Andres Oppenheimer

Anything is possible in Venezuela’s elections today, but there is a good chance that opposition candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski will do better than any of his predecessors in the polls, and that — win or lose — he will put President Hugo Chávez’s 14-year-old regime against the ropes.

While the speeches by President Obama, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu drew the biggest headlines at the United Nations General Assembly in New York last week, there was a major event that went almost unnoticed: UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon’s launch of a plan to put education at the centre of the world’s political agenda.

There has been a lot of speculation in recent weeks that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez will rig the vote count in the October 7 presidential elections.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos’ peace negotiations with his country’s FARC Marxist guerrillas could have widespread international repercussions: If the talks succeed, they could, among other things, drive the US government to remove Cuba from its list of terrorist nations.

If there were any doubts that Republican candidate Mitt Romney is not a closet moderate but a true convert to his party’s extreme right wing, they should have been cleared by now.

The Republican platform approved by the party’s convention earlier this week — a blueprint of what a Romney administration would do if it is elected — makes no bones about its hard-line policy toward Latin America.

While Ecuador’s populist President Rafael Correa steps up his international offensive to grant political asylum to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, an exiled Ecuadoran journalist seeking political asylum has some very interesting insights into what’s behind the Ecuadorian leader’s latest quest for international attention.

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney was already polling at historically low numbers among Hispanic voters before his decision to name Wisconsin Rep Paul Ryan as his running mate.

You have to give credit to Brazil for what it’s doing to combat corruption and solve the worst political scandal in the country’s recent history.

The conventional wisdom is that Venezuela was the big winner at last week’s Mercosur summit when the country officially joined South America’s trade bloc.

It’s very nice of US politicians to express their grief over the death of Cuban dissident leader Oswaldo Payá, but if they really want to honour his memory, they should stop making aggressive statements that play directly into the hands of the Castro brothers’ dictatorship.

President Barack Obama’s campaign ad slamming Gov Mitt Romney for allegedly heading companies that “were pioneers in outsourcing US jobs to low-wage countries,” and claiming that “President Obama believes in insourcing” is unfair, hypocritical and dangerously deceptive.

Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa says in a new book that we are living in a “culture of entertainment” in which everything — including literature, journalism, politics and sex — is becoming increasingly trivial, and that this phenomenon can have disastrous consequences for mankind.

Excuse my impertinence, but Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and several other Latin American countries deserve much of the blame for the recent forced exit of former Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo.

Outgoing World Bank President Robert B Zoellick, who is being mentioned as a possible candidate for US Secretary of the Treasury or State if Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney wins in the November elections, is trying to resurrect an ambitious idea: a hemispheric free trade area.

The 120 heads of state and some 50,000 environmentalists, social activists, and business leaders gathered this week in Brazil for the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development deserve credit for trying to save the planet, but they may be missing the point about the best way to do it.

When I interviewed Chilean President Sebastian Piñera last week after the signing of an agreement to create the four-country ‘Pacific Alliance‘ trade bloc and he said it’s Latin America’s most ambitious economic integration project, my first reaction was of respectful scepticism.

All politicians lie, or sometimes play games with the truth, but the Presidents of Bolivia and Ecuador were so off the mark when they asked the Organization of American States to effectively kill its Human Rights Commission that one can only wonder whether they were being ignorant or blatant liars.

If presumptive Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s first major speech to a Hispanic audience in this campaign was an indication of his strategy to win over Latino voters, he is in big trouble.

It’s not unusual in Latin American politics for presidents to clash with their predecessors who once helped elect them, but the current feud between former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and President Juan Manuel Santos goes beyond anything I’ve seen in a long time.