When Venezuela’s charismatic revolutionary, the late Hugo Chavez, won the presidential election in his country for the first time in 1998, he launched a new political era in Latin America. For the next 17 years, leftist politicians—many of them emerging from humble beginnings, as Chavez had—rose to power through democratic means in a region where that path had seldom been successful for the left or the poor. Chavez’s model of modified socialist economics and modified democratic governance soon spread to a number of countries and became the dominant political phenomenon of the 21st century in Latin America. That period of [...]
Global efforts to mitigate the impacts of climate change are ramping up ahead of the 21st Session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, known as COP21, to be held in Paris later this year. Although Latin America accounts for only 5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, many countries in the region have taken leading roles in global mitigation efforts. Brazil was host to the initial 1992 Earth Summit that led to the framework convention, and continues to be a major participant in climate change mitigation efforts, most notably in reducing [...]
The good times are winding down in much of Latin America, and with them ends not only a period of economic growth but very possibly also one of relative political stability. As the global economy and financial markets strain to adjust to a slowdown in China, for years one of the world’s principal engines of growth, no region of the world will feel a more painful punch from the new reality. In fact, the International Monetary Fund’s growth projections show Latin America and the Caribbean with the slowest economies of any major region this year. Such a sharp deceleration inevitably [...]
