One of the stranger side effects of Venezuela’s ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ has been the explosion in breast implants. They cost around one thousand dollars a pair, and business is booming. With the bulk of the government’s funding dedicated to first aid centres, run in the vast majority of cases by Cuban doctors in the country’s poorest slums, investment in hospital care has plummeted, resulting in a surge in demand for private healthcare. These clinics plough their windfall profits back into their plastic surgery business, keen to pander to the crudely seductive narcissism of the only country in the world that has produced a Miss World and a Miss Universe simultaneously. Twice.

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On 26 August Chile’s supreme court voted by nine votes to eight to strip Augusto of his immunity from prosecution, a privileged enjoyed by the country’s former heads of state. Such an outcome had seemed extremely unlikely, following the court’s 2001 ruling that the former dictator was suffering from ‘irreversible dementia.’ It was this ruling which stopped him being tried by Judge Juan Guzmán in connection with his role in the ‘caravan of death’, a group of soldiers under Augusto’s command which travelled Chile in 1973 killing at least 72 leftwing activists.

Perhaps confident that he was now untouchable, the ex-president gave an interview to a Miami-based TV station in November 2003. Although his comments that he was no repressor but rather ‘a patriotic angel’ caused instant outrage, it was his apparent lucidity that aroused more significant interest. Judge Guzmán promptly asked for a copy of the interview, confident that the former dictator was showing few signs of ‘irreversible dementia.’

The case against Augusto was given a boost by a US senate report into his secret multimillion dollar bank accounts held at the US-based Riggs Bank, prompting none other than President George W Bush to promise a full investigation into the allegations of money-laundering the findings indicated. The key to whether Augusto faces trial will be the paper trail from Riggs bank. If it can show that he had the wit to manage his finances while under house arrest in London in 2002, the court may assume his mental faculties are sufficient to stand trial; not only for personal enrichment at the cost of the state, but also for crimes against humanity.

Human rights lawyers are starting to find witnesses willing to testify against the retired General, and are becoming more successful at connecting their stories to hard evidence. In mid August two former military officers testified against Augusto, claiming that in 1979 army intelligence units received a coded message from him ordering them to ‘withdraw the televisions’. They explained that in the military code of the time, ‘televisions’ referred to the bodies of hundreds of leftwing activists killed after the 1973 coup. Their testimony led to the unearthing of the incinerated remains of 17 bodies.

That former military personnel are beginning to come forward is indicative of the fact that the centre of Chile’s political spectrum has begun to shift to the left. Although the nominally leftwing Concertación coalition has been in power since the return to democracy in 1990, little serious progress had been made in addressing both the political and social legacy of the Pinochet era. Now both the man and the ideologue are under attack. On 11 August the Chilean congress approved a bill which proposed the declassification of over 170 secret laws promulgated during the Pinochet dictatorship. Later in the month a cross-party commission began work on the investigation of the privatisation of state-owned businesses from 1973-1990. Carlos Montes, a deputy from the Partido Socialista (PS), President Ricardo Lagos’s own party, emphasised that the freedom to investigate these processes was much greater now than in 1990, when the idea was first mooted. ‘We had to work in a very restricted context […] there was a very strong defence of those who empowered themselves through the public purse. Today there is a different context, a process of economic reactivation, a favourable international scene, the country is stable and the conditions are right.’ Although Chile remains a deeply conservative country, both economically and socially (divorce was only legalised last year), it is beginning to reconcile itself with its troubled past.

The author works for Latin American Newsletters.

According to the Home Office website, there are two ways of becoming a British citizen. One is registration (basically for British overseas territories citizens and, in certain circumstances, the ‘stateless’), the other naturalisation. Naturalisation requires living here for five years, being over 18, sufficient knowledge of English, being of good character and not being of unsound mind. David Blunkett’s citizenship test has yet to materialise, other than in Liverpool and only in prototype form, attracting what The Sunday Express described as ‘outrage’ by its organisers’ refusal to allow new citizens to graduate to The Beatles; apparently only Elgar or Vaughan Williams will do. Outraged Liverpool MP Peter Kilfoyle said, ‘They are imposing high culture on others’.

