In late October, Uruguayan president José Mujica announced that he planned to withdraw his country’s troops from Haiti, where they make up 11 percent of the U.N. peacekeeping mission. Citing the long delayed legislative elections, Mujica told the press:

One thing is to try to help the Haitian people build a police force that is in charge of security. That's fine… Another thing is being there indefinitely with a regime that we think is at least dubious in terms of a continuity of democratic renewal.

MINUSTAH, as the U.N. mission is known, has been in Haiti since 2004 following the coup that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In October the mission’s mandate was extended by the U.N. Security Council for another year, though a gradual drawdown of troops was also agreed. After his initial statements, Mujica traveled to Brazil where he met with President Dilma Rousseff. Brazil leads MINUSTAH and is the largest troop-contributing country, accounting for 16 percent of the personnel.

After the meeting, Mujica stated that he and Rousseff agreed that the mission should not become a “Praetorian Guard” to protect a government that was not moving forward democratically. On November 20, the U.N. spokesperson for the Secretary General acknowledged that “preliminary and informal discussions have taken place with the Uruguayan representatives in New York regarding the planned withdrawal of a part of their troops,” but that “no formal notification has as yet been exchanged.”

On November 25, before travelling to Haiti for a meeting with President Martelly, Uruguayan Foreign Minister Luis Almagro met in New York with Brazilian and U.N. officials to discuss MINUSTAH’s presence in Haiti. Almagro stated that while Uruguay would only gradually withdraw its troops in line with the Security Council resolution, if “autocratic” tendencies in the Haitian government continued, they would immediately withdraw. Specifically, Almagro conditioned continued Uruguayan support to MINUSTAH on the holding of the overdue legislative elections.

Regional Implications

In June 2012, the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) met to discuss MINUSTAH and agreed to form a working group “for the purposes of elaborating a scheme on the strategy, form, conditions, stages, and timeline of a Plan of Reduction of Contingents of the Military Component of the Mission.” Though there has been little movement since then, the recent actions by Uruguay may change that.

My former CBPP colleague Arloc Sherman has a great, just-the-facts post on the extent to which Americans experience economic hardship, like difficulty affording adequate food, living in overcrowded housing, not being able to pay rent or the mortgage on ti

Dean Baker
Truthout, December 4, 2013

Mark WeisbrotThe Guardian Unlimited, 3 de diciembre 2013. En Inglés

Mark WeisbrotThe Guardian, December 3, 2013 En español

In their new book, Jared Bernstein and CEPR's Dean Baker feature work sharing (a.k.a. short-time compensation) as a way to have more jobs in this economy. They highlight the program's striking success in Germany, where "its unemployment rate has actually fallen by more than 2.0 percentage points from its pre-crisis level, in spite of the fact that its economic growth has been no better than that of the United States."

In his Thanksgiving Day column, Nick Kristof highlights Bad Mommies in Poverty™ including: Alcoholic Mommy of preschooler; Teenage Mommy who “drinks so much during pregnancy that her child is born with fetal alcohol effects”; and Abusive, Stressed-Out Si

Dean Baker
Truthout, December 2, 2013