The political projects of Latin America’s radical leaders have democratic rhetoric at their core. But their dynamics, as in Hugo Chávez's Venezuela, often seem to pull in another direction. The tensions will come to a point of decision in this decade, says Ivan Briscoe.
Latin America is cleaving into two, with an abyss opening up in its centre. Yet it still manages to share between its polarised political segments some practical techniques in bullying
Fidel Castro, reincarnated by some imaginative deity as a bedridden blogger, has recently annotated with the detail of a station-master the movements across Europe of the new United States president.
Only a very brave or simply suicidal person drives past the military barracks on the outskirts of Zacapa in a tinted-glass four-wheel drive. To do so would be to invite
A couple of months before Latin America followed Wall Street into the whirlpools, Venezuela was experimenting with a curious, unnoticed and utterly revolutionary version of financial meltdown. "It is
If Obama wins, the outreach of this peacable figure could send confusing tremors southwards
The man who made his name raiding supermarkets to feed the hungry has a new cause to fire him. Under a giant banner hoisted on three straining branches of bamboo,
The Hispanic vote in the swing states, on a plate. This, in the kind of clumsily indiscreet code language that serves as competition for Obama’s vice-presidential slate, is what
Over four traumatic days in March 2004, Spain acquainted itself with the Islamist terrorist carnage of "11-M", glimpsed a media empire fed on government spin, and switched sides
One image has stood like a rebuke to the supernatural powers of Latin America's new presidential elite. Ingrid Betancourt, her face punched by despair, stares down at the
These are times of despair for Guatemala's few good cops. Each day brings an average of fifteen fresh corpses, scooped up from roadways and ditches after the work
Lands have been confiscated, foreign companies driven out and utilities renationalised, but even so there is a special place in Venezuela for Louis Vuitton. The immaculate store in the Sambil
