WorldcrunchThe oldest newspaper in Colombia, El Espectador was founded in 1887. The national daily newspaper has historically taken a firm stance against drug trafficking and in defense of freedom of the press. In 1986, the director of El Espectador was assassinated by gunmen hired by Pablo Escobar. The majority share-holder of the paper is Julio Mario Santo Domingo, a Colombian businessman named by Forbes magazine as one of the wealthiest men in the world in 2011.
After waiting more than two years for a visa appointment at the U.S. embassy in Bogotá, Héctor Abad Faciolince’s meeting was cancelled following the Jan. 26 spat over migrants between Gustavo Petro and Donald Trump. Nevermind, the Colombian novelist and essayist writes; in a world clearly run by idiots, we’re better off staying at home.
In another sign of changing power relations in the ‘post-Western’ world, the BRICS group of emerging economies could frustrate the United States’ bid to sink communism in Cuba by strangling its economy.
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.
The series based on One Hundred Years Of Solitude, the iconic book by the late Colombian novelist and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, has surprised Gonzalo Mallarino Flórez, who reviews the Netflix adaptation for Bogotá-based daily El Espectador.
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?
In Colombia and elsewhere in the Western world, parents worried about the horrors of the modern world hurting their children have turned to keeping their children on a leash and, worse, overexposing them to Internet garbage. They must let go, so their children can function as social beings, educator Julián de Zubiría Samper writes in El Espectador.
Donald Trump’s second term as U.S. president will undoubtedly bring about a transformation in geopolitics and the world economy. With a businessman rather than a politician in the White House, the country will take a more transactional approach based on negotiations.
Putting authors and artists in categories may help pinpoint their work in socio-cultural and stylistic terms, but is inevitably restrictive of literature’s essential universality. In South America, there is one, tiresome if profitable label literature seemingly cannot shake off, namely Magic Realism.
Multilateral diplomacy may seem to be exhausted today as wars and violence proliferate unchecked, but nobody should think its time is past and expect to see peace in the world.
U.S. President-elect Trump has tasked billionaire businessman Elon Musk with making the government cost-efficient. That may be an admirable objective, but the ideology driving it is wrong-headed… and dangerous.
Feminists want male allies in the fight to advance women’s rights. Yet many men who claim to be allies have shown that they do it for the wrong reasons.
Americans have reelected Donald Trump despite his clear promises to consolidate power and disregard basic human rights. Snapshot of an election of a declared tyrant by a “suicidal” nation. Echoes of history’s very worst tyrant.
As Donald Trump makes his third bid for the White House, Catalina Uribe Rincón considers, in the Colombian daily El Espectador, why so many Hispanic-Americans back a racist and anti-immigrant candidate.
Though mainly associated today with Islamic countries, underage marriage is increasingly being reported in Colombia, and other places in Latin America, often with a financial motivation pushing poorer families to effectively “sell” their daughters to older men.
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.
Bezos, Branson, Musk, Isaacman. Will the billionaires throwing untold resources into private space travel prove to be visionaries or just thrill seekers? The latest, Isaacman’s Polaris dawn mission, launched Tuesday with the objective to feature the first ever private spacewalk.
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.
Marta Lida Arias, a veteran LGBTQ+ activist in Medellín, discusses how she’s created a community for other women who were once intimidated by Colombia’s patriarchal society and norms, and why their fight isn’t over yet.
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.
The former U.S. president and Republican nominee Donald Trump is threatening to revive his choice policies of curbing immigration and trade, and nobody would suffer as a result quite as much as the hundreds of millions of Latin Americans who may be forced to turn toward China and the Global South.
Since U.S. immigration laws were tightened in the 1990s, at least 8,000 people have died trying to cross from Mexico to the United States. Of those, more than 4,000 died in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. While authorities call for migration through legal channels, NGOs argue that regulatory barriers are pushing people to make this dangerous journey.
Through quiet diplomacy, Russia may be courting the rising star of Latin American populism, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele. In time, he must decide between international respectability and a bear hug from Vladimir Putin.
Chiquita — the former United Fruit Company — is being ordered to compensate victims of the paramilitaries it financed in Colombia in the late 20th century. Like Monsanto with pesticides, it might begin saving funds to pay more such fines.
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.
The modern world conspires to make us fear reflection and solitude, but these might be the rocky paths to a happier life, if we could first stop hating them.
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.
An ad for one of Colombia’s biggest banks sparked controversy for including a gay couple. Some viewed it as a step in the right direction, while detractors said the ad was not suited for a bank.
Tourism has become big business in Medellín, Colombia, but it also be fueled the city’s worst sociocultural traits and encouraging drugs and abusive sex work. With new laws and bans being put in place, is change afoot in “the City of Eternal Spring”?
The recent outrage of Colombians online over a singer’s reported criticism of the country’s late, great novelist García Márquez, showed perfectly how jingoism and a primitive hatred of freedom go hand in hand.
Trafficking people, especially for sex, between Colombia and Mexico is rife and rising, buoyed in part by pervasive social and media contempt for the working-class girls who are among the chief victims.
Certain contemporary writers may be deluded and even deceived in claiming there is nothing subjective in their fictional writings, forgetting that their literary “realities” are, inevitably, the fruit of a personal vision.
The German philosopher believed education and discipline is necessary to turn youth into independent and moral adults. As the 300th anniversary of his birth is being celebrated this year, what would Kant say about the current state of affairs? And what can be learned from his teachings?
As the world’s climate becomes erratic and hostile, we might remold our cities from being expressions of our cold triumphalism to vessels and tools for inclusive, peaceful cohabitation with nature.
For the Colombian trans activist Álex Rodríguez Pineda, there is no single way to be a person with trans life experience; our gender identities and our bodies are in constant construction. He speaks with Colombian daily El Espectador about masculinity and trans activism.
Shakira made headlines this week for calling the Barbie movie “emasculating,” yet the Colombian superstar, with a radical image change in 2009 and her signature hip moves, has created her own pack of undeniable feminist she-wolves.
Colombia’s second-largest city has imposed a six-month ban on all prostitution in a bid to tackle the sexual exploitation of minors. But it only shows the government’s ignorance of — and possibly even indifference to — one of the city’s most shameful trades.
As Colombia debates banning the abusive practice of “conversion therapy,” a Colombian teacher recalls the four years of therapy he undertook as teenager and his path to self-acceptance.
The late Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author’s sons have published his draft novel Until August against his will. Yet no work of art is ever really finished. And excerpts and fragments are suited to our anxious times.
Latin American governments have barely denounced the Russian attack on Ukraine, partly for lingering distrust of the United States. But there is also a regional misperception of Russia as a new Soviet Union and friend of “lesser nations” struggling for betterment.
Although the last Salvadorian woman imprisoned on charges linked to abortion was released in December, 11 similar cases are currently pending in the country. Human rights activists acknowledge the progress made, and the work that remains to be done to overturn strict anti-abortion laws.