South America Archive

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro walks and talks with the swagger of a man who just dealt the country’s opposition a crushing victory in the country’s recent legislative elections. But Maduro’s bravado ignores one telling fact: It was Venezuela’s opposition Democratic Unity Roundtable coalition—known by its Spanish acronym, the MUD—that was the victor in the Dec. 6 vote, securing a super-majority of 112 of the National Assembly’s 167 seats. Rather than accepting those results, Maduro talks as if he and his United Socialist Party of Venezuela, or PSUV, received a mandate to deepen and broaden Hugo Chavez’s leftist platform, the self-proclaimed […]

The energy world has been abuzz since Mauricio Macri won a surprise victory in Argentina’s presidential elections on Nov. 22. The former mayor of Buenos Aires’ pro-business platform has raised expectations at home and abroad among investors and analysts anxious for change. Argentina has the potential to be both a regional and global energy leader, but after 12 years of Kirchnerismo, Macri has a long road ahead. Still, the prospects for an economic and energy turnaround have never been brighter, and Argentina’s energy sector has the potential to become a significant driver of future economic growth. Macri, who was sworn […]

If there was one surprise in the overwhelming electoral victory by the Venezuelan opposition in Sunday’s legislative elections, it was that the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) accepted defeat so quickly and peacefully. But anyone who thinks that means the political temperature will cool down in Venezuela should think again. Opposition leaders never doubted they had the votes to overtake the heirs to the late Hugo Chavez. The question was whether President Nicolas Maduro, Chavez’s successor, and his backers would allow a free election to take place—and if they did permit the true vote count to be revealed, […]

Editor’s note: Judah Grunstein is filling in for Richard Gowan, who is out this week. Two elections yesterday, an ocean apart, upended politics in the nations that went to the polls, with implications for their surrounding regions. In Venezuela, the political opposition won parliamentary elections, dealing the first electoral setback above the municipal and provincial levels to the late Hugo Chavez’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) in more than a decade.* In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Front party (FN) topped the combined voting in first-round elections for regional governments, confirming the party’s entry into the mainstream of French […]

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 […]