US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power deserves credit for asking Cuba’s foreign minister to launch a credible investigation into the suspicious death of leading Cuban dissident Oswaldo Payá, but she should have gone a step further.
Uruguay’s government-proposed marijuana legalization drive has been described as the world’s boldest, and could help reduce drug-related crime, but a conversation I had this week with former Uruguayan President Julio Maria Sanguinetti left me wondering whether it won’t backfire.
Just when we were beginning to digest the news that Nicaragua had signed a contract with a Chinese company to build a $40 billion inter-oceanic canal that would compete with a soon-to-be expanded Panama Canal, Guatemala announced this week that it’s jumping into the fray and will build a $12 billion inter-oceanic “dry corridor.”
After more than a decade of booming economic ties between China and Latin America, new headlines that China may be heading for a crisis are starting to draw anxiety in China-dependent countries in the region.
The United States is becoming a dysfunctional country: politically, it’s lurching from one embarrassment to the next, but economically and technologically, it’s rising at an amazing speed.
The surprising support for Egypt’s military coup in US, European and Middle Eastern political circles may turn into a bad precedent for Latin America — it could help legitimize the idea that there are ‘good’ military coups.
It’s no wonder that protesters in Brazil are holding signs reading “more education, less soccer,” or that there are constant teacher strikes in Argentina, Chile, Venezuela and Mexico — Latin American schoolteachers are among the most miserably paid in the world.
Nicaragua’s $40 billion deal with a Chinese company to build a trans-oceanic waterway that will compete with the Panama Canal will either be Latin America’s most important economic project in more than a century or the biggest government scam in the region’s history.
When I interviewed former President Jimmy Carter on a wide range of issues a few days ago, I was especially interested in his views about Venezuela’s two-month-old political crisis.
Something very unusual happened at the 34-country Organization of American States (OAS) annual foreign ministers’ meeting recently: the United States and Mexico won a diplomatic victory over authoritarian populist governments that wanted a free hand to suppress human rights monitors and critical media.
The most interesting thing about China’s new President Xi Jinping’s first official trip to Latin America was that he did not set foot in Cuba, Venezuela or any other of China’s political allies in the region — which would have received a huge propaganda boost from such a visit.
Latin American presidents who support the decriminalization of marijuana won a big diplomatic victory in recent days when the 34-country Organization of American States issued a report that considers that option as one of several policies that might help reduce the region’s drug-related violence.
The highly respected Nature Scientific Reports journal has just published a map of the world’s leading science cities, and it looks pretty bad for emerging countries: It shows the planet’s northern hemisphere full of lights, and the south almost solidly dark.
I’ve read with great attention President Barack Obama’s article in The Miami Herald earlier this week on how to improve US relations with Latin America.
Despite a lot of upbeat talk about upgrading US-Mexican economic relations, there will be one big issue that will be off the table during President Barack Obama’s visit to Mexico starting Thursday — Mexico’s request to be part of ongoing US-European free trade talks.
While many of us were focused on the Boston bombings, Venezue-la’s dubious elections and North Korea’s war noises in recent weeks, the world’s biggest nations took a potentially historic step — they launched a system to detect secret offshore bank accounts.
Former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s endorsement of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro in last Sunday’s elections has perpetuated one of the biggest myths in Latin American politics — that the Venezuelan government, despite its mistakes, has done more than others to help the poor.
Most polls show that Venezuela’s government candidate Nicolás Maduro is likely to win today’s elections thanks to an unfair election process in which the government controls an overwhelming share of TV time, but — even if he wins — Maduro’s future is gloomy.
Nobel Peace Prize winner and former Costa Rican President Oscar Arias could not believe his ears when he heard that the United Nations had overwhelmingly approved a treaty to curb international arms sales, a cause he had been championing for nearly two decades.
What a pleasant surprise! Mexico, whose government routinely supports human rights violators throughout the region, played a key role in thwarting an effort by a group of countries to weaken the region’s most important human rights commission.