By Elizabeth Drew Elizabeth Drew is a contributing editor to The New Republic and the author, most recently, of Washington Journal: Reporting Watergate and Richard Nixon’s Downfall.

President Trump’s top aides have advised him not to shake hands with Cuban dictator Raúl Castro at the Summit of the Americas, which starts April 13 in Lima, Peru.

A joke making the rounds in Mexico says that President Donald Trump has become the de facto campaign manager of leftist populist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who is leading in the polls for the July 1 presidential election.

When Chile’s President-elect Sebastian Pinera told me that Chile may become Latin America’s first developed country by 2025, I was skeptical.

When I saw a demonstration of Domino’s pilot program to deliver pizzas with driverless cars last week, I wondered whether governments around the world are preparing for the massive job disruption that this new technology will bring.

Amid the national debate over gun control in the aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting that left 17 people dead, there’s one detail that has received too little attention: the fact that the mass killer repeatedly made white supremacist and Nazi-like comments on social media.

A senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School weeps in front of a cross and Star of David for shooting victim Meadow Pollack while a fellow classmate consoles her at a memorial by the school in Parkland, Florida, U.S.

When I read that British Prime Minister Theresa May appointed a minister of loneliness, my first reaction was to laugh.

The gloves are off. After decades in which the United States largely looked the other way, the Trump administration has decided to confront China over its growing influence in Latin America.

Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro’s plan to convene a sham election before the end of April has been rejected by all major Latin American countries, the United States and the European Community.

With a new series of serious blunders, the Trump administration is undoing decades of bipartisan U.S.

Outgoing Chilean President Michelle Bachelet’s visit to Cuba last week was a disgrace to her legacy as a democratic leader.

One of Venezuela’s most prominent intellectuals, Harvard economics professor Ricardo Hausmann, has just published an article that is raising eyebrows across the hemisphere: He is calling for a military intervention by the United States and other countries as the only way to end Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis. 

I thought that Venezuela’s economic crisis was so acute — with a 12 percent economic contraction in 2017, a 700 percent inflation rate and widespread shortages of food and medicines — that it could hardly get worse.

At a time when the United States should be going out of its way to stop a dangerous regression toward dictatorships in Latin America, the Trump administration — which to its credit has denounced the power grabs by the leftist leaders of Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua — should be equally critical of the slide into authoritarian rule by the conservative president of Honduras.

When I wrote several months ago that President Donald Trump’s tirades against Mexicans, Muslims and other foreigners would hurt the U.S.

As Venezuela’s financially strangled dictatorship and the opposition prepare for a possible new round of talks Dec.

There’s a good reason that Venezuela and several other Latin American countries rank very high in world corruption rankings: These nations have so much red tape that people grow up knowing that they have to grease a lot of palms to get almost anything done.

This may come as a surprise, but support for the free market is reaching record highs in Latin America.

In the aftermath of Venezuela’s fraudulent Oct. 15 regional elections, the conventional wisdom is that President Nicolas Maduro has closed all avenues to an electoral solution to the country’s crisis, and that Venezuela will become a new Cuba.

Late Venezuelan populist demagogue Hugo Chavez must have cheered in his grave when President Donald Trump made a veiled threat to pull NBC off the air for spreading news he dislikes.

While many of us were trying to absorb the news of the Las Vegas massacre and President Trump’s bungled response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, a growing political scandal in South America went almost unnoticed in the media: Bolivia’s populist President Evo Morales is making an illegal bid to run for a fourth term in office.

Here’s a fact that few people are taking into account when talking about the Venezuelan crisis or Latin America in general: the region’s biggest countries will have elections over the next 12 months, which could change the hemisphere’s political map.

Facing escalating international sanctions, Venezuela’s autocrat Nicolas Maduro is offering a new “dialogue” with the opposition and national elections at the end of 2018.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Irma, I have received emails from friends and relatives all over the world asking whether this city will drown under the sea or be blown away by hurricanes over the next few decades.