Updated June 23
With the exception of catastrophic Hurricane Mitch in 1998 and the Honduran coup of 2009, the world has all but forgotten about Central America since its civil wars obsessed the Reagan Administration in the 1980s. But here, along with the storm and the putsch, is what happened in the meantime: the region has become …
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 …
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 …
Today, June 15, marks Colombia’s deadline to pass Washington’s free-trade test, and it made the grade. To assuage well-founded U.S. concerns about workers’ rights and anti-labor union violence in Colombia, President Juan Manuel Santos agreed to undertake a raft of reforms. They include a major increase in labor inspectors; new …
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 …
This was written by Tim Padgett with Girish Gupta in Caracas
For the past five years, Peru’s economy has had one of the most remarkable runs in Latin America. With the exception of recession-smothered 2009, the Andes nation has generated annual economic growth above 7% and as high as 10%. But even so, a third of Peruvians still live …
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 …
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: …
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, …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Something quite unusual happened in Cuba last week. Dissident lawyer Wilfredo Vallín, who last year filed an unprecedented lawsuit against the island’s communist government, was told by its highest court that the suit can proceed. Coincidentally, the news reached veteran Cuba reporter Juan Tamayo in Miami yesterday, April 27 – the …