military top class, the massive country – the world’s largest democracy – still faces major issues, from poverty to ethnic rivalries and violence among its many different cultures, languages and ethnic communities, Post argued.

“It is not yet a great power, let alone a superpower,” he explained. “For now, it remains a sleeping giant, and there’s no guarantee it will ever awaken.”

India boosters like Martin Wolf of the Financial Times might disagree. Martin recently argued that India will rise to the top of the geopolitical hierarchy for no other reason than its population is now the largest in the world and growing.

India, noted Martin, is on track to hit 1.67 billion people in 2050, while 1.32 billion people will live in China and the US population will be 380 million.

Post was also raising questions about a “great power partnership” between India and the US, as outlined in an Atlantic Council article by Free & Open Indo-Pacific Forum President and Atlantic Council non-resident senior fellow Kaush Arha and Samir Saran, the president of the Observer Research Foundation, India. India has always maintained relations with China, Russia, and other US rivals.

Among India’s greatest challenges to achieving its full potential arguably is caste, or “the most important fault line in Indian society,” noted the Economist. As the BBC explained, the caste system is a 3,000-year-old form of social stratification that divides society into rigid hierarchical groups based on economic class, profession, family history, and so forth.

In an example of how caste sows disunity in India, the country’s Supreme Court recently issued controversial decisions on the matter, rejecting a petition to declare the traditional caste system as unconstitutional, wrote the Jurist. “There are provisions in the Constitution specifically referring to caste, to socially and educationally backward classes,” noted a justice.

They further found that officials could not fire government and bank staffers hired due to their caste even if the government had otherwise removed their castes from the so-called “schedules” that track caste statuses throughout the subcontinent, added the Hindu.

Perhaps most importantly, the court also legalized the sub-classification of folks within the castes in which they are already classified. The Indian Express was critical of the idea, saying it would cause more problems in the lowest castes as they jockey for status within the bottom.

If India can overcome this problem, it has the right to be a global superpower.

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Weaponizing Migration

NICARAGUA

In Senegal, Haiti, India, China, and Libya, the hot new ticket is Nicaragua.

Famed for its beaches, volcanos and rainforests, citizens of dozens of countries are attracted by a different lure: It’s become a major gateway to the United States.

“In Senegal, it’s all over the streets – everyone’s talking about Nicaragua, Nicaragua, Nicaragua,” Gueva Ba, 40, of the capital Dakar, told the Associated Press.

Ba paid about $10,000 to get to Nicaragua in July 2023, where he then made his way to the US border with Mexico. After crossing it, he was caught, detained and deported a few months later, along with 131 other Senegalese who had also tried their luck.

Ba, like many of the tens of thousands of migrants now trying to use this route, had already tried to make it to Europe 11 times by boat from Morocco across the Mediterranean.

But with Nicaragua, he knew he had a special advantage; not only did he not need a visa to land there, but more importantly, Nicaragua is actively encouraging such migration as a way to punish the US for sanctions against the repressive regime of President Daniel Ortega, in power for 28 of the past 45 years, say US officials.

“The Ortega government knows they have few important policy tools at hand to confront the United States … so they have armed migration as a way to attack,” said Manuel Orozco, director of the migration at the Inter-American Dialogue, in an interview with NPR. “This is definitely a concrete example of weaponizing migration as a foreign policy.”

Beyond a tit-for-tat for sanctions, Nicaragua’s government, led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), is making millions of dollars with its business of human trafficking, imposing arbitrary entry fees on the migrant arrivals that can be as much as $200 per person, as well as thousands of dollars in landing and departure fees imposed on the charters, wrote El País. And those prices are going up – arrivals from Africa now will be charged more than $1,100 to land in Nicaragua.

US Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Brian Nichols said he was “concerned” about the “dramatic” increase in flights to Nicaragua to promote migration. “No one should profit from the desperation of vulnerable migrants – not smugglers, private companies, public officials or governments,” he wrote on X. The US slapped new sanctions on Nicaragua in May over the migration issue.

The numbers tell the story. Between May 2023 and May 2024, more than 1,000 flights with migrants from countries such as Libya, Morocco, Uzbekistan, India, and Tajikistan landed in the Nicaraguan capital Managua, while in a six-month period between June to November 2023, about 500 flights, mostly from Haiti and Cuba, landed there, according to the Inter-American Dialogue.

At the same time, while arrests for illegal crossings on the US-Mexico border topped 6.4 million between January 2021 and January 2024 (before falling steeply later in 2024), Mexicans accounted for only about one-quarter of those arrested, the rest coming from more than 100 countries, wrote the think tank. From July to December 2023 there were more than 20,200 arrests of just Senegalese migrants for crossing the border illegally, 10 times the figure for arrests in the same period in 2022.

