Latin View

Forget about the Deepwater Horizon. If Nicaragua’s $50 billion transoceanic canal scheduled to start construction on December 22 becomes a reality, it could be the world’s biggest environmental disaster in recent memory.

Latin American programmes to send more students to US universities are beginning to bear fruit, even if the number of Latin American students in US higher education institutions remains way behind those of China, India, South Korea and even Vietnam.

Chile has just taken a bold step to promote innovation that should be copied by all other Latin American countries.

Here’s the biggest irony of Tuesday’s mid-term elections: the US government will continue demanding that Mexico, Colombia and other countries fight the marijuana trade as part of its “war on drugs,” while Washington voters have just approved making pot legal in the US capital.

WASHINGTON – The big question among Brazil watchers in this capital is whether newly re-elected President Dilma Rousseff will improve her government’s ailing ties with the United States during her second term.

SANTIAGO, Chile: This country, which has long been Latin America’s economic star, has seen its economic growth fall from 5 percent average in recent years to a projected 1.9 percent this year.

As we anticipated in a recent column, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have just released pretty grim economic forecasts for Latin America in 2015.

If opposition candidate Aecio Neves wins Brazil’s October 26 runoff election — a possibility that virtually no pollster is ruling out — South America’s biggest country would “de-politicize” its foreign policy and end 12 years of preferential ties with Venezuela, Argentina and other leftist governments, top aides to Neves say.

When Democrats and Republicans in the ultra-polarized US Congress put out a joint foreign policy statement, as they did when they urged the Obama administration to oppose Venezuela’s admission to the United Nations Security Council, it’s sometimes worth reading.

Latin American leaders speaking at the opening session of the United Nations’ General Assembly renewed their calls for a reform of the UN Security Council to give wider representation to emerging powers.

By Andres Oppenheimer aoppenheimer@MiamiHerald.com   Former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso confirmed last week something that many of us have suspected: If the opposition wins the October 5 presidential election, there will be changes in Brazilian foreign policy that might affect all of Latin America.

President Barack Obama’s biggest upcoming diplomatic challenge in Latin America will be whether to attend the 34-country Summit of the Americas alongside Cuban leader Raúl Castro, who has been invited by the host country — Panama — over US objections.

For years, US officials have been in a quandary about how to counter Venezuela’s political influence in Central American and the Caribbean through its subsidized oil exports.

New polls showing that opposition candidate Marina Silva is likely to win Brazil’s upcoming presidential elections are leading growing numbers of analysts to predict that Latin America’s biggest country may soon shift toward more business-friendly policies, and rock the whole region’s political scene.

After two decades of steady progress in women’s rights — including the election of women presidents in Brazil, Argentina and Chile — Latin America has one of the world’s highest representation of women in top government jobs, but a surprising new study shows that women are losing ground on several fronts in the region.

Watching President Barack Obama at his mega-summit with nearly 50 African heads of state in Washington, D.C.,

I hate to agree with Argentina’s government, a bunch of mostly corrupt pseudo-progressives who have ruined the country despite benefiting from the biggest world commodity price windfall in recent history, but it is mostly right in its dispute with bondholders that led to Argentina’s default.

Despite the excitement among many in Venezuela and Miami about the newly announced US visa restrictions against top Venezuelan officials linked to human rights abuses, I’m not so sure that the measures will have much impact.

The more I read about the massive government corruption in Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Venezuela and other countries where top officials have been accused of stealing fortunes with near total impunity, the more I like a new proposal that is making the rounds in world legal circles — creation of an International Anti-Corruption Court.

This week’s announcement by the presidents of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — the so-called BRICS countries — that they will create their own international financial institution was greeted with polite scepticism and some criticism in Washington DC.