Brazilians sardonically refer to their often corrupt public bureaucracy as O Trem de Alegria, or The Joy Train. I’ve written about a number of the train’s happy passengers over the years, including the mayor of a small working-class town near Rio de Janeiro who jobbed the system so brazenly that he earned a $264,000 annual salary …
Like most Latin America correspondents, I’ve marked my calendar for October 23: Argentina’s presidential election. Then again, maybe I can just watch NFL games that day, since the race actually seems to have been all but decided last Sunday, Aug. 14. Argentina held its first (and compulsory) open primary voting; but since most …
Forget The Change-Up. The best body-swapping story these days doesn’t star Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds; it features Uncle Sam and Latin America.
The U.S. was once the responsible (albeit imperious) adult among the two, the superpower whose politics and finances were managed more reasonably and rationally. Latin America was …
Corrected Aug. 10 2011
Now that Cuba’s highest court has upheld the 15-year prison sentence for U.S. development worker Alan Gross, the key question is whether President Raúl Castro will free him as a humanitarian gesture. Castro has hinted he’s willing to do that. But there are other important questions to consider: Does Castro …
When 33 Chilean miners were rescued last year after spending 70 days trapped deep underground, the scenes of those laborers standing as equals with their billionaire President, Sebastián Piñera, seemed to inspire a national resolution: to improve Chile’s historically lousy treatment of its workers. Despite being one of Latin …
Mexico’s Roman Catholic Church isn’t an institution that progressives usually rush to defend. Its leadership is about as obscurantist as they come, and its history – including the disgraced Legionaries of Christ and their late pedophile leader, the Rev. Marcial Maciel – is checkered at best. But if you advocate free speech, …
In Guatemala’s northern Petén department, May 14, 2011, felt a lot like December 6, 1982. In May, on the Los Cocos ranch near La Libertad, 27 campesinos were slaughtered and decapitated by henchmen of a bloodthirsty Mexican drug cartel, the Zetas – whose ranks include former Guatemalan army commandos known as Los Kaibiles. …
After this past weekend, it seems even more fitting that Guatemala was the site of last month’s high-level international pow-wow on how dangerous Central America has gotten. Just before dawn on Saturday, July 9, celebrated Argentine folk singer Facundo Cabral was murdered by gunmen as he rode from his Guatemala City hotel to the …
It’s big (and overdue) news this week that Mexico City and Washington have finally come to an agreement that lets Mexican truckers ferry their freight into the U.S. But Damien Cave’s excellent and provocative New York Times article about the decline of illegal Mexican immigration into the U.S., which ran on the front page yesterday, …
George Washington and Simón Bolívar are rightly remembered as the New World’s greatest independence heroes, but the anti-democratic flaws each possessed are too often forgotten. Washington was a slave-owner, a fact most Americans disregard during commemorations like this week’s July 4 fete. Likewise, the Caracas-born Bolívar …
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, whose health has been a subject of intense speculation since he underwent surgery for a pelvic abscess in Cuba on June 10, revealed during a televised address from Havana Thursday night, June 30, that he’s also battling cancer. Chávez insisted he was in the process of a “full recovery” …
It’s hard to imagine Hugo Chávez missing July 5. El cinco de julio was going to be a confluence of everything the socialist Venezuelan President lives for politically: It’s Venezuela’s bicentennial, a chance for Chávez to revel in the aura of his Bolivarian Revolution’s namesake, 19th-century South American independence …
No one ever got rich betting on the demise of Hugo Chávez. As a leftist Venezuelan paratrooper officer he led a failed coup in 1992, but he was let out of prison just two years later and started campaigning for the presidency, which he won in 1998. In 2002 Chávez himself was the target of a coup; it threw him out of power for a few …
