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The United States has seized a Venezuelan oil tanker, attacking the country’s main source of income in an escalation of pressure aimed at bringing down the Maduro regime. Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who is in Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, supports the U.S.’s pressure tactics. But our Americans ready to revive imperialism?
This 120-hectare islet with a notorious reputation, located between Bonifacio and Sardinia, is virtually off-limits to visitors by order of its private owners. While public authorities are seeking to regain control, the courts are now moving to put an end to the situation.
Donald Trump and Nicolas Maduro spoke on the phone, but the U.S. president gave him an ultimatum to resign and leave the country. The alternative is likely to involve military action, which would disregard international law.
Venezuela is being held hostage. Rather than outrage, the appearance of a U.S. armada has produced an almost sacrilegious sigh of relief in many. But is even that enough?
On five separate occasions, the U.S. Navy has sunk ships in the Caribbean accused of drug trafficking — yet no evidence has been presented. Acting without the approval of Congress or the backing of the international community, Donald Trump is pushing ahead. This return to power politics is causing alarm across Latin America.
Venezuelan media lambasted Israel during its 12-day assault on the Islamic Republic of Iran, not for justice’s sake, but as an illustration of just how much clout the Tehran regime has bought itself in the Western Hemisphere.
Five activists from organizations and collectives in Venezuela spoke to Latin American feminist media Volcánicas about how the anti-NGO law affects their work and puts their lives at risk.
Gang crime, explosions and hitmen killings, linked to guerrillas or cross-border trafficking, are turning the Colombian frontier city of Cúcuta into a lawless free-for-all. The locals however, are not as shocked as they should be.
In a not-so-distant future, Latin Americans will find they too were wealthy like their overbearing northern neighbor, only their “capital” consisted of art, music and resilience, combined in one of their biggest assets home-bred superstar Shakira.
Certainly things don’t work in communist Cuba, but this neither justifies the embargo that has all but strangled it for decades, nor the obsession with sweeping a singular experiment in governance and social welfare into the globalized banality of our time.
Following U.S. President Donald Trump’s creation of the White House Faith Office in early February, Loris Zanatta writes in Clarín that religious politics is already on the verge of becoming political religion, and the 2020s are starting to look an awful lot like the 1920s. And we know where that led.
Andy’s Mall is the result of the first payment made by Guyana’s government to the Indigenous people of the Kako area, who are proud to say that they were the last to give in and sign the contract with the government that determined the conversion of their forests into carbon credits, sold to the Hess Corporation, an American oil company.
In its first decade, Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution was radical yet legitimate, and enjoyed the people’s electoral support under leader Hugo Chávez. This changed when his successor, Nicolás Maduro, took over after Chávez’s death, and decided he wasn’t going to let votes thwart his insatiable love of power and money.
Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro plans to declare himself president on January 10, as he becomes the likely winner of the 2024 elections. Will there be a showdown or a revolt, or will a tired nation give in to tyranny?
It’s called Active Non-Alignment. The end of a bipolar world and of Western supremacy has created a more fluid, and threatening, geopolitical map. For smaller powers, especially in Latin America, this is the time to “get the best deal” for themselves with the superpowers.
Life is a constant transition — and so is parenthood. How do we find balance and meaning in the midst of chaos and uncertainty, asks journalist Ignacio Pereyra in the latest iteration of his “Recalculating” newsletter on parenthood.
Cuba is approaching a state of economic collapse and has turned to the UN for food assistance for the first time in its history. While Havana blames the U.S. embargo for its economic woes, the reality is quite the opposite.
Edmundo Gonzales, the opposition candidate who should have been declared the winner of the July election in Venezuela, has gone into exile in Spain. For the time being, President Maduro has won the day, even if he is denounced by the Latin American democratic left, notably Lula in Brazil.
The Left’s reluctance to denounce President Maduro’s fraudulent reelection in Venezuela may seem tactical or expedient to itself, but is nothing short of stabbing the very principle of democracy at a challenging juncture in modern history.
The armed forces have been dragged into political and electoral spats across the Americas, from the United States to Brazil to Venezuela. Is this another sign of liberal democracy’s decline in the West?
