Tim Padgett

Articles from Contributor

Will New GOP Isolationism Leave New GOP Star Marco Rubio Isolated?

Since his stunning election victory last November, Florida’s 40-year-old, Cuban-American Senator Marco Rubio has been held aloft as the future of the Republican Party, a sharp-as-a-tack son of immigrants who can bring both youth and Latinos to a GOP that’s not too popular with either. After his debut speech on the Senate floor last …

Four Decades Later, It’s Time to Scrap the Dead-End Drug War



I recently returned from the desert city of Durango, Mexico, where forensic officials are still trying to identify some 240 corpses discovered this year in mass graves. More than 200 other bodies have been found in similar fosas across northern Mexico. All were victims, many of them innocent victims, of the drug-trafficking …

Puerto Rico: Obama Visits a Commonwealth’s Uncommon Problems

It has been 50 years since a U.S. President traveled to Puerto Rico, and that’s indicative of how little Washington ponders America’s Caribbean island commonwealth. Only rarely, like the controversy over the U.S. naval base at Vieques a decade ago, do Americans even remember their ties to Puerto Rico. Even President Obama’s visit …

Did Haiti Commit Disaster Inflation? A U.S. Study Raises the Possibility

Updated 5/31/11

Those of us who cover the developing world deal increasingly today with a new kind of inflation: disaster inflation. I first really noticed it in 1998, while reporting Hurricane Mitch. The storm ravaged Honduras and Central America, but governments felt compelled to inflate the death toll. Even today, the official …

Vive le Fruit-Forward! New World Wine Celebrates the Judgment of Paris

A few years ago I was drinking wine here in Miami with a French friend whose family owns a winery in Burgundy. I poured him something from this hemisphere – it was either a California Cabernet or a Chilean Carménère – and from the look on his face I could tell he thought I was dispensing blood in his glass. Ditto when he tasted it: …

Honduras Welcomes Zelaya Back: Time for Banana Republic Reform

So in the end, the coup crisis that rocked Honduras and the western hemisphere two years ago was apparently all just a big misunderstanding. Everybody just got a little constitutionally crazy, but they’ve ironed it out and former President Manuel Zelaya, whom the Honduran military hauled into exile at gunpoint the morning of June 28, …

Would Strauss-Kahn’s Downfall Mean More IMF Democratization?

Last week, a high-ranking International Monetary Fund official lectured a conference of Latin American central bankers in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, about not letting their economic booms overheat into financial crises. It’s the sort of warning that any country should of course heed. But the IMF has lost a lot of clout in Latin America …

Haiti’s Own “Birthers”: Martelly Refutes Citizenship Rumors

Does Haitian President-elect Michel Martelly, who is set to be inaugurated on Saturday, May 14, have his own “birthers” to contend with? In recent weeks the former Carnival singer, who won Haiti’s runoff election on March 20 by a landslide, has felt compelled to answer rumors that he has U.S. citizenship – which would effectively …

Obama, Now the Warrior, Wants to Revive Immigration Reform

President Obama is reaping a windfall of political capital from the extermination of Osama bin Laden, and he plans to spend a chunk of it on immigration reform. During a Cinco de Mayo celebration with Mexican-Americans at the White House this week, Obama announced he’ll give a major immigration speech during a visit to the border city of …

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