Central America Archive

When Brazil’s lower house voted Sunday in favor of launching impeachment proceedings to unseat President Dilma Rousseff, it loosened one more rock in what has recently seemed like an avalanche of disastrous news for Latin America’s left. There’s no question that the left, which in the not-very-distant past appeared unstoppable, has been on the receiving end of voters’ frustrations with all that ails the region. And yet, observers taking the measure of Latin American politics routinely overlook another part of the picture: Politicians of all stripes are getting battered, beaten and rejected by a restive public. Latin American voters are […]

AMSTERDAM—In the hours that followed the explosive revelations known as the Panama Papers, reverberations from the giant data drop were felt around the globe. After all, the 11.5 million documents from the Panamanian firm Mossack Fonseca, leaked anonymously to International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, implicate rich and powerful people from practically every country on Earth as holders of offshore shell companies that are often used for tax evasion purposes. But while the power from the leaks to discredit prominent individuals extended across practically every nation and every system of government, reaction to the revelations was far from uniform. The differences […]