Let's see Bieber get 75% approval.
Otto writes: Every few months, reliable Mexican polling company Mitofsky puts together its Poll of Polls on the popularity of Heads of State in The Americas, then publishes its findings. That’s what they did scant hours ago and here’s how things look for the continental bigwigs at the moment, colour-coded chart and all. We even do a table if that big graphic is too messy and big for you.
Ecuador's Correa and Venezuela's Chávez are pushing to weaken a key OAS freedom of expression body.
Whatever the merits of Latin America’s left-wing presidents, their track record on freedom of expression has been terrible. The administration of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez has shut down opposition radio and television stations on the thinnest of pretenses. Ecuador’s Rafael Correa is in the process of suing the country’s largest newspaper (El Universo) out of existence. Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner and her allies have gone after Clarín and La Nación again and again, most recently by passing a law declaring newsprint to be in the national interest. All three administrations regularly take time during public appearances to verbally attack specific journalists or news outlets.
While it’s been basically tough beans for local journalists and media outlets, the OAS’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has done some good work cataloging the abuses and bringing cases before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights – often to no avail, but at the very least it has maintained a useful legal-historical record of the abuses for posterity and the purposes of international shaming.
But because of its role as a state eye-poker, the IACHR is not exactly popular with the powerful, and next week the OAS is set to hold a vote in which its member states decide whether to smother one of its more bothersome (read: effective) parts.
Since I started paying close attention to Venezuela in 2007, I have relied on the annual population figures* from the Instituto Nacional de Estadística, or National Statistics Agency.
As you can see on the estimates page, the 2011 population figure was supposed to be 29,277,736. As it happens, the INE did a census in 2011. It was supposed to last from August to November, but was extended to ensure that they counted everyone. The results won’t come out for another year, but the INE page gives the current progress of the “empadronamiento,” or roll-taking. As of Jan. 3 2012, they were up to 26,840,935.
In other words there were 2,436,801 people who were in Venezuela, according to the estimates, but weren’t there, according to the census. That is a very big difference. The estimate as of 2011 was 9.1 percent higher than the number of people counted as of Jan. 3.