South America Archive

LIMA, Peru—Most Peruvians were relieved to see Vice President Martin Vizcarra sworn in as the country’s new leader last Friday, after a series of revelations and accusations of corruption forced beleaguered President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski to resign. But the installation of the relatively unknown Vizcarra as Peru’s 61st president marked the beginning of a period of uncertainty, as his ability to govern effectively in a political environment tainted by corruption and chicanery remains to be seen. Vizcarra is a 55-year-old civil engineer whose only political experience prior to becoming Kuczynski’s first vice president was a four-year term as governor of […]

Earlier this month, the United States, Canada and Mexico concluded the seventh round of talks to amend the North American Free Trade Agreement, once again failing to agree on terms to update the 24-year-old pact that U.S. President Donald Trump promised to renegotiate. Trump’s threats to pull the U.S. out of NAFTA if he doesn’t get what he wants, on top of his other protectionist trade policies, have pushed Mexico to diversify its trade relationships, including with its neighbors in Latin America. In an email interview, Duncan Wood, the director of the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington, […]

Before Colombians voted in congressional and presidential primary elections last Sunday, the front-runner in the race for president, according to early polls, was Gustavo Petro, a former leftist guerrilla fighter and once-mayor of Bogota. But to anyone who thought those numbers meant Colombia was about to take a sharp leftward turn, the election results came as a surprise. The most startling outcome from the congressional vote was the spectacularly disastrous performance by the FARC, the longtime rebel group that signed a peace deal in 2016, demobilized and entered politics, repurposing its Spanish acronym from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia […]

On Feb. 19, Brazil’s government announced it was abandoning an effort to reform the pension system, which is a main driver of its ballooning deficit. Though the official reason was the military intervention launched last month in Rio de Janeiro state, which makes constitutional amendments impossible to act on, the reform effort was widely understood to have little chance of success. The failure of Michel Temer, Brazil’s exceedingly unpopular president, to deliver on a key promise prompted credit ratings agencies to downgrade Brazil further below investment grade. In an email interview, Paulo Sotero, director of the Brazil Institute at the […]

On March 11, Colombians vote in what could be the biggest test of the country’s democracy in decades. For the first time, the now-demobilized Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, will compete at the polls as a newly formed political party. No matter how it performs, the FARC, now known as the Revolutionary Alternative Common Force—maintaining its old acronym in Spanish—is guaranteed 10 seats in Congress overall, with five in the Senate and five in the House of Representatives, as part of the landmark 2016 peace agreement. But the former guerrillas are aiming higher. Running on a message of […]