Following in the wake of President Barack Obama’s trip to Brazil, Chile, and El Salvador in March, Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton held a private dinner party on Wednesday, May 18, where she hosted six former Latin American presidents coming from Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Panama, and El Salvador. The dinner was part of Clinton’s newly hatched offensive in which she hoped to further mend regional relations that could, up to this...
In a scene from my first book, Hugo Chávez: Oil, Politics and the Challenge to the U.S. (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006), I discuss how Brazil became an ally of Venezuela during a key moment of heightened political tensions. It was December, 2002 and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez was facing down an economically damaging lock-out of the oil sector launched by the right wing political opposition. The lock-out capped a tumultuous political year for Chávez: just eight...
Arizona’s current crackdown on illegal immigrants has ignited a heated national legal debate –recent federal, state, and local initiatives have been moving in a more restrictive direction. Even in the “blue” state of Massachusetts, a bill proposing stricter limitations on illegal immigrants’ employment rights, as well as tightened standards for tuition benefits, along with more difficult access to subsidized housing, had received widespread popular support before such steps were reined in by the state...
Washington is currently considering three free trade agreements (FTAs) that await congressional ratification. While U.S. lawmakers hesitate to approve deals with Colombia and South Korea, the proposed U.S.-Panama FTA does not seem to generate much controversy. Although the ongoing transgressions in Panama have not made big headlines in the States, the events transpiring in that country warrant very serious scrutiny. Law 30—nicknamed the “sausage law” because it crams many unrelated provisions into one omnibus...
At a Mercosur summit on August 3rd in Argentina, member states applauded their success in finally making the trade organization into a full customs union, a process that has been heatedly debated since December 1994. Almost completely absent from the agenda, however, was the important matter of restoring diplomatic and economic normalcy between Colombia and Venezuela. Although neither country is currently a full member of Mercosur, their persistently stormy relationship has been of deep...
