When Mexican President Felipe Calderón sent his army after the country’s powerful drug cartels six years ago, we all understood the rationales. For starters, Calderón had won the 2006 presidential election by a razor-thin …
Thanks to sensational atrocities like the 49 headless corpses dumped on a highway last weekend, Mexico tends to grab most of the world’s drug-war attention. But as we’ve reported, the western hemisphere’s most violent …
Drug thugs dumped 49 bloodied and dismembered corpses on a northern Mexican highway on Sunday, May 13. We journalists are finding little new to say, few fresh insights to offer, about these all too frequent narco-massacres in …
“Get your personal affairs in order.” It’s the hardest thing doctors have to tell cancer patients who are as ill as media reports suggest Hugo Chávez is. With an election looming in less than five months, the 57-year-old …
Cuba has always been a volatile issue in Florida, but what played out in Miami this week bordered on the farcical. The Florida legislature, prodded by the politically potent Cuban exile lobby, recently passed a bill that bars …
Argentine President Cristina Fernández did Mexican President Felipe Calderón a big favor this week when, on April 16, she expropriated the Argentine holdings of Spanish oil giant Repsol. The move shocked global capitalists and …
Before the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, this past weekend, much of the talk was about the U.S.’s dwindling influence in Latin America. Now, in the summit’s wake — after a U.S. Secret Service scandal …
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos will host the sixth Summit of the Americas this weekend, April 14 to 15, in the Caribbean city of Cartagena. The hemispheric gathering marks a comeback for Colombia, which is emerging from …
After I and a number of colleagues wrote last month about possible U.S.-Brazil friction on the eve of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s visit to America, a Brazilian diplomat I respect contacted me about what he felt were …
As soon as Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos sat down for an interview with TIME on Monday, April 2, at the Casa de Nariño presidential palace in Bogotá, he checked his watch. During that hour he knew a large helicopter …
Sure, Fidel Castro kept the Roman Catholic Church in Cuba buried under his cigar ash for decades, shutting down its schools, exiling priests and declaring the Communist island an atheist state until the 1990s. But it’s likely …
If you were Mexico’s ruling party, and your presidential candidate was down by double digits in the polls three months before the election, you’d be looking for some divine help too. So President Felipe Calderón’s …
In the often Sisyphean exercise known as U.S.-Latin American relations, old habits die hard on both sides. Even the Obama Administration, which came to power pledging a less high-handed hemispheric policy, snubbed Brazil this …