“Migration flows to the United States have more than doubled to over eight million people annually from 2020 and 2023,” the organization wrote, adding that Nicaragua is responsible for at least 10 percent of all migration that has arrived at the Mexico-US border.

The charters first began in 2021, when the Nicaraguan government opened the doors of the Augusto C. Sandino International Airport, relaxed visa requirements for African nationals and welcomed the first migrant arrivals from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Curacao, and Haiti. Today, passengers now fly from countries in South America, North Africa and Central Asia, to the country on their way to the US to avoid the dangerous crossing at the Darien Gap at the Colombian-Panamanian border, the World wrote.

The Senegalese and others became part of a surge in migration at the southern border, made up for the first time of people from countries such as Mauritania, Ghana, Tajikistan and Bangladesh, who usually head towards Europe. They were able to coordinate the trip because of travel agents, smugglers and the information that comes from social media and apps like WhatsApp, and pay for the trip with electronic payments.

Meanwhile, Nicaragua itself has been increasingly contributing to the flows headed toward the US border over the past few years, according to the Migration Policy Institute. It has deported hundreds of its own nationals, while the deepening repression in the country has led to thousands more deciding to head north.

“Nicaragua is caught in a spiral of violence marked by the persecution of all forms of political opposition, whether real or perceived, both domestically and abroad,” said Jan Simon, the chair of a United Nations human rights group that accused the Nicaraguan regime led by Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, of “crimes against humanity.”

A former police special forces officer, going only by the name Edwin, was ordered to shoot protesters during mass anti-government demonstrations in 2018. Instead, he fled, before being captured, imprisoned, raped, and severely tortured.

These days, he lives in exile in Costa Rica, making ends meet with odd jobs while waiting for asylum in the US. He worries about Nicaraguan officials finding him.

“There were moments of desperation when I thought: ‘It would have been better if I stayed … killed all those people,” he told the Washington Post. “But I didn’t go into the police to kill people.”

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Victories, Great and Fixed

ALGERIA

Imane Khelif returned to Algeria a hero.

The Olympic gold medalist who garnered headlines over “uninformed speculation about her sex,” wrote the Associated Press, was the star in a parade celebrating her victories in her hometown of Tiaret, around 300 miles to the south of the capital, Algiers.

“She’s the daughter of the people,” said Dhikra Boukhavouba, an Algerian who studies in Paris, in an interview with the Washington Post.

Some Algerians won’t get a chance to take to the streets to enjoy similar jubilation after the North African country’s general election on Sept. 7.

Algerian police recently arrested opposition figure Fethi Ghares, picking him up at his home. The officers said they needed him for an “interrogation,” his wife told Agence France-Presse, but they didn’t explain why or produce a warrant. Officials still have not given any reason for his detainment, but the timing was unmistakable.

A secular leftist who opposes conservative Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune of the ruling National Liberation Front political party, Ghares had recently served two years in jail for insulting the president, harming national unity, and other charges. He formerly served as head of the Democratic and Social Movement party before Tebboune banned the party, added Africa News.

Tebboune, 78, is expected to win the election, earning a second and final five-year term, reported Reuters. The president has shored up support throughout the North African country’s political elite and its major civic and corporate institutions. Energy exports have helped make him popular. An OPEC member, Algeria is a key supplier of gas to Europe. Algeria is on track to double its gas exports in the next few months as winter approaches and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues to constrain supply.

To further consolidate his power, the president has also sought to control information, enacting new media laws that have resulted in more arrests of journalists, less free speech and expression, and pliant, state-owned press operations, World Politics Review explained.

Lastly, in addition to the arrest of Ghares, election officials rejected 13 candidates for the presidency, allowing only two to run against Tebboune: moderate Islamist Abdelaali Hassani and center-left socialist Youcef Aouchiche, wrote Radio France Internationale.

These efforts might be vital to Tebboune’s chances. Only 40 percent of voters turned out to cast their ballots in 2019 when he won 58 percent of the vote after pro-democracy protests weakened the longtime President Abdelaziz Bouteflika.

Tebboune has barred such protests, noted Le Monde.

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The Pressure Cooker

TAJIKISTAN

A statue of Ismoil Somoni is a big attraction in Dushanbe, the capital of the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan. In the 10th century, he ruled over an empire that included parts of what are now Afghanistan, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. “Somonis” is the name for Tajikistan’s currency.

