The Americas Archive

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Old-fashioned political graffiti still shouts calls for social change on the walls of Latin American cities like Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Young idealists still preach the virtues of revolution, and an occasional taxi driver can startle you with an excited display of admiration for Colombia’s Marxist rebel leader Manuel “Sureshot” Marulanda. Observing this scattered evidence of wishes to overthrow the system, one could easily be fooled into thinking democracy in Latin America is on shaky ground. A closer look, however, points to strong evidence that democracy is throwing deep roots in Latin soil. A few decades […]

Angarsk, a city of about 270,000 in southeastern Siberia, is the home of the Angarsk Electrolyzing and Chemical Combine, a plant created to enrich uranium for the Soviet nuclear program. Throughout its history, the plant has been a restricted area — closed to all foreign visitors. On Nov. 28, 2006, however, the state-funded Russian news agency ITAR-TASS reported that the Russian government has decided to remove the Angarsk plant from its list of restricted areas. Soon, according to the report, Angarsk will become the site of the world’s first “international uranium enrichment center” (IUEC). Enriched uranium fuel is required by […]

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — Brazil defies definition. Its contrasts and contradictions are everywhere — from the Europeans of the south to the African heritage of Bahia, the megalopolis of Sao Paulo to the untouched remoteness of the Amazon, the joyous samba amid the chronic gun violence of the shanty settlements. It has world-class companies like energy giant Petrobras, but in many ways is a highly uncompetitive economy. But the most overwhelming contrast is between the fabulously wealthy and the desperately poor. By every international measurement, Brazil is one of the most unequal societies on earth, a condition that has […]

PIRIÁPOLIS, Uruguay — Workers in this Uruguayan town have been busily crafting the finishing touches on beachfront shops and restaurants. The Southern Hemisphere’s summer is arriving to this time-travelers’ destination, a place oddly reminiscent of a mid-century resort in the South of France. With summer’s arrival, hordes of tourists from neighboring countries should start rolling in at any moment. As laborers toiled here, somewhere else in the continent a modern brand of Latin American professionals wrapped their work on a more ambitious project. South America’s new crop of leftist leaders met in Cochabamba, Bolivia, to chart a course of regional […]

TONY’S LONG GOODYE — Until recently the received wisdom in Whitehall was that British Prime Minister Tony Blair would announce his resignation in early May, with Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown stepping into his shoes in June. But political developments have forced the pace of his departure, says a knowledgeable insider in London, and he will very probably quit 10 Downing Street in early March.<<ad>>Some time around May, the Labor government faces a very difficult election in Scotland where its strength is being challenged by the Scottish Nationalist Party; and the last thing Brown — a Scotsman — wants […]

CARACAS, Venezuela — “Es-tu-dian-te u-ni-ver-si-ta-rio.” It took a while, but José Bueno finally read out “university student” from a bulletin board at a Caracas primary school, where he is learning to read thanks to a government-sponsored literacy program. “I didn’t know any of that before,” he said. “But if you set a goal, you can achieve it.” Bueno grew up in rural poverty, planting corn and sweet potatoes instead of going to school. It was a time of donkeys and candles, a time of two-party democracy, oil-fueled modernization schemes, and corrupt elites. The system later collapsed and then came change. […]

WASHINGTON — President George Bush met with a leading Iraqi Shiite politician at the White House Monday amid speculation of an imminent change of direction in the U.S. approach towards charting Iraq’s national destiny. Bush said he told Sayyed Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the influential leader of SCIRI, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, “we’re not satisfied with the pace of progress in Iraq.” The administration has been gathering proposals from several sources on how to put the democratization of Iraq back on track and accelerate an orderly American withdrawal. One source, the bi-partisan Iraq Study Group is […]

The U.S. and U.K. governments have independently made public statements on the future of their respective nuclear weapons programs in the last week. Considering the timing, it is tempting to conclude that the two events are linked, but in fact these announcements reflect the two countries’ differing approaches to modernization given the unique characteristics of their nuclear arsenals. The Announcements On Monday, Dec. 4, Prime Minister Tony Blair announced the British Government decision to replace its four Trident nuclear submarines and reduce its nuclear stockpile to 160 warheads. Following parliamentary debate and a vote scheduled for the end of March […]

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — U.S. lawmakers have again fallen for a steel industry propaganda campaign. The cause this time is a news article that rehashed what has been known for years about the inhumane conditions of charcoal workers in Brazil. Charcoal is used to make pig iron, which is transformed into any number of consumer goods for sale in the United States. Every several years, usually around election time, the United States steel industry stirs up its lobby in an effort to close the U.S. market to foreign competitors. Democrats and Republicans are both subject to the barrage of […]

Guadalajara, MEXICO — The tense situation that appears close to resolution in Oaxaca, Mexico, began in May with a teachers’ strike, a fairly regular event. But with the unleashing of an authoritarian crackdown the following month on the striking teachers, it descended into an open revolt against the governor of one of the Republic’s poorest and most corrupt states. The nearly six months of unrest has left at least 16 people dead and the state economy in shambles. And while some of the parties in the conflict — namely the teachers and a left-wing group backing their demands — have […]

CARACAS, Venezuela – Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez yesterday earned six more years to steer the world’s fifth largest oil producer through what is set to become the region’s most expansive socialist experiment. Amid claims of voting irregularities by the opposition, election officials last night announced that Chávez had won 61 percent of the vote, with 38 percent garnered by conservative opposition candidate Manuel Rosales. Caracas exploded with the news. Fireworks, horns and throngs of chatting supporters broke an eerie silence that had settled on the tense city throughout the day of voting. By 11 p.m., thousands had converged on Miraflores, […]

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — In South America’s Southern Cone, “Dirty War” wounds are getting a fresh coat of pain. Under populist governments in Uruguay and Argentina, human rights investigators have been turning over old stones to prosecute crimes dating back to the region’s 1970s dictatorships, a period of state violence against dissident citizens known as the Dirty War. And old ghosts are flying. In October, Uruguayan President Juan Maria Bordaberry was arrested for his involvement in the 30-year-old murders of two politicians and two leftist guerrillas. Officials in Montevideo had detained the 78-year-old former leader and his former foreign minister, […]

This past week, Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) once again dropped the “D” word into the midst of the political debate surrounding the war in Iraq. By announcing his intent to introduce legislation to reinstate the draft, Rangel once again drew attention to the fact that the United States continues to wage a long-term war with an all-volunteer force. Then, as if on queue to highlight the “burden sharing” disparity that motivated Rangel’s proposal, we learned that the President’s daughter was busy fighting her own battle to recover the purse she had stolen while dining in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Thus, as […]

Last month, a coalition of self-styled human rights groups, including the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, announced that it had filed a war crimes complaint in Germany against Donald Rumsfeld and thirteen other present or former U.S. officials. Other sponsoring plaintiffs include Germany’s Union of Republican Lawyers (RAV) and the French-based International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH). (The presence of the FIDH among the plaintiffs is particularly noteworthy, since the FIDH is a regular and substantial recipient of EU financing.) Whereas the announcement will undoubtedly have sent Rumsfeld-haters, Bush-bashers and anti-Iraq War activists the world over into raptures, those […]