The Americas Archive

LONDON — Only moments after takeoff on a flight from Amsterdam to London, everyone on board, it seemed, had disappeared into a newspaper. With front pages from across Europe held aloft, a glance down the aisle showed one story dominated the news that day in dailies across the region, with another piece of news coming in a close second. Almost every front page showed a picture of Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. Not far below the news from Denver, most papers featured unsettling news about Russia and the possibility of a new Cold War. Once again, America and Europe stand […]

SAN JOSÉ DEL GUAVIARE, Colombia — At a military base in this eastern town on the edge of the jungle, Juan Manual Santos, Colombia’s defense minister, recently delivered a triumphant appraisal of the country’s fight against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Just a few years ago, it would have it would have been hard to imagine staging such an event here, for fear of a guerrilla ambush. “We have chosen San José del Guaviare because it symbolized the old Colombia, a country ridden with narcotraffickers, paramilitaries and guerrillas,” said Santos as he addressed the country’s generals and elite troops […]

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Last week, the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos (INDEC), the Argentine government’s statistics agency, released the official inflation figure for the month of July: 0.4 percent. Such a report would have caused jubilation among the Argentine public, had they believed it. “It’s a lie,” responded Yamila, a local drama teacher, without hesitation when asked about the figure. The coordinators of the INDEC report appear to be the only ones who have failed to notice the recent price increases in Buenos Aires. Charles, a French researcher who has resided here for the last three months, scoffed […]

Earlier today, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski signed an agreement negotiated last week that will position 10 American-controlled interceptor missiles at a U.S.-manned missile defense base in Poland. Both governments reached the deal despite strenuous Russian opposition to the move. During the past year, Russian political, military, and other leaders have stridently denounced American efforts to establish a comprehensive ballistic missile defense (BMD) network that extends beyond the United States. In particular, Moscow has objected to U.S. plans to deploy ballistic missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic to supplement the […]

As Venezuela prepares to mark the 10th anniversary of its Bolivarian Revolution, Hugo Chávez has little cause for celebration. His stewardship of the state economy has largely resulted in failure: Income inequality is on the rise while inflation has skyrocketed to nearly 30 percent. Basic food staples — such as milk, eggs, and meat — are scarce, raising fears of a looming food crisis. Violence is rife. Venezuela’s murder rate has grown so ruinous — with more than12,000 homicides in 2007 — that the country no longer releases official data. On the political front, matters are equally troubling. In the […]

AUGUST BLUES — “August is the month when wars start,” wrote the late Al Aronowitz, the rock writer. Both World War I and II started in August, and now the Georgia-Russia conflagration has followed suit. In planning their attempt to retake South Ossetia, did the Georgians think the Russians would all be on vacation and not notice? Their second miscalculation was to forget the lesson of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 and somehow believe that their patron, the United States, would step in. That’s what the Hungarians believed when they launched their revolution against the Soviet presence, based mainly on […]

The participation of the American basketball player Chris Kaman in the Beijing Olympics as a member of the German basketball squad has caused some eyebrows to be raised — not least, those of Kaman’s own father LeRoy. “You’re not German,” Yahoo Sports reports LeRoy telling his son: “You’re an American citizen.” But the story of Kaman’s blitz naturalization is not only one of a basketball mercenary in search of a chance for glory at the Olympics or of the German national team’s desperation to find a usable center to line up next to star forward Dirk Nowitzki. It also reveals […]

When Secretary of Defense Robert Gates unveiled his first (and presumably last) National Defense Strategy (NDS) on July 31, he argued that the best single word to describe it would be “balance.” Although the document is comprehensive and eclectic in its listing of possible security threats to the United States, its real function is to counterbalance what the secretary sees as the U.S. Defense Department’s natural tendency to focus excessively on winning conventional conflicts rather than “irregular wars” such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan. The NDS also aims to promote a more balanced U.S. national security policy by bolstering […]

