Mexico today increasingly resembles Colombia 25 years ago. Drug cartels are strengthening rapidly, Mexico's governmental authority and legitimacy are weakening and the people are deeply divided over how to respond to the cartels' challenge to Mexico's civil society. The stakes for the United States were high in Colombia back then, but they are even higher now in Mexico. The drug cartel threat has already rendered broad areas on our side of the border unsafe. The State Department has...

Debate in Washington about Hugo Chávez -- to the extent that it exists -- generally centers on whether the Venezuelan strongman is a genuine threat to the United States or a buffoonish nuisance who is best ignored. A related discussion concerns whether and how Venezuelans can free themselves from Chávez, should they wish to do so. Could the country's tattered democratic institutions bring about his peaceful removal, or is some kind of breakdown or revolution unavoidable? The...

San Juan Copala, traditional centre of the indigenous Triqui people, lies in Oaxaca State, Mexico, and is one of the poorest and strife-torn areas in Mexico. In an attempt to break the cycle of poverty, inequality, exclusion, and persistent human rights violations, and to unite the Triqui people and preserve their culture and traditions - as well as to distance themselves from the rampant corruption and violence of local political parties - the community declared itself an autonomous...

American policymakers love to see purple thumbs in the developing world, especially in countries in which the United States has undertaken “nation-building” projects (read: invasions and occupations). The recent Afghan parliamentary elections are a case in point. Yet elections in the developing world are not usually what they are cracked up to be and can be downright destabilizing. Many despots in the developing world have realized that the United States is obsessed with exporting...

AT DAWN on September 16th 1810 Miguel Hidalgo, the parish priest of Dolores, a small town in central Mexico, rang the bells of his church to raise the cry of rebellion against the Spanish crown. Mexico, Spain’s richest American colony, thus joined a struggle for independence which had already seen the colonial authorities ousted and rebel juntas installed in Caracas, Buenos Aires and other South American cities. Two years earlier, following Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of the...

Latin America Specific Recommendations: As is the case with Native Americans in the United States, for the 40 million indigenous citizens of Mexico and Central and South America the possession of commonly held ancestral land goes beyond mere economic survival-although it also serves tens of millions for that purpose as well. The ability to govern themselves, to establish and maintain group rights and territorial control of lands that form part of their cultural inheritance, to empower...

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the start of Latin America’s struggle for political independence against the Spanish crown. Outsiders might be forgiven for concluding that there is not much to celebrate. In Mexico, which marks its bicentennial next week, drug gangs have met a government crackdown with mayhem on a scale not seen since the country’s revolution of a century ago. The recent discovery of the corpses of 72 would-be migrants, some from as far south as Brazil, in...

If someone were to rank the most embattled Jewish communities in the world today, the Jewish community of Venezuela would certainly be high on that list. Over the past decade the community has shrunk by half its size. “Ten years ago we had about 18,000 members,” said Salomon Cohen. “Now we have about 9,500.” Cohen, head of the Confederacion de Asociaciones Israelitas de Venezuela (CAIV), an umbrella group representing the South American country’s Jewish...

Here’s a puzzler. Latin America has never been more democratic: of 34 nations in Central and South America and the Caribbean, all except one (Cuba) are constitutional democracies, with laws guaranteeing open elections, independent courts, legislatures, and freedom of expression. So why do so many governments still trample on citizens’ rights, bully journalists, harass private business, and generally lord over hearth and home? Incidents in just the last few weeks range from the...

Now that Colombia’s crackdown on the FARC has significantly weakened the group, there are signs that it is setting up in neighboring Venezuela and preparing for a rebirth of sorts, Samuel Logan writes for ISN Security Watch. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) made an unusual appeal on 23 August to UNASUR, South America's multilateral security forum, to explain its political and strategic goals in Colombia. Within 24 hours, Colombian Defense Minister Rodrigo Rivera, part...