Tajik President Emomali Rahmon – who has been in office since 1992 when he and his fellow former Soviet elites fought a four-year civil war against liberal democrats, nationalists and Islamists that resulted in as many as 150,000 deaths – has promoted Somoni as well as other Persian figures in recent years.

As Le Monde diplomatique reported, this mythologizing of Tajikistan’s Aryan past has been Rahmon’s way of building a sense of Tajik national identity.

It’s also likely one reason why Rahmon recently decided to ban women from donning attire including the hijab, the black veil that many Muslim women wear, even though 97 percent of Tajiks are Muslim, wrote Euronews. Instead, the government is encouraging women to wear traditional Tajik clothing, or Western garb.

The idea is to suppress religious extremism, say Rahmon’s allies, according to Radio Free Europe, even as some would argue that Islam doesn’t necessarily compel women to wear hijabs. Men with long beards – a common custom in Muslim countries – have also received frowns from officials. Police trimmed the beards of 13,000 men in Khatlon Province in 2015, for example.

Human rights activists say the policy violates civil liberties and freedom of expression, wrote the EU Reporter.

Rahmon has been pursuing these kinds of measures for years. In 2011, lawmakers passed a law banning minors from entering places of worship without permission and punishing parents who send their kids to foreign religious schools. In 2017, the government shut down almost 2,000 mosques, converting many into tea shops and health clinics.

Critics don’t believe the hijab ban will work. Tajikistan is one of the poorest countries in Central Asia, and Tajiks have few economic opportunities at home. Instead, many leave for menial jobs in Russia. Others opt for Islamic militant groups because they believe radicalism provides them with more dignity and options for the future, argued Emerging Europe. Rules about clothing won’t change those conditions, it added.

Tajikistan certainly has a problem with terrorists. Russian authorities say the terrorists who attacked Moscow’s Crocus City Hall in March, killing 140 people and injuring 360, carried Tajik passports, for example, reported TRT World.

Nazila Ghanea, the United Nations human rights agency’s special rapporteur, believes the restrictions are counterproductive, the news organization added, stressing that it plays a strong role in promoting radicalism within society.

That’s exacerbated by “Tajikistan’s geographic isolation, weak economy and repressive government, (which) will leave it particularly vulnerable to destabilization and becoming a hotbed for radicalization for the foreseeable future,” wrote analytical group Stratfor, adding that a looming succession crisis due to the ailing and aging leader (who’s 71 years old) could inspire even more radicalization among the population.

Meanwhile, there’s another crackdown on belief in the country – the government announced in late August it would suppress witches, warlocks and their clients, wrote the Times of Central Asia. It appears the government has concerns that “deeply rooted beliefs revolving around the supernatural are a threat to stability.”

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Neighborly Relations

NORTH MACEDONIA

Five months after he was elected to office in early May, North Macedonia’s nationalist, right-wing Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski unveiled his plan to integrate the country into the European Union.

“The government is fully committed to the realization of our strategic goal of full integration into the EU,” said Mickoski, according to local English-language newspaper Sloboden Pecat, or ‘Free Press.’ “In this process, we not only see the future of our country as a full member of the EU, but also as a modern, economically stable and prosperous country that meets the highest European standards.”

The prime minister – and leader of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization – Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity political party (VMRO-DPMNE) – might be speaking out of both sides of his mouth, however. His election already has raised eyebrows among skeptical officials in European capitals and Washington.

VMRO-DPMNE lost power in 2017 when voters ousted former Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski amid corruption allegations, authoritarian leanings, the unfair suppression of political opponents, and fears that his nationalist government was unenthusiastic about joining the EU, Reuters explained. His successors failed to make much headway in their efforts to achieve accession, however, leading citizens to give Mickoski a chance. But Mickoski appears inclined to ruffle feathers abroad and at home.

American diplomats, for instance, were monitoring events in North Macedonia after Mickoski claimed that leaders of the Democratic Union for Integration, an ethnic Albanian opposition party, were threatening to destabilize the country, Balkan Insight reported. North Macedonian security forces and ethnic Albanians briefly clashed in 2001, raising fears that violence akin to what happened throughout the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s might erupt in this corner of the former communist – and since disintegrated – country again.

Mickoski has also said that he would refuse to refer to his country as the Republic of North Macedonia, added Radio Free Europe, because he believed the “North” appellation was a “shameful adjective.” Many European countries, especially Greece, had refused to recognize North Macedonia as an independent nation unless it differentiated itself from Macedonia, a province in northern Greece. Greek leaders didn’t want their neighbors to the north ever claiming that Greek territory should belong to them.

