Andres Oppenheimer

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica — While Mexico’s bloody war against the drug cartels is making headlines worldwide, there is a little-known fact that is sounding alarm bells among US and Latin American officials: Central America’s drug-related violence is far worse than Mexico’s.

What was most surprising about Nicaragua’s election last Sunday was not that President Daniel Ortega was re-elected after a highly questionable electoral process, but that his victory got a seemingly unconditional blessing from 34-country Organization of American States chief Jose Miguel Insulza.

If political biographies of recent US presidents and top foreign policy officials are any indication of what goes on in their mind — and I think they are — the new book by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice speaks for itself: it’s about 98 per cent about the Middle East, Russia and Asia, and 2 per cent about Latin America.

When I interviewed UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recently, I was curious to hear what he would say about US congressional criticism that the United Nations has become hijacked by totalitarian regimes.

Colombia, Panama and South Korea are celebrating the long-delayed U.S. congressional approval of their free trade agreements with Washington, which Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos called “the most important treaty in our history.”

A group of 46 high-profile Mexican politicians and academics from across the ideological spectrum shook this country earlier this week with a daring proposal to end Mexico’s political gridlock: forcing whomever is elected president in 2012 to form a coalition government.

A Tweet I received from a Spanish follower hours after the death of Apple founder Steve Jobs caught my attention.

BRASILIA — While waiting at the Miami airport for my flight to Brazil one day last week, I read a press report that Brazil’s tourism minister was illegally using a government driver as his wife’s private chauffeur.

Now that most Latin American and Caribbean countries have announced that they will join Islamic nations in voting for the creation of a Palestine state along the 1967 borders at the United Nations General Assembly later this month, the proposed motion is almost certain to pass by a comfortable majority of at least 120 votes.

After a decade of record Latin American exports to China, which helped the region grow significantly despite the recent global recession, there are signs that the honeymoon may be coming to an end.

SANTIAGO, Chile— Critics of Chile’s free-market democratic model had a feast in recent days with images of massive student strikes and a two-day general strike that made headlines across the world.

SANTIAGO, Chile — The student protests that paralyzed Chile this week have been widely depicted as a symptom of the failure of this country’s free-market-oriented education system.

Despite the avalanche of bad news for President Barack Obama, he remains the most likely winner of the 2012 elections.

While much has been written about the fact that Latin America’s rapidly growing economies are largely immune to US financial woes, President Obama’s deal with Congress to avoid a US debt default will have a negative impact throughout the region.

The 34-country Organization of American States is better known for its cocktail parties than for its contributions to mankind, but congressional Republicans may have been drunk the week before last when they voted to end all US funding to the regional institution.

South Korea’s announcement that it will ban all school paper textbooks and replace them with electronic tablets by 2014 should ring alarm bells in the United States, Europe and Latin America — many of our children run the risk of being left even farther behind their digital-savvy Asian counterparts.

Now that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has publicly conceded that he has cancer — after his regime had accused independent media of being “agents of imperialism” for speculating that his prolonged stay in Cuba was due to a serious illness — here are three scenarios of what may happen in Venezuela.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez’s critics have taken advantage of his three-week absence for treatment of what was at first an undisclosed illness in Cuba to blame him for all kinds of misdeeds, but it’s time to give him credit for having performed a true economic miracle in his country.

Republicans in Congress have launched a major offensive to force several million undocumented immigrants to leave the United States with a bill that would make it mandatory for US employers to electronically verify workers’ legal status.

What irony! Despite all their grandiose rhetoric about Latin American unity, Brazil, Argentina and Chile have not yet come out in support of Agustín Carstens, the Latin American candidate to head the International Monetary Fund.