Latin View

Win or lose, Capriles may win in Venezuela

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.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon

UN picks wrong education partners

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.

President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela (Miami Herald)

Colombia’s peace talks may impact US-Cuba ties

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.

Republicans tilt right on Latin America

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.

Ecuador’s crusade for Assange is all about power

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.

Oswaldo Payá

Romney should heed Payá’s message

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.

Mitt Romney

Obama’s outsourcing ad is demagogic populism

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.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Vargas Llosa makes good case against ‘Show’ culture

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.

Robert Zoellick

Obama, Romney should take up regional agenda

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.

Peter H Diamandis

UN Rio+20 summit misses the point

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.

Osvaldo Rosales, Director of Division of Trade and Integration, ECLAC

New ‘Pacific Alliance’ bloc may have a chance

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.

 Rafael Correa

Leaders lie blatantly about OAS rights group

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.

  President Juan Manuel Santos

Uribe v Santos feud could cripple Colombia

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.

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