When I interviewed Colombian rock star Juanes about his work for social causes last week, I was struck by his insistence that Latin American countries pay more attention to pre-school education. I couldn’t agree more.
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.
The appointment of Venezuelan-born Rafael Reif as president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) last week raises an interesting question: why are so many Latin Americans excelling in the world’s best universities, but not in Latin America?
A U.S. congressional proposal aimed at expelling Argentina’s populist-leftist government from the G-20 group of the world’s leading economies faces an uncertain future, not the least because it lacks significant support from unexpected quarters — conservative Cuban-American Republican lawmakers.
If President Barack Obama and presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney spend any time talking about Latin America during the campaign for the November elections, I can already see the thrust of their discussion — who lost Latin America?
M Polls show that center-left opposition leader Enrique Peña Nieto is likely to easily win the July 1 presidential elections and put an end to 12 years of center-right governments, but after several days in this country I haven’t found anybody who is really excited about his widely expected victory. In fact, I didn’t find anybody who is excited about any candidate.
Sen. Marco Rubio, the 40-year-old rising star of the Republican Party and among top contenders to be Gov. Mitt Romney’s running mate, is trying to rebrand himself from a right-wing Cuban-American politician to a center-right Hispanic one.
The oddest thing about Florida’s new state law to punish foreign companies that do business in Cuba is not that it is an election season gimmick by Republican lawmakers to win Cuban-American votes, nor that it is likely to cost taxpayers a lot before it ends up defeated in the courts. It’s that it would actually help Cuba’s dictatorship.
Bad news for Brazil: its magic moment as the world’s most promising emerging market in the eyes of international economic elites is waning, and replaced by a wave of gloomy forecasts.
When the recent Summit of the Americas in Colombia decided to commission a study on whether to decriminalize drugs, many thought that would be the end of it, and the whole thing would be quickly forgotten. Well, maybe not.
Four years after Latin America made headlines by becoming a world leader in giving out free laptops to millions of schoolchildren — an idea that has since been embraced by more than 20 African, Asian and Eastern European countries — the first results are in, and they give some reasons for hope.
Whether she intended it or not, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s decision to nationalize Argentina’s biggest oil company earlier this week has placed her nation in the camp of Latin America’s radical populist countries — alongside Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Nicaragua — in the eyes of the world.
The big headlines at the summit of President Barack Obama and 29 other hemispheric leaders that ended here Sunday focused on the U.S.- Latin American spats over Cuba and the Falkland/Malvinas Islands, but the talk behind the scenes among the presidents dealt with something that worries them much more – the return of protectionism.
President Barack Obama and leaders of 30 Latin American countries met here Saturday for a summit titled “Connecting the Americas,” but there is such a political disconnect between Washington and its southern neighbors that top officials anticipate that there will be no joint declaration at the end of the two-day meeting.
When I asked Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos about the ongoing U.S.-Latin American spat over Cuba’s absence in the 33-country Summit of the Americas that he will host in Cartagena this weekend, he gave an answer that many civil rights advocates find troublesome.
Two new studies confirm what we have long suspected: Latin American companies cannot effectively compete in the world economy because their countries’ educational systems are totally disconnected from reality.
When we talk about the violence that has left nearly 50,000 dead in Mexico over the past five years, we usually focus on Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, or the Juárez cartel, but it may be time to include the U.S. National Rifle Association cartel.
On the 30th anniversary of Argentina’s ill-fated invasion of the Falklands/Malvinas islands, one thing seems clear: Argentina’s government is pursuing the worse possible course to recover the British-controlled South Atlantic islands.
Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Cuba will not produce much change, but everybody — the Pope, the Cuban military regime, dissidents and Cuban exiles — can claim a semblance of victory from the high-profile event. The key question is who won the most.
A new definition of bad governments is spreading fast on the internet: Ineptocracy (in-ep-toc’-ra-cy) — a system where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable to succeed, and where the least capable to succeed are abundantly rewarded with goods and services for electing the least capable to lead.
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