South America Archive

Unlike his predecessors, Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa, has enjoyed consistently high approval ratings since coming into office in 2007. And while support for some other regional leaders, hit hard by economic slowdowns and corruption scandals, are nearing rock-bottom levels, Correa’s rule has also been relatively free of political turbulence. But over the past several weeks, that has changed. Growing protests reveal that many Ecuadoreans are increasingly disaffected and no longer afraid to take to the streets and openly defy a self-assured president intent on carrying out his so-called citizens’ revolution. The biggest protests came late last week in the country’s […]

Mining conflicts are intensifying across Latin America, with 218 mining projects embroiled in conflicts with 312 communities—including six conflicts spanning national borders—from Mexico to Argentina. One of the most prominent protests flared up this spring in southern Peru, at the $1.4 billion Tia Maria copper mine run by the Mexican-owned company Southern Copper. In late May, more than five years of protests came to a head there, with a general strike and police crackdown that resulted in five deaths and hundreds wounded and arrested. One issue above all is driving the Tia Maria protests, the 34 others in Peru and […]

Earlier this month, lawmakers in Uruguay announced they were working on legislation that would classify femicide—the gender-motivated killing of women—as a crime. In an email interview, Patricia Leidl, a Vancouver-based international communications adviser, discussed government responses to crime against women across Latin America. WPR: What has prompted the recent public outcry against violence against women in Latin America? Patricia Leidl: The “recent” outcry over violence against Latin American women is in fact not recent at all. Since the early 1990s, human and women’s rights defenders have been raising the alarm over steadily climbing rates of gender-based violence in Mexico, El […]

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto hosted his Brazilian counterpart, Dilma Rousseff, in Mexico City late last month, where the two leaders signed an economic accord aimed at doubling trade volumes by 2025. They also talked about Brazil’s scandal-ridden state-owned oil giant Petrobras partnering with the Mexican oil company Pemex, as Mexico’s liberalized energy market opens up to joint ventures. Pena Nieto and Rousseff, who have a history of cool personal ties, finally seemed to be coming together. But when it came to speaking about the state of relations between their two countries, they were not on the same page. Pena […]

Last month, Costa Rica announced an initiative that aims to eradicate child labor by 2020. In an email interview, Noortje Denkers, a program official for the International Labour Organization’s International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour, discussed the fight against child labor in Central America. WPR: How widespread is child labor in Central America, and in what sectors is child labor most common? Noortje Denkers: According to global estimates on child labor from 2012, the broader regional figures show that Latin America and the Caribbean, including Central America, has shown the greatest progress in the fight against child labor […]

When U.S. prosecutors unveiled a stack of corruption indictments against individuals involved with FIFA, the world’s governing body for soccer, they unwittingly added fuel to a potentially transformative movement that is emerging with astonishing force in Latin America. Throughout the continent, powerful men and women who had grown accustomed to operating with impunity in gray areas of the law are suddenly finding themselves on the defensive. They now face a day of reckoning, as mass movements demand an end to graft, corruption and favoritism benefiting top government officials as well as their friends, families and supporters. Against this backdrop, Washington’s […]

Since transitioning from authoritarianism to democracy, civilian governments in Argentina, Chile, Peru and Colombia have made great strides in curtailing the autonomy of the armed forces in terms of accountability for past abuses, budgeting, promotion and operations. But in all these countries, the military and intelligence services have retained a degree of autonomy over specific missions and their operations, referred to as “reserved domains” in the Latin American democracy transition literature of the 1990s. Recent events have demonstrated how far the region still has to go in improving transparency and civilian control over the intelligence services. Argentina has been rocked […]