South America Archive

Earlier this month, Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno announced that he was stripping Wikileaks founder Julian Assange of the asylum he’d been granted in Ecuador’s London embassy in 2012, under former President Rafael Correa. Moreno claimed that Assange had violated the terms of his asylum, but the decision was also part of Moreno’s broader effort to take Ecuador in a different direction after Correa’s autocratic presidency, says Carlos de la Torre, a professor of sociology at the University of Kentucky. In an interview with WPR, he explains how Moreno has reoriented Ecuador’s foreign and domestic policy since taking office in May […]

Not much remains of the “pink tide” of leftist governments that swept across Latin America in the 2000s, riding the long commodities boom. After the boom came the bust, and with it widespread voter dissatisfaction. Where free elections have been held, most of the region has subsequently swung to the right. There are, of course, some exceptions, most notoriously in Venezuela. President Nicolas Maduro, who came to office in 2013 as the handpicked successor of the leader who launched the wave, Hugo Chavez, continues to preside over one of the worst economic and humanitarian disasters in recent Latin American history. […]

Last month, South American leaders, many of them politically conservative, gathered in Chile to launch a new regional body. Although they didn’t say it, they had come to bury Unasur, or the Union of South American Nations, the left-leaning bloc that has been led by Venezuela since its founding a little over a decade ago. They hoped that their new group, the Forum for Progress in South America, or Prosur, would set the stage for a new era of integration and cooperation in the Southern Cone. But critics were quick to predict the new group’s demise, arguing that the fledgling […]

It’s been nearly three months since Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido declared himself interim president, vowing to oust Nicolas Maduro and bring the country’s protracted crisis to an end. But while Guaido successfully managed to muster international support from a host of countries in Latin America and beyond, it appears that hopes for a speedy improvement in conditions for ordinary Venezuelans are bound to go unmet. That’s the case not just for Venezuelans who are still in the country, but also for those who have migrated to neighboring Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America. Officials in Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and […]

CUCUTA, Colombia—Blood seeped from Juan Carlos Parra’s head as he slumped in a white plastic chair just a few steps from the border with Venezuela. His floral button-down shirt, which he had removed as he fought with a member of the Venezuelan National Guard, sat rumpled in his lap, soaked a deep red. Moments earlier, Carlos, 24, had been struck with a projectile launched by Venezuelan forces on the other side of the border. Two medics from the Colombian Civil Defense dressed in orange helmets and jumpsuits gathered around him and tried to stitch up the wound. Around them, chaos […]

In one of his latest displays of undiplomatic impulsiveness, President Donald Trump unexpectedly slammed the closest ally the United States has in Latin America, Colombian President Ivan Duque. The comments startled Duque and much of Colombia, highlighting the risks to politicians everywhere who align their fates too closely with a president like Trump, who is not only unpopular in their own countries, but who also has a penchant for mistreating Washington’s friends. The incident occurred on March 29 when Trump was on a visit to Lake Okeechobee in Florida with a group of Republican officials. Trump alluded to Duque, who […]

Loyal followers of U.S. President Donald Trump might enthusiastically proclaim that his “America First” foreign policy has been a success. His apologists more modestly argue that, if you ignore Twitter and focus on Trump’s actions, what little has changed in U.S. foreign policy is for the better. Whether enabled by ideological blinders or driven by partisan hackery, both claims are quite simply wrong. After more than two years of Trump’s amateurish bluster, no amount of posturing and self-declared victories can obscure the damage he has done to America’s interests. His failures are now on prominent display in Iran, North Korea […]