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, …
Latin America
Venezuela’s Bicentennial: Should Chávez Re-Examine Bolívar – and His Revolution?
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 …
Hugo Chávez Reveals His Battle With Cancer: Will It Affect His Re-election Battle?
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” …
Chavez’s Health Postpones a Summit: Will He Return For Venezuela’s Bicentennial?
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 …
With Hugo Chavez in Hospital, Venezuela Frets Over Its Future
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 …
The “Deadliest Zone”: Hillary Clinton Visits Central America’s Narco-Nightmare
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 …
Will New GOP Isolationism Leave New GOP Star Marco Rubio Isolated?
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 …
Four Decades Later, It’s Time to Scrap the Dead-End Drug War
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 …
U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Foot-Dragging: Will Washington Welch On the Deal?
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 …
“Caravan of Solace” Moving Towards Peace, Slowly
William Lloyd George explores the “Caravan of Solace” anti-drug violence movement for TIME. Just as hundreds of Mexicans screamed “Justice” during the final stop of the Caravan, many of the activists associated with the protest questioned both the success and the overall mission of the week-long tour. While Mexican activists agree that …
Puerto Rico: Obama Visits a Commonwealth’s Uncommon Problems
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 …
Latin America’s Race to the Middle: Has Humala Renounced Chávez?
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 …
Report: The Global War on Drugs Has Failed. Is It Time to Legalize?
The global war against drugs is fought seemingly every day in the jungles of Colombia and the mountains of the Hindu Kush, the inner cities of the U.S. and the trafficking corridors of Central America. But, according to a new report, it’s an abject disaster.
The Global Commission on Drug Policy, an organization launched by former …