South America Archive

On July 13, with a handshake and a smile, long-ruling President Desi Bouterse handed over the reins of power in Suriname to Chan Santokhi, a former police chief who has tenaciously pursued mass murder charges against Bouterse for the last 15 years. “It won’t be an easy job,” said Bouterse, who had a parting trick to play on his rival. When Santokhi turned up to work the following week, he found his new office stripped of its IT equipment. Aside from procuring some new phones and computers, Santokhi faces three main challenges in governing this former Dutch colony on the […]

Until recently, it was one of the brightest, most promising trends in Latin America, and one of the strongest arguments for optimism about its future. But tragically, the fight against corruption, which had made determined strides in its drive to uproot graft, influence peddling and venal misuse of resources, has not only stalled—it has shifted into reverse. The backsliding is now converging with the scourge of the coronavirus, adding to the many challenges that Latin Americans face, and raising the barriers to recovery after the pandemic ends. Latin America is not alone in hitting a wall in its attempts to […]

As the coronavirus pandemic takes a terrible toll across Latin America, with over 3.5 million cases and nearly 150,000 deaths, the region is increasingly facing a financial and humanitarian emergency. Across Latin America and the Caribbean, GDP is forecast to contract by 9.3 percent in 2020, according to the International Monetary Fund—the region’s largest economic contraction on record, and far worse than the outlook for African and Asian economies. The United Nations expects the value of South America’s exports to fall by nearly a fifth this year due to shrinking international demand and weaker commodity prices. Foreign investment has also […]

Any doubt that the coronavirus pandemic can transform political realities was erased Monday when one of the world’s most entrenched strongmen was formally swept out of power in the tiny South American nation of Suriname. The National Assembly, Suriname’s legislature, officially named Chan Santokhi, a former police chief who prevailed in elections in May, to replace longtime President Desi Bouterse. Grounds for removing Bouterse, who was convicted of murder last year, have never been in short supply. But it took the pandemic and Bouterse’s spectacular mismanagement to bring an end to his rule. Until the coronavirus arrived, Bouterse withstood challenge […]

The coronavirus pandemic has thrown a harsh light on the long-standing structural weaknesses of global labor markets and of the protections available for workers. The estimated 2 billion people worldwide toiling away in the informal sector—in jobs that are not backed by contracts or institutions, and that are not monitored or taxed by governments—are the new economically vulnerable. Across the globe, in developing and developed economies alike, these often-overlooked workers are bearing the brunt of COVID-19 and its accompanying economic depression, and will continue to even when economies start to recover. Because many of these employees work off the books […]

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, “Our knowledge of what we’re able to do as [election] observers is evolving as our knowledge of the virus evolves,” says David Carroll, director of the Democracy Program at the Carter Center. Carroll, who has participated in dozens of independent election observation missions around the world, joined WPR’s Elliot Waldman on the Trend Lines podcast this week to talk about how democracies are adjusting to COVID-19 in the way they administer elections, and how the pandemic is changing the facts on the ground for observers. Listen to the full conversation here: And if you like what […]

The coronavirus pandemic has created a vexing challenge for democratic societies: How to safely hold free and fair elections. Some countries that saw early success in containing the spread of COVID-19, like South Korea, have been able to hold national elections safely, while a slew of others have been forced to postpone their votes. The pandemic has also changed the facts on the ground for independent election observers. For this week’s interview on Trend Lines, WPR’s Elliot Waldman is joined by David Carroll, director of the Democracy Program at the Carter Center. He has participated in dozens of observation missions […]

Editor’s Note: Guest columnist Neil Bhatiya is filling in for Kimberly Ann Elliott this week. Last week, the presidency of the Financial Action Task Force, the global intergovernmental standard-setter for combatting illicit financial threats, passed from China to Germany. The presidency of the FATF is an important platform for countries to highlight critical threats to the global financial system. Among Germany’s incoming priorities for its two-year term is a focus on the illicit financial flows behind many crimes related to the environment. Such a campaign is an overdue step to combat a lucrative but not widely understood criminal enterprise, one […]