The Americas Archive

Earlier this month, Brazil’s president, Michel Temer, gathered his Cabinet to the Planalto presidential palace in Brasilia to mark the end of his first year in office. He toasted progress on his reform agenda, while stumping for still more austerity. Federal spending on social programs had been capped for 20 years, and the airline and oil industries opened to more foreign investment, but the real prize awaited. Congress was advancing toward the approval of the top item on Temer’s agenda, the most ambitious pension reform since Brazil’s dictatorship ended in 1985. Given the positive impact that a cut to benefits […]

Oil markets are expecting the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its allies to extend their supply quotas when they meet in Vienna on Thursday. The current production cuts have failed to drain bloated oil inventories due to a remarkable resurgence in U.S. shale production. Keeping production down will not be easy for the coalition of 24 oil producers, 11 of which are not in OPEC. Even if fully implemented, an extension of the deal will likely just prevent oil prices from falling, while giving more market share to U.S. shale. It seems that OPEC has lost the […]

Argentina’s president, Mauricio Macri, was in Beijing last week to attend China’s enormous One Belt, One Road summit and sign several agreements with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping. Nearly 30 heads of state and senior representatives of at least 20 other countries attended the summit, where Chinese officials presented their vision for building massive infrastructure projects in many parts of the globe. The agreements between Macri and Xi covered more than $30 billion of Chinese investments in Argentina on everything from energy and agriculture to transportation and mining, capped by a Chinese plan to build two nuclear power plants at […]

On May 11, Hubert Minnis, a physician and former health minister, was sworn in as prime minister of the Bahamas, having led his Free National Movement political party to victory in the May 10 general election. He replaces Perry Christie, who had served for two nonconsecutive terms. In an email interview, Larry Smith, a columnist for The Nassau Tribune who operates the Bahama Pundit blog, describes the issues that animated the campaign as well as the challenges Minnis faces now that he’s in office. WPR: What were the main issues of the campaign, and how did Hubert Minnis’s message compare […]

Venezuela is spiraling out of control. Daily life is growing ever more dire for most of the population, and the prospects for political reconciliation and an end to the humanitarian emergency are looking increasingly dim under the leadership of President Nicolas Maduro and his United Socialist Party of Venezuela, or PSUV. As the opposition struggles, so far unsuccessfully, to put an end to the crisis, the question arises: What can—or should—the international community do to help the Venezuelan people? On Wednesday, the U.N. Security Council held a closed-door meeting on the matter, a sign that the issue’s importance on the […]

Since the beginning of April, Venezuela has witnessed sustained protests on a scale not seen since 2014, when 43 people died during anti-government unrest. The latest wave of protests, in which at least 42 people have died, was initially triggered by the Supreme Court’s attempts earlier this year to assume the powers of the opposition-dominated National Assembly. Although the move was revoked days after it was introduced, it served as a catalyst for protests over wider grievances, including shortages of basic goods, triple-figure inflation and increasingly undemocratic practices by the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela, or PSUV. Government attempts […]

Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series about income inequality and poverty reduction in various countries around the world. When she was inaugurated for her second term in 2014, Chile’s president, Michelle Bachelet, declared, “Chile has a single enemy and that is inequality and only together can we overcome it.” Despite a struggling economy, she has pursued multiple initiatives intended to achieve that goal, notably education and tax reform. In an email interview, Daniel Hojman, associate professor of economics at the University of Chile, explains how inequality has evolved and whether the issue will be central […]

ASUNCION, Paraguay—A month after rioters set fire to Paraguay’s Congress, President Horacio Cartes has abandoned his contentious plans to change the constitution to allow him to run for a second term in 2018. But a corrupt party system and factionalism among Paraguay’s elites pose a greater threat to representative government in one of the poorest countries in South America. On April 26, the lower house of Paraguay’s legislature, the Chamber of Deputies, rejected a bill to amend the country’s constitution to allow former and current presidents to run again. Nine days earlier, Cartes, a tobacco magnate who is one of […]