Western states have reflexively diagnosed the continuing violence and lawlessness in Mali's fragmented north to the ills of global jihad, willfully ignoring the region's deep links to the transnational criminal racket that sustains both the criminalized state and its criminals.
Venezuela is politically polarised and so is much of the coverage of it. But just as the violence is now kaleidoscopic the international response must become more complex.
As on-going peace talks in Havana address narco-trafficking amidst Colombia's continued economic growth, remnants of the FARC are more likely to turn to what were once the very seeds of the rebel movements: social banditry.
Just as the wandering elites of Damascus, Cairo or Tripoli seek salvation in London, the peripatetic poor and needy of the very same countries are drowning to the distant putting sound of an indifferent life-boat.
This indeed is the authentic measure of the late president’s achievements: there is now no simple switch in Venezuelan public ideology – no going back. The turn in the post-colonial history of the region is unequivocal.
Interstate conflict used to be the norm. Now, as old battles are being put behind us, Ivan Briscoe asks if the UK and Argentina can reconcile their differences over the Falklands/Malvinas.
Talk of a pact with criminals is beyond the pale in Mexico’s presidential election campaign. But the tentative success of a deal with gang leaders in one of Central America’s most violent countries suggests the time may have come to explore a new style of negotiations aimed at reducing appalling l
The sudden expropriation of Argentina’s YPF’s oil firm has stirred alarm across Spain, the EU and international business. But the galloping radicalization of economic policy led by a group of young officials in Buenos Aires is grounded in lessons drawn from the global crisis and the errors of Euro
Two bouts of gunfire on either side of the Atlantic gave the inspiration to this week’s series of articles. But if the statistics show that war is declining and criminal violence in most regions is flatlining, how should we read the redoubts of extreme insecurity? Are they holdovers from the past,
Obama’s trip to the stable democracies of Brazil, Chile and El Salvador beginning on March 19 is a sign of maturing relations between the US and Latin America. Nevertheless, a toughening approach towards security issues and the hard-headed calculation of US national interests will be a dominant th
How should civil society convey the countless loopholes, miseries and quiet victories of development in this digital era of time-compressed argument and ideological insinuation?
The work of the Argentinean writer Tomás Eloy Martínez is intimately bound with the country’s modern history of political delusion and personal liberation. Ivan Briscoe reflects on a fiction-reality fusion that made a unique contribution to “inventing Perón”.
