What’s most shameful about Latin Ameri-can presidents’ sche-duled visit to Cuba for a regional summit on Tuesday is not that they will visit one of the world’s last family dictatorships, but that they most likely won’t even set foot at a parallel summit that the island’s peaceful opposition plans to hold at the same time.
Some of the best-known international institutions have just released their economic forecasts for Latin America in 2014, and most of them agree that this will be a better year than 2013 in the region.
What’s most worrisome about Latin America’s disastrous performance in the recently released international PISA student tests are not the results themselves, but that many countries in the region are not even recognizing that they have a serious problem.
WASHINGTON — Extending an apparent olive branch to Venezuela, Secretary of State John Kerry suggested Monday that Sunday’s much-awaited local elections there failed to rattle the country’s populist authoritarian government, and said the United States is “ready and willing” to improve bilateral ties.
BUENOS AIRES — Beleaguered Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro may be able — or not — to remain in power for the remainder of his term, but Venezuela’s influence elsewhere in Latin America seems to be diminishing as rapidly as the country’ s dwindling foreign reserves.
I have never thought of Shakira, Juanes and lesser-known artists as potential engines of Latin America’s economy, but newly released studies conclude that the region could grow more rapidly if it developed its so-called “creative industries.”
Former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet is likely to win the Dec 15 runoff election by a landslide, and the conventional wisdom is that her new coalition, which includes the Communist Party, will make a sharp turn to the left.
More than two years after President Obama announced his plan to increase US-Latin American college-student exchanges to 100,000 in each direction by 2020, the programme may be advancing too slowly to meet its target.
There are many reasons why potentially-rich Latin American nations are growing at a slower pace than their Asian counterparts but one of the least noticed factors — and one in need of urgent attention — is that a Latin American may grow old before being able to enforce a business contract in many countries of the region.
LIMA — When I interviewed Peruvian President Ollanta Humala last week, he struck me as a less articulate leader than most of his South American colleagues —but one who may be doing a better job than his more loquacious counterparts.
The U.S. government, which loves to lecture other countries on how to run their affairs, would do well in learning some lessons from other nations in order to avoid a repeat of last week’s costly — and embarrassing — government shutdown.
The US government’s recent signing of a first-of-its-kind bilateral deal with the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo makes me wonder whether Washington will start a new strategy in Latin America — by-passing not-so-friendly national governments, and signing agreements with more amicable local authorities.
When I interviewed Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa last week, I was most surprised by his renewed optimism about Latin America, and by his confidence that Chavismo — the region’s authoritarian populist movement — is rapidly losing ground.
President Barack Obama’s state-of-the-world speech before the United Nations General Assembly recently did not mention any Latin American country, and virtually omitted the region as a whole.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s angry denunciation of US electronic spying at the United Nations General Assembly in New York this week was applauded by most in the room, but her proposal to regulate the Internet should make all of us very nervous.
Much of the world is demanding greater pressure on Syria following a United Nations inspectors’ report hinting that Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons in his country’s civil war, but — amazingly — Venezuela and some of its Latin American allies are still passionately defending Syria’s dictator.
What’s most amazing about the arrest in Miami of Bolivia’s top anti-corruption police official, caught on tape extorting a bribe from a well-known businessman, was that hardly anybody was surprised by the news.
The World Economic Forum’s ranking of competitiveness released this week confirms what many of us feared: Latin America is losing ground in the global economy and is doing very little about it.
The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) is doing great things in Latin America, but I wonder whether its latest role as a middleman to help place 4,000 Cuban doctors in remote areas of Brazil does not amount to sponsoring slavery.
While the much-needed US immigration reform bill remains stuck in Congress, Canada is not waiting — it has launched a pilot programme to attract global entrepreneurs by offering them permanent visas and a path to citizenship.
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