Even though Mickoski used his country’s official name after taking his oath of office, Greek leaders warned that the prime minister’s comments could complicate North Macedonia’s EU bid, the Associated Press noted. Reopening an issue that had been put to rest in 2019 was not “good neighborly relations,” they said, according to the Anadolu Agency.

That, the AP added, could bring Mickoski’s plans to join the EU to an immediate halt because Greece could, and would, likely veto its bid. Even so, North Macedonian President Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova later insisted that she had a “human right” to refer to the country as she liked.

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Getting Polished

BOTSWANA

The president of Botswana, Mokgweetsi Masisi, appeared transfixed recently as he held up the rough-hewn, 2,492-carat diamond in his hands. The rock, he said, would finance the future.

“Kids going to school. Food coming in,” Masisi said at a press conference. “It’s a real diamond. Coming from a real country brought out by real people impacting real people.”

Diamonds and power have long been friends, especially in southern Africa.

Gems in the British crown jewels, for instance, include shards of the Cullinan diamond, the largest ever found, wrote the Washington Post. The Cullinan was a 3,106-carat stone mined in South Africa in 1905. Other shards figure in other British royal household rituals.

Masisi and his allies have sought to wrest control of the diamond industry from the London-based De Beers Group and created the Diamonds for Development Fund to steer diamond revenues into local economic development, National Jeweler reported. He has also proposed requiring mining companies to sell a 24 percent stake in mines to local investors or the government, Reuters added.

Diamonds have arguably given Botswana headaches, too, however. Speaking to France 24 at a summit of the Group of Seven in Paris, Masisi criticized the bloc’s mandate that all diamonds sold in the wealthy bloc receive certification in Belgium to prevent Russia from profiting from the diamond trade. During the same event, he said Africa should leverage its resources to produce its own vaccines rather than relying on foreign relief to maintain public health, a problem underscored during the Covid-19 pandemic and more recently the outbreak of Mpox.

Masisi has maintained good relations with the US in a bid to hedge potential problems related to Russian commerce. African defense leaders recently met in Botswana, for example, to discuss security challenges on the continent, reported Voice of America. The US organized the meeting in part to counter the expansion of Russian influence in sub-Saharan Africa.

The recently discovered 2,492-carat diamond was in an area that has previously produced many precious stones due to the region’s volcanic activity in the distant past. “All of the stars aligned with that volcanic eruption, and the conditions were just perfect,” diamond expert Paul Zimnisky told the New York Times.

Even diamonds can’t solve all of Botswana’s problems, unfortunately. The value of the stone has slumped recently, dragging on the country’s economy, wrote Bloomberg. These shifts are tough for a landlocked nation that faces unique challenges due to its lack of access to the sea, the United Nations noted.

Still, the country has growing clout and vigorously pushed back on Europe recently when it felt itself slighted or taken advantage of. For example, when the United Kingdom tried to make a deal to send asylum seekers landing on its shores to Botswana for processing, the country said no (Rwanda accepted the deal).

Then earlier this year, European countries including Germany pushed for a ban on trophies from hunting elephants and other wildlife in Africa for conservation reasons. Botswana, with the world’s largest elephant population, reacted by offering to send 20,000 elephants to Germany. “It is very easy to sit in Berlin and have an opinion about our affairs in Botswana,” Masisi said.

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Tech and Tradition

PARAGUAY

Cryptocurrency miners whose servers generate their digital product have flocked to Paraguay to take advantage of the landlocked South American country’s low taxes and cheap electricity.

But as power shortages continue to plague the capital of Asunción, many of these crypto miners also steal electricity, as the Economist wrote. Now, the government is launching a crackdown that includes 10-year jail sentences for such theft.

For example, Paraguayan authorities have seized 10,000 mining computers this year alone from these so-called “crypto cowboys,” noted the Week.

Companies have lined up to register for business in the crypto mecca rather than fleeing the country, claimed officials who operate the public power company, according to Bitcoin.com. At least one has decamped for Brazil, however, in search of friendlier climates.

These developments highlight how Paraguay is embracing future technologies while still grappling with its past, figuring out how to uphold the law and balance the power of the state with personal freedoms and civil liberties.

The brass feet sitting on a plinth in Asunción illustrate the point. The feet belong to a statue that commemorated Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, until citizens tore it down in 1989. The longest-ruling dictator in Latin America, Stroessner took power 70 years ago, killing hundreds and throwing thousands of others in jail.

