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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-trafficking nexus today is Honduras, where the murder rate is five times higher than Mexico’s and is now the world’s worst. Honduras wants [...]
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 Mexico and the 50,000 people murdered so far in the country’s endless drug war. That’s troubling, because one [...]
“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 Venezuelan President would also need to get his political affairs in order — and many believe the [...]
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 state and local government from hiring foreign firms that do business with Cuba or Syria. (This being [...]
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 made Mexico, Latin America’s second-largest economy ahead of Argentina, look all the more attractive as a destination for foreign investment (even though [...]
In the summit’s wake – after a U.S. Secret Service scandal involving 11 special agents, some Cartagena prostitutes and a reportedly loud disagreement between them over payment for services rendered – much of the talk is about…well, it’s not about the U.S.’s rebounding influence in Latin America.
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 half a century of crippling guerrilla, drug and political violence and is making a serious bid to be [...]
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 some misconceptions in my article. The first was the idea that the Obama Administration might have dissed Rousseff [...]
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 would touch down about 50 miles (80 km) to the south, delivering the last of [...]
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 Castro also admires the Vatican in a sad way: like him, the Pope is an autocrat who doesn’t [...]
