President Barack Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderón are in Guadalajara, Mexico, today for the North American Leaders' Summit. They will discuss, among other topics, what to do about the explosion in drug-trafficking violence on the continent. But they are also expected to address the political situation in Honduras. Honduras's Partido de Unificación Democrática (UD) is on the list. The party has only a small representation...

Luis Adolfo Cardona worked as a forklift operator at an American-owned bottling company that packages 50,000 cases of Coca-Cola’s famous fizzy beverages a month. On an unassuming morning, Cardona narrowly escaped death when right-wing paramilitary troops attempted to kill him. Unfortunately, not all labor union activists are so lucky. Isídro Segundo Gil, the gatekeeper and the union’s chief negotiator at another Coca-Cola bottling plant in the small, rural town of Carepa,...

U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela Patrick Duffy resumed his post in Caracas last month after being expelled by President Hugo Chávez in 2008. But he better not unpack his bags just yet. Rising tensions between the two countries are growing again, making a fresh rupture possible. There are two flash points threatening to bring promises of better relations tumbling down. One is Colombia; the other is Chávez’s moves against the country’s press. Both pose challenges to U.S....

The first time Hugo Chavez froze relations with Venezuela's second largest commercial partner (Colombia that is, on January 2005), it was due to the capture of one of FARC's leaders Rodrigo Granda, while attending in Caracas one the Bolivarian get-togethers organized by the Venezuelan regime. Granda, a wanted criminal involved in planning and assassinating Cecilia Cubas, daughter of former Paraguayan President Raúl Cubas, had been living in Venezuela and was given citizenship by the...

The sacred memory of the lost ones and the country’s dignity itself force Argentina’s society to insist fighting for the justice which was not served at this horrid event of the AMIA massacre.The effort and work employed by the family members and organizations surrounding them, such as AMIA and DAIA, have expressed the extent at which the courage and determination continues to eventually achieve this justice. (From Buenos Aires) NOBODY WAS EVER PUT INany jail for the murder of 86...

When President Barack Obama was criticized for his over friendly interaction with Hugo Chavez during the Summit of the Americas, he responded by saying that the U.S. has nothing to fear from a country that has an economy six hundred times smaller than ours. This curious remark by our President brings another logical question to mind: how big is Al Qaeda's economy in comparison to ours? It is likely that Al Qaeda's assets are substantially smaller than oil-rich Venezuela's. Likewise, Iran's...

In the 1960s, leftist philosophy professor Abimael Guzman started a Maoist guerilla group at the University of San Cristobal de Huamanga in Ayacucho, Peru. Guzman named this organization in honor of the most celebrated phrase ever turned by an early Peruvian Communist and journalist, Jose Carlos Mariategui, who wrote that "Marxism-Leninism will open the shining path to the revolution." Little did Peruvians realize then that the path would turn into a river of blood. Dried up for a...

Within a democracy, one cannot give any type of legitimacy to a coup d’etat. For Latin America, this coup in Honduras serves as proof of the extent at which it troubles this region to accept that democracy can only work within boundaries and through laws. (Santiago de Chile)MANUEL ZELAYA, PRESIDENT OF HONDURAS, was exiled to its neighbouring country of Costa Rica. The first question that comes to mind is how to qualify this event. The answer: a coup d’etat. But more importantly,...

The Cutting EdgeFor centuries, blue-turbaned nomadic Tuareg tribesmen have led caravans of camels across the expanses of the Sahara. Laden with millet and cloth from Africa’s West Coast, the caravans traveled unmarked paths to trade for salt and dates in Timbuktu, across the sand plains of Niger, and into the mountain oasis of the Algerian south. Smugglers take the same routes today - driving SUVs along paved roads or with guidance from the Tuareg and satellite phones - to move...

It is clear to all but the most blinkered observer that Iran's recent presidential election was a sham. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's fraudulent "victory" over challenger Mir Hussein Mousavi, and the violence that followed, confirmed that the Islamic Republic is a brutal police state that crushes dissenting voices. Most governments around the world have refused to congratulate Ahmadinejad, realizing that such a gesture would merely legitimize the stolen election and discourage the...