As Al Jazeera explained, Stroessner was a classic strongman who deployed the military to aid his political allies in the country’s elite in their oppression of ordinary folks. His security forces would massacre people who dared claim they owned land, for example, over the objections of business leaders and others who would prefer otherwise.

The generalissimo’s legacy, like the brass feet, remains, however, in the form of his conservative Colorado political party, whose leaders continue to rule the country.

Paraguayan President Santiago Peña, for instance, is working hard to attract cryptocurrency miners, other tech companies, and foreign investment to decrease Paraguay’s dependence on agricultural exports. While on a recent trip to Argentina to boost economic development, however, his party expelled a crusading anti-corruption senator from the legislature – undermining the rule of law image Peña was trying to project.

“As Peña seeks to showcase the country’s potential on the global stage, its democratic institutions remain mired in local networks of patronage and corruption,” wrote World Politics Review.

A recent shootout between police and drug smugglers at the home of another Paraguayan lawmaker and Colorado party member also showed how connections between the country’s elite and criminals continue unabated.

Peña will need to tackle his country’s big problems, especially corruption, before he can attract more investment, say analysts. “This is entrenched through all political parties, at all levels,” said Christopher Newton, an investigator at research organization InSight Crime, in an interview with the Associated Press. “When it comes to people who have the power to make changes, a lot of those people are the ones who will likely benefit from not making changes.”

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Tilting at Windmills

AZERBAIJAN

Vafa Nagi is running for a seat in parliament as an independent in Azerbaijan’s parliamentary elections Sept. 1.

“I have no chance to win,” she told Radio Free Europe.

Around the world, opposition candidates like Nagi, a former journalist, often boycott elections as a show of disapproval of an election process they say is rigged in favor of the incumbents –Bangladesh’s election in January, for example.

But Nagi says that taking part in a race that is certain to be swept by the dominant New Azerbaijan Party, headed by President Ilham Aliyev, along with other loyal parties because of the iron control they collectively have on the country, still makes sense.

“You can see that people need someone to tell their problems to, people need someone to care about them,” she said of voters. And regarding her home district of Neftchala, she said, “People have been completely forgotten by officials.”

Still, many of her fellow opposition members are refusing to stand in the election. The question has divided the opposition for years, especially so during the presidential race in February, which Aliyev easily won, says Eurasianet.

So far, the largest opposition party, the Popular Front Party of Azerbaijan (AXCP), is boycotting the parliamentary race, as it did in February, to take away any legitimacy the race might have.

“We know that we won’t come to power through a boycott,” the party’s leader, Ali Karimli, told Meydan TV, an independent Azeri outlet. “But the question for us now is not how we will come to power, but whether we take part in the government’s charade of a fraudulent election?”

“The fact that the principled opposition … didn’t fit into Aliyev’s plan (for the election) is driving the arrogant regime crazy,” he added.

That was underscored by prosecutors starting an investigation into him in early August for slander and insult, according to JAMnews. About a dozen of his fellow party members are already in jail on “politically motivated” charges.

Meanwhile, Musavat, another large opposition party, has decided to take part in this one.

“I don’t think our participation will lead to democratic elections,” Musavat’s leader, Isa Qambar, told Voice of America. “But we don’t know any other way to change the system.”

Azerbaijan, a former Soviet satellite, has been one of the most repressive countries in the region since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, according to Freedom House. And Aliyev, who is running for his fifth term and has been in office since 2003 – shortly before his father, a former high-ranking KGB agent and then president of the country, died – has made the country even more repressive.

For example, last year, parliament passed a law that restricts political parties, duly dampening the activities and efficacy of opposition parties. Journalists and civil rights activists, meanwhile, are routinely arrested or harassed, wrote Human Rights Watch.

Analysts say the government occasionally allows a few opposition candidates to win, to keep the public engaged in the election. But Nagi is unlikely to be one of those acceptable candidates.

The powers-that-be have driven her out of office before.

Nagi was elected in 2019 to a municipal council in the Neftchala district, but made powerful enemies after she questioned the council about the illegal sale of lands and other governance and transparency issues, wrote the US Embassy in Azerbaijan.

The Embassy reported that “local officials launched a gender-based harassment and intimidation campaign against Vafa Nagi … the local municipal council chair reportedly ordered authorities to hang photographs of Nagi dressed in her swimsuit with the caption ‘Lady Gaga’ throughout the conservative village to embarrass and shame her and her family members.”

Soon after, she was ousted from the council.

Still, Nagi’s a glass-full type of candidate. She told RFE/RL that the situation can always get worse: “We are trying so our country doesn’t turn into Turkmenistan.”

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