Bolivia this month is accusing India’s Jindal Steel & Power Ltd. of failing to honor its $2.1 billion investment commitment to develop the Mutún iron ore mine and smelting works. Jindal in turn claims Bolivia isn’t providing it sufficient gas and electrical power to get the job done. Such disputes between Latin American governments …
It was Chile’s own man-on-the-moon moment. In fact, for those of us who were there, last year’s miraculous rescue of 33 trapped Chilean miners seemed in some ways eerily, wonderfully similar to a moonwalk. It played out in the cold dead of night on a remote and rocky desert landscape that might as well have been the lunar …
If Iranian government operatives really did try to contract a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., as the Obama Administration alleges today, then they weren’t just being diabolical. They were being fairly stupid.
Granted, the Zetas – the drug mafia that Iranian-American Manssor Arbabsiar …
During the Cold War, spy swaps were seemingly commonplace. Iconic, in fact: countless movies of the era use scenes of spooks and dissidents being exchanged at Checkpoint Charlie. And we still do it: just last year, the U.S. sent 10 arrested Russian agents home while Russia in turn let go four prisoners accused of espionage whose …
When Jamaican Prime Minister Bruce Golding announced his resignation last month, the only surprise was that it took him so long. Since last year, Golding, leader of the Jamaica Labor Party (JLP), has been embroiled in one of the worst scandals to hit Jamaica since it won independence five decades ago. His government faces accusations …
Even in the wake of a catastrophic earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people – or perhaps because of that disaster – nationalism reared its head during Haiti’s presidential election campaign last year. Many candidates, including the eventual winner, Michel Martelly, sensed that Haitians had grown weary of U.N. …
Like the tourism-dependent state of Florida, the tourism-dependent nation of Cuba 90 miles away can’t afford to foul its picturesque coastline with an oil spill. But unlike Florida, which has long resisted the temptation of lucrative offshore drilling, Cuba is broke. And because it’s now hearing the seductive call of as much as …
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights concluded this week what just about everyone in the western hemisphere already knew: leading Venezuelan opposition politician Leopoldo López was denied due process of law in 2008, when socialist President Hugo Chávez’s government barred him from running in elections for six years because …
Few would disagree that disgraced British fashion designer John Galliano was acting like a drug- and alcohol-addled jerk. On two separate occasions at the same Paris bar last October and February, he unleashed anti-Semitic insults and was caught on video saying he loved Hitler. But if Galliano’s tirades were socially disturbing, a …
Haitian President Michel Martelly announced a Presidential Advisory Council for Economic Growth and Investment this week. It’s got big international names – Bill Clinton, Wyclef Jean, Mohamed Yunus, to name a few – and a big mandate to harness international investment for destitute, earthquake-racked Haiti. So why isn’t it …
In my Aug. 30 post, I posed two questions about the speech Mexican President Felipe Calderon gave on Aug. 26, a day after the massacre of 52 innocent people in a Monterrey casino set afire by drug-cartel gangsters. The first question: was Calderon, fed up with America’s “insatiable” demand for drugs, in effect telling the U.S. to …
The central statistic of Mexico’s violent drug war – 40,000 gangland murders in the past five years – is repeated so often it almost fails to alarm us anymore. But what happened last Thursday, Aug. 25, in the northern business capital of Monterrey – 52 innocent people massacred after gangsters set fire to a casino, presumably …
It’s getting harder and harder to remember the Monterrey, Mexico, I first visited in 1990. Not because I’m 21 years older, but because the city now seems frighteningly darker. Monterrey in those days, on the eve of NAFTA, wasn’t just Mexico’s new business capital. It was the country’s window to the developed world – a …
