Colombia’s congressional elections on March 14 were hailed by the United Nations as the most peaceful in years. The victory of the coalition led by President Alvaro Uribe suggests an easy win for his party in the presidential elections scheduled for May 30.
How might the changing political relationship between Cuba and the United States influence Cuban-American literature?
In its draft “Preliminary Damage and Needs Assessment” (PDNA), which was prepared with the help of some of its bilateral and multilateral donors, the government projected total damages and losses caused by the quake at close to eight billion dollars.
As a 30-year-old Australian who had previously travelled to Guatemala and El Salvador, I decided to respond to an email listserv request for international observers in Honduras after the June 2009 coup.
The United Nations will host a Haiti donors’ conference at the end of March.
This conference will be quite different from last year’s event, of course, coming as it does on the heels of the worst earthquake to strike Haiti in two centuries. An agenda has already begun to take shape: It’s already clear that a future Haiti must be populated with environmentally sustainable, earthquake-resistant buildings, for example, and it’s also clear that the international community must do something to ease Haiti’s massive debt burden.
Millions of Brazilians have serious housing problems. The Movimiento Sin Techo (Homeless Movement) seeks to organize them, and to occupy abandoned properties and land on the outskirts of the city to pressure the government.
In a virtually unnoticed exchange on February 3, Congressman Peter Hoekstra (R-MI) called the CIA to task for its incredibly ham-fisted handling of an April 20, 2001 incident in Peru. In collaboration with a CIA aircrew working as part of a joint program to interdict drug trafficking, the Peruvian air force shot down a plane carrying an American missionary family, killing two. In an angry tone, the Republican congressman denounced the CIA’s response, released the actual film of the incident, and triggered an official statement from the agency — conveniently left off the CIA website to attract as little attention as possible.
Brazil is now a big league player. In the decade in which it begins its ascent, the country is so important that it is forcing its main competitor in the region, the United States, to redesign its foreign policy to take into consideration Brazil’s prominence, a tactic that might destabilize all of Latin America.
Recently I had the opportunity to accompany two labor union leaders from my country, Mexico, to meet with high-level officials of the Obama Labor Department. The meeting was an example of the kind of new U.S.-Latin America relations that so many hoped would come from an Obama presidency.