Latin America

The Declining Power of the U.S. in the Americas

April 17, 2015 / economics, Latin America / , ,

This weekend I took part in a K-12 Educators session on Latin America, which the World Affair’s Council organized at Lewis and Clark College. It was an impressive event, which included music and dance exhibitions, as well as breakout sessions on a wide array of topics. I had been asked to present on Brazil. Given that I had an hour, and wanted to leave fifteen minutes for discussion and questions, what could I say to K-12 educators that would be meaningful? What I finally decided to do was to talk first about Brazil’s history for about twenty minutes, and then consider how Brazil’s rapid economic growth is giving its political leadership a chance to address these legacies. As always happens, the best part of the session was the time at the end when I had a chance to talk to the group, which included people from Panama and Peru. And during that conversation I realized that I could have organized the session in another way. I believe that the most important political and economic trend in South America is the waning influence of the United States. And this is a trend not only in the southern hemisphere but also throughout the Americas, as an article about Canada’s trade in today’s Wall Street Journal makes clear. …

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Three Mystery Epidemics

April 17, 2015 / Africa, Asia, global health, Latin America, mystery / , , , , , ,

The World Health Organization is an under-appreciated institution, which often takes on critical tasks. For example, in 2011 it brokered an agreement to end a controversy about viral sample sharing particularly related to avian influenza. This agreement will greatly help with the development of pre-pandemic vaccines, but such achievements attract little press coverage. The WHO receives much more press when it acts as the world’s medical sleuth. When invited, it quickly arrives on the scene wherever a new disease is emerging. At the moment there are no fewer than three new diseases that merit the WHO’s attention. Although they may not each be the next SARS, they all have worrisome aspects.

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The Lost Island of Bermeja

October 21, 2019 / Latin America, mystery / , , ,

The world is filled with mythical islands, maybe because the idea of an isolated place evokes ideas of a utopia. Perhaps that is why Judith Schalansky’s

Image of islands courtesy of Liz Noffsinger at freedigitalphotos

Atlas of Remote Islands became a popular book. But few mythical islands islands have been as enduring as Bermeja, which cartographers have been placing on maps off the coast of the Yucatan since Alonso de Santa Cruz first mentioned it in 1539.  In the nineteenth century something strange happened. The island disappeared, likely because it had never existed. But the power of this idea is so strong that people continue to look for it, including a BBC film crew.

What is more important, however, is the popular view of the island in Mexico. How is that an island that existed on maps for centuries could disappear? A cynic might wonder if map-makers had been copying each others’ maps for centuries. But within Mexico there are conspiracy theories, which argue that the United States destroyed it. Because Mexico lost so much of its national territory to the United States in the U.S.-Mexican War, there is a profound distrust of the U.S. in Mexico. Much of Mexico’s national budget comes from the operations of the state oil company PEMEX, which pumps much of its oil from the Gulf of Mexico. And a June 2000 treaty between Mexico and the United States defined rights to oil reserves based on the distance from U.S. or Mexican territory, in particular islands. For this reason, one can find Youtube clips blaming the United States for dynamiting the island into oblivion, and calling on Mexicans to be aware of what has been stolen from them. Posts about this are easy to find on the web. Mexican radio stations and TV news also discuss this topic, as these Youtube clips (for those who speak Spanish) show. …

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Colombia’s Oil Boom

April 17, 2015 / energy, Latin America / ,

Brazil, Canada and the United States are currently receiving a great deal of attention for an energy boom, which has seen dramatic growth in the oil produced in the Western Hemisphere. But there is one nation that may soon be added to this list, which has never been thought of as an energy power: Colombia. The reasons for this shed light on energy politics in South America, and suggest the costs that Venezuela may be paying for its policies.

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Witches’ Broom: The Mystery of Chocolate and Bioterrorism in Brazil

November 15, 2018 / food, Latin America, mystery / , , , , ,
Geographic and Genetic Population Differentiation of the Amazonian Chocolate Tree, Juan C. Motamayor, Philippe Lachenaud, Jay Wallace da Silva e Mota, Rey Loor, David N. Kuhn, J. Steven Brown, Raymond J. Schnell; from Wikipedia commons
“Geographic and Genetic Population Differentiation of the Amazonian Chocolate Tree,” Juan C. Motamayor, Philippe Lachenaud, Jay Wallace da Silva e Mota, Rey Loor, David N. Kuhn, J. Steven Brown, Raymond J. Schnell; from Wikipedia commons

When people think of chocolate, they may know that it roots stretch back to Mexico, where Aztec emperors used to drink a frothy concoction of cacao and chile. They are less likely to know that cacao originally came from the Amazon, most likely somewhere in Ecuador, which still has the most genetically diverse cacao trees. How it traveled north, perhaps on trading ships along the Pacific Coast, or overland through Central America,  we will never know. But its origins are less of a mystery, than the disappearance of chocolate in Northeastern Brazil beginning in the late 1980s.

Chocolate was originally brought from the Amazon to Brazil’s north-east in 1746. This region was colonial Brazil’s heartland, where the legacy of slavery had created a society defined by both poverty and social inequality.  I spent two months in Recife, Brazil in 1990, where I saw the gold and jewels in the Baroque churches, and the poverty in the countryside. This poverty -and the power of traditional elites- may have motivated one of the greatest crimes in all history, if such a crime actually took place. …

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Pakistan’s Military, Irregular Forces and Latin America

April 17, 2015 / Asia, Latin America / ,

This has been a difficult year for Pakistan’s military. First came the May 2, 2011 killing of Osama Bin Laden in a house in Abbottabad, less than a mile from the Pakistan Military Academy. Then came a militant attack on an air-base in Karachi on May 22, 2011, which led to ten deaths and the destruction of two American-built P-C 3 Orion surveillance planes. On May 31, 2011 came the death of Syed Saleem Shahzad, the reporter for the Asia Times. He had covered the assault on the naval base, and reported that the cause of the militant attack had been the navy’s arrest of its personnel. He stated that naval intelligence had detected militant cells within the navy, which were plotting an attack on American targets. After their arrest, the militants opened negotiations with the navy for their release. When the navy refused, the militants responded with this assault. His death was widely blamed on Inter-Service Intelligence, a creature of the Pakistani military, which led to a firestorm of protest: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syed_Saleem_Shahzad) The continuing U.S. drone attacks in Waziristan, which the Pakistani military is perceived as tolerating, also stoked widespread anger within Pakistan. Finally, on September 22, 2011, Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that the insurgents who had attacked the U.S. embassy the prior week had used cell-phones to call their handlers in Pakistan before and during the attack. The U.S. believed that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI was behind the attacks (www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/09/23/eveningnews/main20110965.shtml).  In sum, U.S. observers have suspected Pakistan’s armed forces –or elements within it- of being complicit with Osama Bin Laden (or incompetent in not detecting him), of being infiltrated by militants, and of supporting violence in Afghanistan, all while taking large amounts of U.S. military aid. …

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