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3	VEGAS’ SAFEST BET— power in media Univision news director Adriana Arevalo steers Spanish-language coverage in the nation’s second fastest growing Hispanic television market. read more...
4	TAKING WING—power through philanthropy Made up of determined high profile Latin American artists and business people, the organization ALAS is launched. read more...
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The power of PHILANTHROPY

taking flight

With the creation of the ALAS foundation, some of Latin
America’s most influential artists join forces with some of its
deepest pockets to tackle poverty in the continent.

The event at the National Theater in Panama City featured an impressive line-up: salsa artist Rubén Blades, jazz pianist Danilo Pérez, the boys from Maná and Babasónicos, Alejandro Sanz, Shakira, Juanes—the list went on and on. A sure sellout had it not been a private affair. But, there was no concert.
The musicians, along with an unprecedented assortment of VIPs, had come together not to perform but to inaugurate the ALAS Foundation. ALAS, which means “wings” in Spanish, stands for América Latina en Acción Solidaria, or Latin America Solidarity Action. On the guest list were representatives of some 30 aid groups, about a dozen business moguls and a few elder statesmen.
The VIPs included Carlos Slim, the Mexican telecommunications mogul; Emilio Azcárraga, of Grupo Televisa, Mexico’s largest television network; Alejandro Soberón, of CIE (Corporacion Interamericana de Entretenimiento); Ricardo Salinas, of Televisión Azteca; José Antonio Fernández, chairman of FEMSA, the largest beverage company in Latin America; Alejandro Santo Domingo, of Colombia’s Caracol TV and Bavaria beer manufacturer; Joseph Safra, of Brazil’s Safra Group; Roberto Kriete, of Grupo Taca, the Salvadoran airline; Stanley Motta, chairman of Panama’s COPA Airlines; Raúl Alarcón, Jr., the Cuban-American president of Miami-based Spanish Broadcasting System, the largest Hispanic radio chain in the U.S.; among others.
Rounding out the cast were former Spanish Prime Minister Felipe González; former Costa Rican president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Oscar Arias; Argentine movie director and actor Sergio Renán; executive director of Mexico City’s Papalote Children’s Museum Marinela Servitje, and Peruvian journalist Jaime Bayly.
Seventy-eight-year-old author Gabriel García Márquez, remained in Havana but sent a note declaring he assumed his role as the group’s honorary president with “youthful enthusiasm.”
“With the conviction of a good veteran I believe that this powerful union of wills and creativity will help us make a formidable leap, toward a Latin America of equals and within the reach of our children.”
That last phrase referred to the title of a three-page essay he wrote about his native Colombia in 1996 titled, Manifesto: For a country within reach of the children. He tweaked the title for the inauguration, changing “country” to “continent,” and the ALAS members signed it as their creed.
“In each one of us, in the most arbitrary way, justice and impunity cohabitate,” García Márquez wrote. “We are fanatics about legalism, but wide awake in our soul we carry a pseudo-lawyer with a masterful hand for mocking laws without violating them, or violating them without punishment. We love dogs, we cover the world in roses, we die for love of country, but we ignore the disappearance of six animal species every hour of the day and night from the criminal devastation of tropical forests, and we ourselves have destroyed beyond remedy some of the great rivers of the world.
“We are indignant about the bad image of the country abroad but we don’t dare to admit that often the reality is worse. We are capable of the most noble acts and of the most abject, of sublime poems and demented assassinations, of jubilant funerals and deadly sprees. Not because some of us are good and others bad, but because when circumstance arises we all participate from both extremes —and God free us—we are all capable of everything.”
The ALAS website (www.fundacionalas.org) complements that stunning prose with shocking statistics:
• Approximately 240 million people in Latin America, or 44 percent of the population, live in poverty. (The figure is 60 percent for Central America.)
• Two out of five people living in poverty are children.
• Forty million children or adolescents live or work on the streets.
• Poverty kills 40 children every hour.
Of course, governments and aid groups have tried to combat these problems in the past. So what’s new?
“This is the proposition of a generation, of an artistic group that perhaps we’ve never had during other epochs in Latin America, in the way that it has affected the Latin market, the Spanish market, and the North American market,” says María Emma Mejía, former foreign minister and education minister of Colombia and current executive president of Fundación Pies Descalzos (Pies Descalzos Foundation), which Shakira started in 2001.
