Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez has long been Iran’s greatest ally in the Western Hemisphere, but as Chavez’s cancer grows and his country’s future becomes increasingly uncertain, Iran may need to find a new best friend in Latin America—and fast. Enter Bolivia. Since Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad first visited Bolivia in 2007, the relationship between Amhadinejad and Bolivian President Evo Morales has grown. The two even played soccer together in Tehran not too long ago. But Morales and Ahmadinejad’s fancy footwork aside, it’s clear that the relationship between Bolivia and Iran is … More
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By Juan Carlos Hidalgo
The most important development this week in Latin America is the decision of the Argentine government to seize control of Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF), the country’s largest oil company. On Monday, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner announced the expropriation of the controlling stake of YPF that is owned by the Spanish company Repsol. The Spanish [...]
Argentina’s Point of No Return is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
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With a score of 78.3 in the 2012 Index of Economic Freedom published by The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal, Chile is now the seventh economically freest nation in the world (out of 179 countries ranked) and is number one in all of Latin America. Its overall score improvement—nearly one point—reflects better protection of property rights, more vigilance against government corruption, and greater monetary freedom—although there is room for additional improvement in business and labor freedom. Led since 2010 by President Sebastian Piñera’s center-right Alianza coalition (one of … More
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The society that Pope Benedict XVI will find when he lands in Cuba next week will be a destitute one, prostrate in every way. The once proud and comparatively wealthy Cubans are now among the poorest in the hemisphere, definitely the least informed and, consequently, the least free. For outsiders, Cuba is a cautionary tale about what happens when a minority with guns takes over and tries to create a socialist paradise. For Cubans, who can’t escape, Cuba oscillates between inferno and merely tedious existence. Cuba is disconnected from the … More
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This week, the White House dispatched its peripatetic Vice President Joe Biden south to Mexico and Honduras. Biden rightly sees criminal violence and insecurity as the gravest security threat in the region, but he was too quick to dismiss the potential threat posed by Iran. “People talk about Hezbollah. They talk about Iranian support for weapons and the rest. I guarantee you, Iran will not be able to pose a hemispheric threat to the United States,” he said. This appears to contradict what Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James R. … More
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Challenges to U.S. international broadcasting and public diplomacy continue to mount. Iran, joining China and Russia, also nourishes ambitions as a global power and is moving forward with soft-power advances in Latin America. (Not that there is anything “soft” about Iranian soft power.) Part of the explanation is that Iran is desperate to boost its image and economy as it faces broader sanctions and a potential European oil embargo. Iran may also be focusing its propaganda efforts on Latin America to build influence with the Lebanese Shia diaspora there, where … More
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On February 21, President Hugo Chavez told the Venezuelan people he will soon undergo another round of surgery. The breaking story was characteristically brief and uninformative. Chavez said doctors had detected a new lesion in the area of previous cancer surgery. He claimed the lesion is small. Following the removal of an undisclosed malignancy in June 2011 and repeated rounds of chemotherapy, Chavez reassured his country in October that he was cancer-free. Venezuelans loyal to Chavez took comfort in the fact their president appeared healthier, re-grew lost hair, and was … More
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Within 48 hours of the impressive victory in Venezuela’s first-ever presidential primary, the winner Henrique Capriles Radonski, who favors an end to polarization and national reconciliation, faced a barrage of vituperative, mendacious, and scandalous attacks by supporters of the Chavez regime. A chorus of baying hounds swiftly sought to discredit the young presidential aspirant from the start. Leading the pack was Diosdado Cabello, the rattled former military comrade and possible heir-apparent to Chavez, who denounced Capriles as a stooge of the Right. “Now we know who is the candidate of … More
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Is it April Fool’s Day? Has somebody in Paris hacked the website at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development? Have we been transported to a parallel dimension where up is down and black is white? Please forgive all these questions. I’m trying to figure out why any organization—even a leftist bureaucracy such as the [...]
Acting as the Typhoid Mary of the Global Economy, the OECD Urges Higher Taxes in Latin America is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
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As we have been reporting, Iran is increasingly expanding its presence in Latin America, as evidenced in Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent tour to Ecuador, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. More troubling, of course, are reports uncovered by the Univision News Network that Iran is using Latin America as a base for possible terrorist plots against the United States. Unfortunately, despite the obvious national security threat of Iran’s increasing reach in Central and South America, this Administration’s policy toward Latin America has been devoid of urgency to reassert American leadership in … More
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