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This Week in Latin America: Peru Votes
Sign up here to get This Week in Latin America delivered to your inbox every Monday. Peru Election: Peruvians go to the polls on April 10 to elect their next president from a shrinking pool of candidates. Investor favorite Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, who is polling second behind center-right front-runner Keiko Fujimori, is the latest to face potential disqualification … Read more
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How Obama’s Havana Trip Signals a ‘New Normal’ in U.S.-Cuba Relations
For all the pomp and circumstance surrounding U.S. President Barack Obama’s trip to Cuba last week, the visit had a simple goal: to make the administration’s opening to the island impossible to reverse, no matter who wins the White House in November. After spending the week of Obama’s visit in Havana, it is clear to … Read more
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Anger Management and Gun Control? New Ways to Reduce Violence in Latin America
Reducing violence is not about controlling violent neighborhoods or even about controlling violent people. It is about inducing people to control themselves. That’s it. The best policing comes when no police are required. The question is how to achieve this in Latin America, the most violent region in the world and home to countries like … Read more
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This Week in Latin America: Brazil’s Government Breakup
Sign up here to get This Week in Latin America delivered to your inbox every Monday. PMDB Decision on Rousseff: It is considered “inevitable” that Brazil’s largest political party, the PMDB, will on Tuesday formally break with the government and support the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. One party leader tweeted “On Tuesday the 29th, the party will decide to … Read more
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La diáspora es la mejor opción para cambiar la situación en Puerto Rico
Read in English Es complicado vivir entre dos países. Creo que la película Selena explica bien la situación cuando el padre de la protagonista le dice a su hija: -Tenemos que ser más mexicano que los mexicanos y más gringo que los gringos. ¡Ambos al mismo tiempo! ¡Es agotador! Para los que crecimos como miembros … Read more
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Argentina to Expand Use of Plea Bargaining, Inspired by Brazil
With the use of plea bargaining, a Brazilian legal team has recovered $785 million stolen in the Lava Jato (Car Wash) corruption scandal, and they’re hunting down another $5.9 billion. You can’t blame Argentina for wanting to use the controversial legal tool to see what it can recoup, too. Inspired by Brazil, Argentine President Mauricio Macri is laying … Read more
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The Simple Anti-Zika Trick You Won’t See in Brazil
To combat the spread of the Zika virus, Brazil has zapped male mosquitoes with gamma rays, rolled out cyber mosquitos and smartphone apps, released genetically modified mosquitoes into the wild, and deployed nearly 250,000 troops to spray insecticides and add larvicides where mosquitoes lay eggs. Indeed, Brazilian authorities seem willing to do almost anything to curb Zika’s expansion. Just don’t ask them … Read more
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Top 10 Plays in U.S.-Cuba Baseball Diplomacy
Cuba and the U.S. have not always seen eye-to-eye. But the two countries have long shared a love for baseball, which each claims as its national pastime. Similar to how Ping-Pong diplomacy broke the ice between the U.S. and China in the 1970s, baseball helped thaw relations with Cuba ahead of President Barack Obama’s historic … Read more
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Puerto Rico’s Diaspora Offers Its Best Chance for Change
Leer en español Feeling caught between two countries is always complicated. I think the experience was best summed up in the movie Selena when the title character’s father laments: “We have to be more Mexican than the Mexicans and more American than the Americans, both at the same time! It’s exhausting!” For those of us … Read more
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Castro Still Unlikely to Play Ball With MLB
In the latest game of U.S.-Cuba baseball diplomacy, Raúl Castro has home field advantage. The Cuban president on March 22 hosted the first Major League Baseball game in his country since 1999, a potent symbol of MLB’s efforts to take advantage of U.S. President Barack Obama’s diplomatic opening with the island. So far, however, Castro … Read more
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This Week in Latin America: Obama in Havana, Venezuela in Crisis
Sign up here to get This Week in Latin America delivered straight to your inbox every Monday. Cuba, Argentina Host Obama: Cuba and Argentina each play host to U.S. President Barack Obama this week, with human rights issues shading both visits. Today, Obama will hold a working meeting with Cuban President Raúl Castro, who will then host a state dinner … Read more
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The Endgame of Brazil’s Crisis: Four Things to Watch
After one of the most eventful 24 hour periods in Brazilian history, the crisis threatening President Dilma Rousseff appears to have entered its endgame. For those trying to handicap the odds of her impeachment, or simply struggling to make sense of it all, here are four things to watch in coming days: 1. The … Read more
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Moody’s: Lula Appointment Could Spell End of Fiscal Adjustment in Brazil
Brazil’s political crisis is moving at such intense speed that it’s hard for even dedicated analysts to keep up. AQ’s editor-in-chief spoke on Tuesday with Moody’s ratings agency’s chief analyst for Brazil, Samar Maziad, about how the changes in Brasilia are affecting the economy. At the time, there were rumors that former President Luiz Inácio … Read more
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The Key to Rousseff’s Future – And Maybe Brazil’s, Too
After more than a decade studying Brazil, there are still two things whose popularity I cannot fully explain: bacalhau and the PMDB. The former is a vile salted codfish that no human being should ever be forced to ingest. The latter is the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, a shape-shifting, ideologically diverse group of politicians that … Read more
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Brazilians Vent Rio Olympics Frustration in Graffiti – Photo Essay
The graffiti marking nearly every building in Rio de Janeiro’s Vila Autódromo favela isn’t the work of idle teens. With five months to go before the Summer Olympics, the small community is being demolished to make way for Rio’s planned Olympic Park. The favela has become a focal point for anger over Olympics development, as … Read more
