The election of Laura Chinchilla of the National Liberation Party on February 7 to the presidency of Costa Rica is an important milestone for Central America. President-elect Chinchilla has become Costa Rica’s first female president and the fifth woman elected president of a Latin America state since 1990. Her election represents a further blunting of the populist Left’s mythical invincibility in the region, and offers a pleasing counterpoise to the likes of anti-American machismo of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. In Panama, Honduras, Chile, and now Costa Rica, leaders of the …
On January 17, voters in Chile’s presidential run-off selected conservative Sebastián Piñera to become their next chief executive. The win for Piñera ended the 20-year hold on the presidency exercised by the center-left Concertación coalition and made Piñera Chile’s first elected conservative president in 52 years. Piñera, a billionaire businessman and leader of the Coalition for Change, successfully managed to ward off negative campaigning by former president Eduardo Frei, who tried to link Piñera to the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Piñera captured an estimated 52% of the vote in …
One year after taking office, President Obama has yet to usher in the new dawn in relations with Latin America he talked about during his campaign. It was a huge promise, given his predecessor’s visits to the region, free trade agreements with Colombia and Panama, the newly created Millennium Challenge Account directing more effective aid to countries there, the Merida Initiative for fighting drugs in Mexico, and the continuing success of the Clinton-era Plan Colombia. Thus far, the Administration’s involvement with the Americas has been more reactive than proactive, dominated …
This week marks the one year anniversary of the president’s election to commander chief, but it seems more like an occasion for concern than for slapping high-fives. It is not hard to craft comparisons between Carter and the current occupant of the Oval Office. Both entered office with high expectations; both vowed to change the tone in Washington and remake the world. Carter had a terrible sophomore slump. America’s enemies took stock of his foreign policy in his first year in office. The next year they exploited the weaknesses they found. …
A Round up of Op-eds from the Heritage Foundation US: Why We are All Winners – Israel Ortega Many of us who are first-generation Americans retain immediate connections to nations truly savaged by civil unrest, ethnic and class conflict and political violence. We don’t have to think too hard to think of places where “suffrage,” “elections” and even “democracy” are generally just catchy slogans[...] Conservatism’s Death: Greatly Exaggerated – Ernest Istook Liberal pundits such as the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne were quick to interpret the recent elections as “a definitive …
This year was indeed historic for Latin America. Fidel Castro finally stepped down from power and handed the reins to his brother Raul. According to a panelist at a recent event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Raul, unlike his brother, is no charismatic political leader; he is a military man, a manager of bureaucracy. Does that matter? Perhaps. The panelists also made clear Fidel will most certainly not return to power due to deteriorating health, though he still does manage to “put his foot down” from time …
Free trade has been receiving a bad rap lately. Barack Obama’s campaign has come out in full force against free trade. In addition to clumsily saying he would unilaterally renegotiate NAFTA (much to the chagrin of Canada and Mexico), during the third presidential debate Obama voiced opposition to the Colombian free trade agreement under the guise of “human rights.” Yet according to a recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal, labor union members, the contingent against whom human rights abuses have been aggressively exercised, are now much safer under Alvaro …
Last week, the world witnessed a stunning example of the success of Plan Colombia when 15 men and women were rescued after years as hostages of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC). The full details of the rescue as explained by The New York Times and other news sources read like a movie script with the Colombian military tricking the guard of the captives into transporting the hostages right into their hands. The FARC is a guerrilla army in Colombia, listed by the U.S. and the European Union’s as …
While the days of the organized crime of The Sopranos are over, the policies that were used to fight them have been revived in the struggle against domestic and international organized crime. These strategies in combination with a new interagency coalition are seeking to not only combat gang crime, but take down the gangs themselves. Numbers put out by the FBI estimate that there are roughly 30,000 “violent street, motorcycle and prison gangs” with some 800,000 members. Many are hoping that this new strategy of interagency information sharing will help …
