South America Archive

After years of mostly steady economic growth and largely moderating politics in much of Latin America, the past year brought a spate of unexpected difficulties to the region, from severe political crises triggered by corruption scandals, to economic disruptions from the collapse of commodity prices. The troubles, as I’ve noted, will be key to the many pivotal elections this year. And now, there’s another major challenge for the governments and people of the region: a huge outflow of refugees and migrants from Venezuela. Venezuela’s worsening political and economic crises have triggered a wave of mass migration that looks set to […]

Earlier this month, before leaving for a five-country trip in Latin America, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson speculated about a potential way out of the economic and political chaos in Venezuela. Perhaps, he suggested, the best solution was a military coup d’état. “In the history of Venezuela and South American countries, it is oftentimes that the military is the agent of change when things are so bad and the leadership can no longer serve the people,” he told an audience at the University of Texas. President Donald Trump first introduced the notion of prioritizing bullets over ballots in Venezuela […]

Less than three weeks ago, Colombians saw a familiar face splashed across every news platform. The man known by his nom de guerre “Timochenko,” the leader of what used to be Colombia’s largest guerilla group, which fought government forces for more than half a century, was formally launching his campaign for the presidency. As the head of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or the FARC by its Spanish acronym, Rodrigo Londono had commanded thousands of men and women in a campaign for a radical Marxist revolution. But Londono also guided the militia to a peace deal in 2016, vowing […]

Last week, negotiators from the European Union and Latin America’s Mercosur trading bloc, which includes Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, concluded another round of unsuccessful talks in Brussels aimed at securing a free trade agreement. Negotiations between the two sides have been ongoing periodically for over two decades, and the most recent round again failed to provide a breakthrough, although talks will reconvene in Paraguay on Feb. 19. In an email interview, Sebastian Dullien, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and a professor of international economics at the applied sciences university HTW Berlin, discusses the […]

In this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, managing editor, Frederick Deknatel, and associate editor, Omar H. Rahman, discuss three international crises faced by the Trump administration that are now coming to a head. In Syria, North Korea and Venezuela, the administration will soon have to take decisions and actions with important consequences. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get some of our uncompromising analysis delivered twice a week straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free and timely […]