ABOARD THE U.S.S. KEARSARGE — There was something strange about the U.S.S. Kearsarge amphibious assault ship as she left Norfolk, Virginia, last week for a four-month South American cruise. Instead of the usual solid ranks of white-clad sailors lining her huge flight deck, the size of two football fields, there were hundreds of military medical personnel in the green, blue, gray or tan uniforms of the Canadian Army, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force and the Brazilian and Dutch militaries — not to mention scores of civilian aid workers in blue jeans and t-shirts. For decades, the U.S. Navy’s […]

On July 8, a bipartisan National War Powers Commission called upon the next administration to replace the controversial 1973 War Powers Resolution. Co-chaired by former Secretaries of State James A. Baker and Warren Christopher and composed of high-ranking former officials such as former Congressman Lee Hamilton, Former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and Judge Abner Mikva, the privately-sponsored commission recommended the change to create more effective cooperation between the legislative and executive branches on when and how to deploy U.S. forces overseas. The U.S. Constitution gives both branches a role in approving the use of military force, but over the […]

August is when official Washington shuts down and heads off for vacation. Congressmen and senators travel to their districts to politick, especially in these even-numbered years, and presidents travel to their ranches or beach houses or, this year, to the Olympics. But that wasn’t the case during the administration of George H.W. Bush. In fact, it was during these dog days of summer that the elder Bush was busiest. The next president could learn a thing or two from the 41st — about what to do and what not to do. It’s regrettable that Bush’s presidency is usually mentioned in […]

Hats off to Joshua Paltrow for two WaPo pieces describing six days trekking through the Ecuadoran rainforest with an Ecuadoran Army patrol in search of FARC guerillas along the Colombian border. I spent some time in the Ecuadoran rainforest, but unlike Paltrow (who was advised by an Ecuadoran colonel, “Don’t worry about the snakes. Worry about the guerrillas.”), all I had to worry about was the jungle. And the soldier Paltrow cites pretty much sums it up: “The jungle is beautiful,” one soldier remarked. “But everything bites.” Another thing that resonated for me was the soldier, a rainforest Indian, who […]

SEOUL, South Korea — Following talks here this week with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, U.S. President George W. Bush said North Korea must do more if it wants to retire its membership in the “axis of evil.” And for the first time during the six-party talks, U.S. diplomacy appears focused on North Korea’s human rights record.Seoul was the first stop of Bush’s last tour of Asia while in the White House. At a press conference following his third meeting with Lee since the conservative South Korean president took office in February, a reporter asked Bush if North Korea still […]

Despite the steady stream of suggestive reports about Russia’s desire to regain a military presence in Cuba, here’s what a Cuban diplomat had to say about the matter: However, a high-ranking Cuban diplomat said on Saturday that the Cuban leadership had no intention of resuming military cooperation with Russia, especially after the surprise closure of the Lourde’s listening post. The electronic monitoring and surveillance facility near Havana at Torrens, also known as the Lourdes facility, the largest Russian SIGINT site abroad, was shut down in October 2001 by then-president Vladimir Putin. “We were not even notified about the decision [by […]

The excitement — however artificially stimulated by opening rock bands and generously inflated crowd estimates — of Barack Obama’s speech in Berlin is now passed. What remains are some serious questions: notably, for German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and the Mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit. The two leading Social Democrats — both touted as possible candidates for the chancellorship in the 2009 German elections — were also the two politicians most closely associated with the push to have the American presidential candidate give a high-profile public speech in the German capital. It is a well-established principle of international law that […]

The recent clashes in eastern Afghanistan thrust the “forgotten war” back into the public eye. At a time when admittedly fragile stability is taking hold in Iraq, it is also an important reminder that the need for improved counterinsurgency capabilities neither began nor will end there. The international effort to stabilize Afghanistan is in peril, and the United States and its NATO allies lack many of the resources required to effectively secure and reconstruct that war-torn country. Against this backdrop, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s inauguration of the Civilian Response Corps is a very welcome development. The demands of large-scale […]