Blog entries

I was in Madrid for our major conference on U.S.-Spain-Latin American relations the day that the White House announced President Obama was going to skip the U.S.-EU Summit scheduled for May, and it went over like a lead balloon.  Subsequently, the Financial Times (editorial of February 3), Anne Appelbaum (op-ed in the Washington Post) and … Read more

Leaders of countries including Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, and Haiti arrived in Quito, Ecuador, on Tuesday to discuss a collective response to Haitian President René Préval’s appeal for aid. It was the first time Alvaro Uribe, president of Colombia, had visited Ecuador since 2008 when he ordered the bombing of a rebel camp on Ecuador’s … Read more

Russia displaced the United States last year as Latin America’s largest overall supplier of weapons and defense-related equipment, according to a recently released assessment by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Mexico and Colombia, however, still purchase the majority of their defense munitions from U.S. companies. Over the past year, Russian defense companies have signed … Read more

Chile’s new president-elect, Sebastián Piñera, will announce his first cabinet picks on Tuesday, February 9, after what has been a rather complicated process. During the campaign, Piñera and his closest advisors had committed to a technocratic approach to cabinet selection, however since the election the largest political party in the winning coalition, Unión Demócrata Independiente … Read more

En 2004, una novela de poco más de 100 páginas sirvió para situar a Yuri Herrera (Actopan, México, 1970) entre los escritores más destacados de la narrativa mexicana contemporánea. Trabajos del reino, el primer libro de Herrera, narra el ascenso y la caída de un compositor de corridos deslumbrado por la vida en la “corte” … Read more

This post is a follow-up to my Unleash the Googles entry from last week. But now I would like to specifically focus on the human rights implications of Alan Gross’ detention. Why is the U.S. keeping so quiet… still? This has been a vexing question. There’s no grand geopolitical strategy behind our silence. Alan Gross … Read more

In her first public comments, Mercedes Marcó del Pont, the new president of the Central Bank of Argentina, promised today that she would bring about “reasonable” policy changes and that she was “thinking of maintaining the monetary and exchange rate policy with regards to the type of competitive managed float.” Marco del Pont, a Yale … Read more

With the 11th anniversary this week of President Hugo Chávez’s ascension to power, I started reflecting on what I had learned from the leader of the Bolivarian Revolution.  President Chávez’s behavior and profile, internationally and nationally, provide a powerful lesson on how to challenge and defy traditional wisdom—and with it international norms and precedent.  1) … Read more

From the Americas Society/Council of the Americas. AS/COA Online’s news brief examines the major—as well as some of the overlooked—events and stories occurring across the Americas. Check back every Wednesday for the weekly roundup. Sign up to receive the Weekly Roundup via email. Costa Rica Gears up for Presidential Elections Alex Leff blogs for Americas … Read more

The U.S. government has asked a Miami federal judge to grant Manuel Noriega’s extradition to France after the Supreme Court decided not to consider the former Panamanian dictator’s appeal. Noriega is charged with laundering money through French banks.  His attorney, Jon May, will ask the Miami court for a rehearing on February 19, based on … Read more

In spring 1997 I found my way, pretty much by accident, into an upper-level college course at Rutgers University, called “Historical Fiction in Latin America.” I knew little about the instructor, other than the fact that he wrote critically-acclaimed fiction, often about two singular figures in the history of Argentina: Juan and Eva Perón. Little … Read more

President Barack Obama’s proposed budget plan for fiscal year 2011 would decrease aid to Latin America by nearly 10 percent, mostly by cutting military and police support. Released on Monday, the plan—a blueprint of the president’s budget priorities that will now be debated in Congress—calls for economic development aid in the region to stay about … Read more

Costa Rica’s presidential campaign has become quite tense in the lead-up to the February 7 elections, but it also has turned rather goofy. One of the latest displays of wackiness took the form of a lie detector test, which several leading candidates actually agreed to take on national television. I was eating dinner at a … Read more

Paraguayan officials have arrested a man accused of participating in acts perpetrated by the Paraguayan People’s Army (EPP)—an armed group that officials say has ties to Colombia’s Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC). José Villalba was taken into custody in Concepción (a city near the Brazilian border) during an operation by the national police and … Read more

U.S.-Cuba dynamics continue to follow the traditional script of mixed signals. The romance is there; the trust is not. Shortly after U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Bisa Williams returned from extended talks in Havana, the Cuban regime seized Alan Gross, a U.S. subcontractor for a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) democracy program in … Read more