Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks at a campaign event in Mississauga, Ontario, Sept. 29, 2019 (Canadian Press photo by Ryan Remiorz via AP).

Voters in Canada will go to the polls on Oct. 21 to decide whether Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should be returned to power. Trudeau swept into office following a decisive victory in the 2015 federal elections, but his popularity has declined precipitously since then as a result of several high-profile scandals. This year’s election is widely seen as a toss-up, with polls showing Trudeau’s Liberal Party running neck-and-neck with the main opposition Conservative Party, led by Andrew Scheer. In an email interview with WPR, Christopher Sands, director of the Center for Canadian Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced […]

Maka indigenous leader-in-training Tsiweyenki, or Gloria Elizeche in Spanish, handles a copy of the Bible translated into her native language, in Mariano Roque Alonso, Paraguay, April 17, 2019 (AP photo by Jorge Saenz).

Seven thousand indigenous languages are spoken around the world today, and four in 10 of them are in danger of going extinct, a recent United Nations study warned. After its release in August, U.N. experts called for a series of steps, including new laws and international commitments, to reverse what they described as the “historic destruction” of indigenous languages. Researchers like the linguist Frank Seifart of Berlin’s Leibniz Center for General Linguistics, whose work includes a study of Carabayo, a language of indigenous people in the Colombian Amazon, have found that older speakers of a range of indigenous languages are […]

Peru’s president, Martin Vizcarra, announcing the dissolution of Congress at the government palace in Lima, Sept. 30, 2019 (Peruvian presidential press photo by Andres Valle via AP).

There is no shortage of high-stakes, bitter political battles across the globe today. Few, though, can compete with the drama unfolding now in Peru, where a standoff between the president and the opposition-controlled Congress has suddenly erupted into an unprecedented constitutional crisis. On Monday, President Martin Vizcarra dissolved Congress, and Congress responded by suspending Vizcarra on the grounds of his “permanent moral incapacity,” swearing in Vice President Mercedes Araoz as his replacement. No one is quite sure which move was legal. If the president’s dissolution of Congress is valid, then the Congress was not entitled to remove Vizcarra. If the […]

OAS and Rio Treaty members meet to discuss sanctions on Venezuela, New York City, Sept. 23, 2019 (AP photo by Bebeto Matthews).

The Organization of American States took a new step late last month that it hopes could lead to an end to the ongoing crisis in Venezuela—but that others fear may spark an armed conflict between Venezuela and its neighbor, Colombia. On Sept. 23, the OAS voted to take punitive actions against as-yet-unspecified members of President Nicolas Maduro’s government through a somewhat obscure mechanism: the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, also known as the Rio Treaty, or the TIAR by its Spanish acronym. The TIAR is a mutual defense treaty among 19 states in the Western Hemisphere. Signed in 1947, it […]

A Mexican marine stands guard at the Suchiate River border crossing between Guatemala and Ciudad Hidalgo, Mexico, June 16, 2019 (AP photo by Idalia Rie).

CHIQUIRINES, Guatemala—In August, Abner Lopez Macario, a 30-year-old farmer and father of two, found himself out of luck and back in Chiquirines, a town in the muggy coastal lands of Guatemala surrounded by sprawling banana plantations. Far from being a bittersweet return after years abroad, Lopez Macario’s homecoming was an admission of defeat. Three months earlier, after a 20-day trek through Mexico guided by a migrant-smuggler, he, his wife and his two sons made it all the way to the border of the United States in the back of a truck. Upon reaching El Paso, Texas, they had sought out […]

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