Today, Venezuela is barely recognizable as the prosperous and liberal state of the late 20th century that gave refuge to regional dissidents, thanks to the resolve of the late Carlos Andrés Pérez — the “roguish” president whose commitment to democracy has put his socialist successors to shame.
Venezuela’s elections this year took a very different course than Nicaragua’s in 2021. In both Latin American countries, an authoritarian leader wanted to stay in power and committed electoral fraud to do so. But in Venezuela, the opposition was able to create resistance to Nicolás Maduro.
The leaders of three big Latin American powers, Colombia, Brazil and Mexico, have shown they believe keeping a fellow socialist in power is more important than respecting the votes of millions of ordinary Venezuelans who chose freedom over socialism.
Foreign condemnations and sanctions will not force Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro to abandon power after losing the recent presidential elections. The army could, but with a security system designed by Cuban advisers, it is firmly under regime control.
The crushing weight of Chinese loans to socialist Venezuela may yet become the biggest, if less publicized, obstacle to the restoration of liberal democracy there, if its power-drunk president were ever to abandon power as he once again appears unwilling to do after a highly contested election.
Corruption, human rights violations, and alliances with totalitarian regimes are all good reasons why the West should be paying attention to Venezuela ahead of the country’s presidential elections on July 28, writes Venezuelan journalist Miguel Henrique Otero in Nicaragua’s Confidencial newspaper.
Venezuela’s Bolivarian regime has been trampling on democracy, by degree, for 25 years while deftly managing international opinion to avoid too much backlash. Now, with Maduro defying fair elections, there may be no turning back.
Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro joins a long line of dictators whose fall from grace is marked by a period of incessant corruption, isolation, and a disconnection from reality.
What we are witnessing is the struggle of a people against their oppressors. This electoral process, although flawed, could become a milestone for Venezuelans to regain their freedom — and it is one that should concern everyone who believes in democracy.
The Venezuelan opposition and its leader Corina Machado may yet end 25 years of socialist rule with an against-the-odds election win in July, which would bring to mind that of Corazon Aquino in 1986 that toppled the Marcos regime in the Philippines.
Venezuela and its neighbors are nervously waiting to see if President Maduro and his clique will soon hold a fair election, or cling onto power, fueling more despair and unleashing yet another migratory wave over the region.
Following the announcement of Colombia’s first rare earths mining project, Climate Tracker reports on the incomplete licenses, unreal expectations, bad relationships with indigenous populations and suspicion of planted minerals that surround the venture, which seeks to extract minerals critical for the energy transition.
With a sham court ruling, Venezuela’s President Maduro has paved the way for his unchallenged reelection as president this year, regardless of U.S. sanctions. This is happening as Latin America’s leftist governments, notably Brazil, watch in silence.
Latin America’s socialist regimes are following the “Putin model” of policing the population, inspired by Soviet practices, but in the case of oil-rich Venezuela, fortunately, the communist science of repression is not yet watertight.
Is Venezuela’s President Maduro renewing the country’s long-standing claim to a big part of neighboring Guyana to distract from his unpopularity at home, to postpone next year’s general elections, or to nab some of Guyana’s rocketing oil wealth?
A democracy is not just the vague and dangerously malleable promise of popular rule. It is instead an institutional regime or “republic” that defines and protects the rights of the people, and of individuals.
The Biden administration’s exploration to lift sanctions on Venezuela, hoping to gently push its regime back on the path of democracy, might have taken its cue from Brazilian President Lula’s calls to stop demonizing Venezuela.
The number of migrants and refugees who have passed through the Darien Gap reaches historic figures. So far this year, it is estimated that 250,000 migrants and refugees have crossed through the dangerous Darién jungle, mainly from countries such as Venezuela, Ecuador and Haiti.
Like Cuba, Venezuela churns out doctors who are poorly trained and overworked. Colombia then lets them practice medicine in the country in yet another senseless gesture of political goodwill toward Venezuela.
The absence of accurate official statistics in Venezuela is no accident. Rather it is a symptom of the breakdown of the rule of law and hides the regime’s criminal failures.