In 16 years Venezuela has fallen from being a model for the anti-globalization movement to an example for doomsday planners, video gamers and screenwriters of post-apocalyptic chaos.
The problem isn’t that domestic investors are treated any differently in Venezuela than foreign investors. All investors are subjected to the same arbitrary set of rules and regulations. Restoring the country’s productivity requires re-establishing predictability and respect for private property.
Según Consejal Jesus Armas, “Ya no es una lucha entre gobierno y oposición, sino que, se ha convertido en una lucha entre el pueblo y un gobierno que nos ha empobrecido.”
The December 6, 2015 elections brought positive change for Venezuela, but this is only the beginning in a long process that is likely to be complicated and in which a positive outcome is far from guaranteed.
The past two decades of progress in LGBTQ rights in many Latin American countries have helped to extend basic rights of marriage, health care and a security to many in the LGBTQ community—but not all.
One of the legacies President Barack Obama will leave to his successor is increased foreign policy leverage in Latin America. Nowhere is this more evident than in U.S. policy toward Cuba and Venezuela—and because of those two countries with the rest of the hemisphere.
La democracia tiene un solo camino: el compromiso con los derechos garantizados a todos los ciudadanos del país. Su esencia es proteger los derechos y las decisiones del pueblo respecto a un gobierno que podría abusar de su poder, ignorando o rechazando los resultados de la elección. Esto es de extrema seriedad porque constituiría la violación de principios fundamentales.
Any numerical representation of people has institutional and moral consequences. This is especially so in Venezuela where Chavistas consistently had a monopoly on being the majority and used it to discount opposition as los escualidos (the few, rotten elites), a characterization that is now less credible with the recent elections.
Even in Latin America, a region often thought to share the same democratic orientation and values of the U.S. and Europe, there are some striking differences among groups of countries regarding supporting norms and practices on human rights internationally, with some countries lining up more with autocratic countries of the Global South.
Despite legal setbacks in Peru and El Salvador and retrograde rhetoric from the newly-elected President of Guatemala and the Catholic cardinal of the Dominican Republic, overall LGBT civil, human and political rights continued to make gains across the region.
