Chavez Archives - Americas Quarterly

Venezuela’s Odd Transition to Dictatorship

Venezuela proved last week that it can still defy regional trends. By suspending the process to carry out a recall referendum on President Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela became the only country in Latin America since the late 1970s to experience the transition to a full dictatorship. When I started studying Venezuela in the early 1990s, the … Read more

Untapped

Since the days of Richard Nixon, U.S. presidents have called for energy independence — even as their country’s appetite for foreign sources of oil has continued to grow. Today the U.S. consumes almost a quarter of global oil supplies, with little sign of a cutback in consumption, which will likely consign President Barack Obama’s $150 … Read more

Sur Solidarity: Bolivarian Dreams of Integration Confront Economic Reality

Sudden and sharp shifts in commodities and financial markets in the last few months are realigning geopolitics worldwide. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, whose ambitions are greased by oil wealth, is taking an especially hard hit. An early casualty of the global economic slide could be the regional alliances promoted by Chávez to challenge what he … Read more

Deal with the Left’s Resurgence

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The landscape of Latin America has shifted in both political and economic terms in the last ten years. The Left, with its “one thousand faces,” has reappeared in a distorted and pernicious manner, without providing any solutions to the biggest problems in the region such as poverty, drug trafficking, contraband, and corruption, among others. In many of our countries, we have to start over again. The challenge awaiting the new president of the United States in developing new policies for the region will not be easy.