The real threat from the December 3 constitutional amendments in Ecuador isn’t the possibility of indefinite re-election for President Correa, it’s the way they were approved and their implications for freedom of expression.
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos is not the only president to have wagered his legacy on the possibility of peace. But securing both his legacy and peace will require avoiding the mistakes of past negotiations.
This week’s stats shot measures equal protection of laws and lack of discrimination across the region. Equal treatment does not improve with increasing development.
Latin America and Caribbean negotiators arrived at the global climate talks in Paris with ambitious plans. But without international development financing, those ideas will amount to little.
As the deadline looms, the logistics of the ceasefire in Colombia remain controversial. If the parties are committed to ending hostilities before the March 2016 deadline, their negotiators in Havana must agree on a ceasefire model before the end of the year.
Ecuador and Venezuela on the UN Human Rights Council? The UN General Assembly just voted Ecuador to the organization’s human rights body and renewed Venezuela’s mandate—two countries that have some of the worst human rights records in the Western Hemisphere.
En los últimos años, la Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos se ha encontrado bajo constantes ataques diplomáticos destinados a debilitar el alcance de su mandato y privilegiar la soberanía nacional.
Should Latin America continue to put all its eggs in the commodity basket hoping for a return of the good times? Of course not. The region must diversify its economic base to focus on manufacturing and services as well. In the meantime, the agricultural sector needs greater unity across the sector to improve productivity, efficiency, and innovation.
The longest running internal armed conflict in the Americas could soon be over. The Colombian government and FARC have announced a date to sign a peace accord, and the parties have finally come to an agreement on the single most contentious issue of the negotiations: whether, to what extent, and under what conditions the members of FARC would be punished for its crimes. Will it be sufficient?
In resolving a 40-year debt, Peruvians and, in particular, Peru’s international business class need to understand what is at stake here: not just the integrity and effectiveness of the judicial system but international opinion on how the government and the judicial system treats property and legal obligations.
