The Americas Archive

U.S. President Barack Obama has promised to continue his push for Congress to approve the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), despite firm opposition to the free trade agreement from both of the major candidates for president, including his former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. “Right now, I’m the president and I think I’ve got the better argument,” he told reporters following a meeting Tuesday with Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong. But what are the actual arguments about the TPP? For all the heated debate over the deal, which would free up trade among the United States, Japan and 10 other Pacific […]

On June 18, Mexico officially completed an eight-year transition toward a new justice system, replacing an outdated inquisitorial system, in which the court acts as investigator, with an adversarial one, in which the court is mainly an impartial referee between the prosecution and the defense. Under the old system, court cases were mostly conducted on paper, rather than in oral arguments, and convictions were often based on confessions and little else. Now, oral trials will be open to the public, and they will be based on testimony, cross-examinations and a greater reliance on evidence. Expectations for the new system vary […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series on the status of women’s rights and gender equality in various countries around the globe. The Colombian government and rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) agreed during peace negotiations last month to promote women’s access to property and to deny amnesty to perpetrators of sexual violence. In an email interview, Felipe Jaramillo Ruiz, a founding member of Colombian Network of International Relations and doctoral student at the Graduate Institute of Geneva, discusses women’s rights in Colombia. WPR: What is the current status of women’s rights and […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series on countries’ risk exposure, contribution and response to climate change. Last month, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in an interview that imposing a “strong” price on carbon is an “essential element” of his government’s climate change policy. In an email interview, Amin Asadollahi, the lead for climate change mitigation at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, discusses Canada’s response to climate change. WPR: How big of an issue is climate change domestically, and what role has Canada played in regional and global efforts to address climate change? Amin […]

Shock waves from Venezuela’s precipitous economic collapse have finally reached Cuba. They are forcing drastic cuts in energy consumption, slashing economic growth from 4 percent last year to just 1 percent in 2016, and raising fears of another “Special Period”—the catastrophic economic decline in the 1990s that followed the collapse of Cuba’s previous patron, the Soviet Union. Cuba’s predicament was foreshadowed by the plunging price of oil on the world market and Venezuela’s declining production, down 12 percent in the past year alone. Nevertheless, for several years Venezuela continued to meet its obligation to ship some 80,000 to 90,000 barrels […]