When leftist schoolteacher Pedro Castillo became president of Peru in July, having won the election by a hair’s breadth the previous month, it didn’t require uncommon insight to predict that, sooner or later, the right wing would seek to impeach him and remove him from office. After all, Peru has gone through a jaw-dropping succession of unfinished presidencies, impeachments and presidential prosecutions in the past 20 years. What was less expected was that he would hand the opposition so much ammunition in its efforts to oust him. It took less than four months in office for Castillo to face his first [...]
In September, several senators belonging to Mexico’s National Action Party, or PAN, met with a visiting delegation from Vox, a rising political party from Spain. As the latest far-right party to gain traction in Europe, Vox seemed like a strange bedfellow for the PAN, a center-right party that has produced two of Mexico’s last four presidents. The meeting was a political gift for leftist President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who seized on it to brand his opponents in the PAN as “almost fascist.” The PAN’s own leadership hastened to assert that the senators had met with Vox in a purely [...]
Just as the U.S. Supreme Court prepared last week to hear one of the most contentious abortion cases since Roe v. Wade, which legalized the procedure in 1973, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued a scathing verdict on an abortion case in El Salvador. In its ruling, it held the Salvadoran government responsible for the death of a 33-year-old woman, identified only as “Manuela,” who died in prison in 2010 while serving a 30-year sentence for the “aggravated homicide” of a fetus through a miscarriage. El Salvador strictly enforces one of the world’s most draconian anti-abortion laws. At a [...]