Recently I went to a friend’s citizenship ‘ceremony’; it was depressingly bureaucratic affair, conducted in the sterile environment of a solicitor’s office. The lawyer was a nervous, pale sort who sheepishly asked my friend, Catarina, if she wanted to swear on the Bible (you can take the oath with or without) and could not mention the Queen without giggling. The oath itself is couched in somewhat uninspiring legalese: ‘I (insert your name here) swear by Almighty God that on becoming a British citizen I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, her heirs and successors, according to law.’ He then told her that would be five pounds, please. No fur or ermine, no questions on the efficacy of the longbow at Agincourt or the origin of Walford’s unfortunate Slater sisters and no Elgar, no Vaughan Williams. Catarina, a Brazilian, has lived here for six years, was married to an Englishman for two of them, and intends to return to Brazil in another couple of years.

I am not suggesting that a decent soundtrack to the taking of an oath would make her stay, but a recognition that a nationality is a significant part of a personal identity is no bad idea. In the process of learning what you are, learning where you are is not entirely irrelevant. Citizenship is more than a matter of bureaucracy, just as an individual is more than an economic unit, as both Marxists and Coalition forces in Iraq would do well to realise. However, the primary test of citizenship should be language. All our history and culture is encoded in language, and it binds individuals of whatever background to the area they live in far more surely than some fragments of knowledge. And the borders of language are more porous even than those of the nation state. English is a language with a comparatively massive vocabulary and a flexible grammar, open to change and innovation. New users can and do shape it according to their whim, for it allows both a unique personal identity and a collective consciousness.

In conclusion: David Blunkett, ditch the citizenship test, bring on the TEFL teachers, and sex up the ceremony.

Since the passing of the Bossi Fini Law, a joint legislation drawn up by the Veneto Separatist party and the Allianza National (the heirs of Mussolini), in July 2002, the role of the immigrant in Italian society has been reduced to the purely economic. Civil status depends entirely on employment, and consequently on employers who are willing to validate their immigrant workforce and assist them in obtaining a ‘permiso di sogiorno’ or residency permit. Those who do are obliged to pay a fine for having hired illegal labour. This results in a situation whereby the employer has total control over any ‘extra-communitaria’ (literally, ‘outside of the community’) employee; the promise of a permit keeps the employees working for a minimal wage, until they are relieved of their services with the threat of deportation if they turn to the authorities or given the permission of their employers to apply for residency, provided they pay the fine themselves. And of the 700,000 or so applications presented since the law came into effect, less than 1,000 have so far been processed.

Italy’s economy is dependent on cheap, flexible labour, but its political structure resists realising the social contract necessary for any long-term, responsible policy. All Italy’s immigrants are economic since there is, at present, no asylum law. Immigrants fleeing persecution without having done their homework will discover that there is in fact no process of application, and that they will be deported without question following a couple of months spent in a detention centre.

Mario Cruz, a former taxi driver in Ecuador, with brothers and sisters spread over Western Europe and North America, arrived in Rovigo in March 2002, following his wife who found work as a domestic help a year before. After four months spent working ten to twelve hour days as a manual labourer on a farm, for which he was paid a total of 400 Euros, he was forcibly ejected from the premises, prevented from retrieving his belongings and threatened with the police. Since then he has been sleeping in the railway station or at friends’ houses, helping out the odd hour a week in a mini-supermarket, frequented almost exclusively by the immigrant community, and being paid between 5 and 10 Euros. ‘It’s not a real job. It’s like when I used to give my children a couple of dollars to clean out my taxi; it’s pocket money.’

Associazione di Immigranti was founded in 2001 with the aim of promoting immigrant rights, principally by helping to assist residency applications and address the problem of housing. Money set aside by the municipality for accommodation three years ago has yet to result in any material benefits, and estate agents are reluctant to let property to immigrants. Flats registered in immigrants’ names are regularly searched by the police, who check the number of people sleeping there.

The Associazione, having drafted, amended and finally passed a statute, is now in the process of organizing elections for a central committee, composed of representatives of all the significant immigrant communities in the area.