Latin America

Few outside of Argentina remember him, but a good man died yesterday. Raul Alfonsin was the first democratically elected president of the Argentine Republic after seven years of military rule in which over 10,000 Argentinians were "disappeared" by the military in a "Dirty War" against leftist guerrillas.

In El Salvador, for the first time ever in Latin America, a former political-military organization that tried to gain power through the barrel of a gun has achieved its aims through the ballot box.

Although the Sandinista Front in Nicaragua did win a semi-legitimate election in 1984, it had reached power five years earlier by overthrowing the Somoza dictatorship. By 2006, when Daniel Ortega was finally re-elected, the old Sandinista Front of 1979 was unrecognizable.

Jorge Castañeda, former Mexican foreign minister, calls it an ''ad hoc'' grouping with Latin American countries befriending Cuba ''out of conviction or ...

To the myriad foreign challenges Barack Obama will have to confront upon taking office we may have to add a complex conundrum next door in Latin America. On three fronts that have posed serious problems for the United States before, there is a growing and worrisome democratic challenge in the hemisphere--and no one knows quite how to handle it.

Over the past few weeks, some silly ideas have circulated on the impact of the financial crisis on Latin America. The most dangerous was that Latin America would be largely impervious to a debacle that was, as Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva imprudently phrased it, "Bush's crisis." Leaders ranging from Mexico's Felipe Calderón on the center-right to Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez on the extreme left all claimed, for different reasons, that orthodox macroeconomic policies, recent growth, solid banking systems, the high price of commodities (oil,… more

"There's certainly nothing wrong with increasing good will and promoting partnerships," said Frida Berrigan of the Washington, D.C.-based think tank New America Foundation, who has spent 10 years studying Latin America.   But leaving that job almost totally up to the military "highlights the profound imbalance in our foreign engagement, in the way we interact with other countries," she said. LINK

Angelo Rivero Santos, the deputy chief of mission of the Embassy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, and Andrés Martinez, senior fellow at the New America Foundation, discuss recent political and economic trends in South America: Are Latin American nations moving toward neo-liberal free markets or a 21st century form of Bolivarian socialism? Why are relations between Venezuela and the U.S. perceived as being so bad?  How might U.S. relations with South and Central American nations change after Barack Obama or… more

This article is adapted from Parag Khanna's book The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order.

The term "second world" has fallen out of use. It used to mean countries of the socialist world; today I use the phrase to refer to those countries in eastern Europe and central Asia, Latin America, the middle east and southeast Asia which are both rich and poor, developed and underdeveloped, postmodern and pre-modern, cosmopolitan and tribal -- all at… more

If I didn't already prefer Ketel One vodka in my martinis, I might very well call for my own boycott against Absolut.

Not because I agree with the knuckleheads who fear that the Swedish company's advertisement featuring a map of the American Southwest as Mexican territory is fueling ethnic secessionism, but because, in its attempt to lure upper-middle-class consumers in Mexico, the company played on an age-old canard that has historically been used to justify discrimination against Mexican immigrants and… more

Last February, I found myself in the difficult position of explaining American insecurity to a group of Mexican undergraduates at a college in Matamoros, Mexico, just south of the border at Brownsville, Texas. I was taking questions after delivering a lecture on the long-term prospects of Mexican immigrants being accepted into U.S. society. A neatly dressed young man in the back stood up to ask a pointed question. "How," he said politely in Spanish, "could such a rich and powerful… more