“I don’t think there’s ever been such an important group of personalities, of musicians, of young people that was capable of it,” Mejía says. “First, in getting together, putting egos aside. Second, they were able to attract the most important and rich businessmen of Latin America.”
Traditionally, philanthropy in Latin America has been the purview of fam-ily owned companies that donate to the poor in their own countries, says Felipe Agüero, professor of international studies at the University of Miami and editor of a forthcoming book on corporate social responsibility in the region. “What’s unusual is to see Latin Americans from different countries coming together on this,” he remarks.
Participants credit Shakira for getting the ALAS idea to gyrate. She created Fundación Pies Descalzos to help displaced children in Colombia. But she started thinking even bigger.
“When Bono invited her to sing at the Live 8 concerts in Paris in July [2005]—the famous concerts for Africa—it occurred to her that while it’s very good to sing for Africa, it’s now time for Latin musicians to call out and sing for poverty in Latin America,”
Mejía says.
Shakira first discussed the notion with Alejandro Sanz and Miguel Bosé, no strangers to charity work. Bosé’s résumé includes an Oxfam International project in Peru aimed at helping cotton harvesters; Sanz has collaborated with Infancia sin Fronteras (Infancy Without Borders), a Spanish aid group that has projects in Albania, El Salvador, Honduras and Sri Lanka. Sanz convinced Juanes to enlist, Bosé contacted Felipe Gonzáles, Shakira called Carlos Slim and other businessmen, “and that’s how the chain started moving,” Mejía says. Shakira’s boyfriend, Fernando de la Rúa, son of the former Argentine president, was also involved in early discussions.
Another early recruit was Lautaro García Batallán, who will serve as the ALAS executive director. He is a psychologist, former Argentine Congress member and education ministry official in president Antonio de la Rúa’s Alianza goverment in the late 1990s. García Batallán has worked with the International Financial Institutions program, which funds sustainable development projects in Latin America, and most recently he ran a consulting firm specializing in “strategic communications,” including presidential and other political campaigns in Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic.
He is also friends with Bosé and the younger de la Rúa, and first heard of the ALAS concept in March 2006 during a business trip to Miami, while hanging out with Bosé, Shakira and Sanz at Sanz’s house in Coconut Grove, a historic neighborhood in Miami.
“We started conversing about the idea there and it was something that was so fascinating that one couldn’t say no. It was that kind of thing,” García Batallán says. “Above all, I remember Miguel saying this isn’t about trying to replace the responsibilities that governments and states have in terms of public policies and social inclusion, but it’s about being insistent at times in framing improvements so that nobody gets complacent.”
They drew up lists of people to call and made assignments. “The truth is, we worked a lot, very quickly,” he says. “We didn’t discover solidarity or invent anything. This was simply a job of uniting, of connecting.”
Shakira met with Carlos Slim in September, which was “a transcendent moment for all this,” says García Batallán. “Slim’s commitment was crucial for mobilizing the whole business sector.”
The moguls, who have pledged annual contributions to ALAS of $200,000 each, will sit as the Civil Society Consultative Council, chaired by Felipe González. The secretary general is José María Michávila, who served as Spain’s justice minister from 2002 to 2004. Bosé is president of the Council of Activists committee, that is, the musicians, who will be identifying projects related to im-proving the health, nutrition, and education of children, with the help of UNICEF and the World Food Programme.
“We have a very clear motto: to help those who help,” García Batallán explains. “We aren’t going to replace existing programs or duplicate efforts.”
Priorities for 2007: medical care for pregnant mothers at risk, vaccinations for newborns, and birth certificates and other papers for the plethora of undocu-mented children in Latin America. The musicians are planning a series of concerts for October in Latin American cities to raise awareness and donations.
García Batallán cautions that compared to the $50 billion that Latin American governments spend on social programs, ALAS’s contribution will be like “a little grain of sand” to the struggle against poverty. But, says María Emma Mejía, expect the musicians of ALAS to push those governments “to take more risks, to be more audacious.”