Panamanians are doing their best to register indifference to the return of Manuel Noriega. The 77-year-old former military dictator, drug-trafficking convict and all-around banana-republic creep, who’s been rotting behind bars …
Brazil is widely regarded as the first Latin American country to win membership to the club of developed nations, or at least to get its foot in the door. For that, it can thank leadership. In the past two decades, from former …
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez brands himself the standard bearer of all things revolutionary in Latin America – including the Community of Latin American & Caribbean States (CELAC), the new hemispheric organization that …
A decade ago, Miami was considered a tropical beach paradise but hardly an international arts oasis. In fact, after the violent Miami Vice-style scenes of the 1980s and 90s, followed by the Elián González fiasco and the Flori-duh images of the presidential vote recount in 2000, the Magic City was better known, fairly or not, as a …
It’s rarely a good sign for the leader of any country when his party loses a governor’s election in his home state less than a year before the next presidential election — especially when that party’s candidate is the president’s own sister. So while I was in Mexico City this week it was hard not to notice Mexican President …
Few stories at this month’s New York City Marathon were as inspiring as Maickel Melamed’s. The 36-year-old Venezuelan man, born with a severe muscle-depleting condition that makes it difficult to move across a room let alone a 26-mile marathon course, finished the race in 15 hours and 22 minutes to “help people realize the things …
Venezuela has reason to celebrate this morning, Nov. 12, after last night’s rescue of kidnapped baseball star Wilson Ramos. The Washington Nationals catcher, who had come home to play in the winter league, was abducted by gunmen at his mother’s home Wednesday night in Valencia, southwest of Caracas, in the first known kidnapping …
When I was a graduate student in Caracas in the 1980s, some of my best memories were hanging out at the Estadio Universitario during the winter baseball season, when Venezuela’s Major League Baseball stars would come home to play for teams like the Leones and the Tiburones. I used my expired Chicago Sun-Times intern press pass to …
Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s re-election victory on Sunday, November 6, is widely regarded as an affront to democracy in Central America, since his Sandinista allies on the Supreme Court twisted the Constitution into a pretzel so he could run for another term. But even though Nicaragua is under caudillo rule again, many …
It wasn’t too surprising when Cuba announced on Thursday, Nov. 3, that people on the communist island may now buy and sell private homes. They can buy two, in fact – one in the city and one in the country, perhaps for those weekends when you just need to get away from your neighborhood’s Committee for the Defense of the …
Now that Uruguay has revoked a 25-year-old amnesty for human rights crimes committed during the country’s 1973-85 military dictatorship, citizens are coming forward in droves this week to file charges against former officers, soldiers and cops. Uruguay was one of South America’s last holdouts when it came to annulling amnesty …
In America, the Great Recession has moved protesters to occupy Wall Street. In Europe the debt crisis has incited them to tear up any street. So where in the Western world can you find a modicum of national confidence these days? South American way, amigo, to once obscure capitals like Brasília, where President Dilma Rousseff, the …
This week the U.S. Senate voted 99-0 to ban future “gunwalker” operations like the Obama Administration’s “Fast and Furious” debacle. “Fast and Furious” was the well-intentioned but awfully executed program headed by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives (ATF) in Arizona that let hundreds of …
