Categories
Ideas Society

A Writer’s Advice For How To Read The Words Of Politics

Colombia’s reformist president has promised to tackle endemic violence, economic exclusion, pollution and corruption in the country. So what’s new with a politician’s promises?

Categories
In The News

Cilia Flores de Maduro, How Venezuela’s First Lady Wields A Corrupt “Flower Shop” Of Power

Venezuela’s first lady, Cilia Flores, is one of the country’s chief power brokers and a consummate wheeler-dealer who, with the help of relatives, runs a voracious enterprise dubbed the Flower Shop.

Categories
Society

“Splendid” Colonialism? Time To Change How We Talk About Fashion And Culture

A lavish book to celebrate Cartagena, Colombia’s most prized travel destination, will perpetuate clichéd views of a city inextricably linked with European exploitation.

Categories
In The News

Have No Doubt: Bolsonaro’s Fingerprints Are All Over The Brasilia Assault

Emulating the Trump-inspired attack on the U.S. Capitol, the assault of a right-wing mob on government buildings in Brasilia took its cue from former president Bolsonaro’s longstanding contempt for democratic institutions.

Categories
In The News

Geopolitically, “Latin America” Does Not Exist

The election in Brazil of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) is being hailed by some as the confirmation of Latin American around a shared leftist project, yet even the left can’t agree with itself. It’s a story that goes back centuries, and can only change with a commitment to move beyond ideology.

Categories
Society

Kafka And Dostoevsky: Was ‘The Trial’ A Hidden Rewriting Of ‘Crime And Punishment’?

A Colombian student of Franz Kafka insists works by the 20th century Czech author, like The Trial, are so close to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment as to be versions of it — creating potential trouble for European publishing houses.

Categories
Geopolitics In The News

Adiós Castillo: Why Latin America Is Ready To Close The Era Of “Cheap Populism”

The impeachment and arrest of Peru’s Leftist president can be taken as perhaps a conclusive signal to the region that populism — from the Left and Right — may have run out of gas.

Categories
Geopolitics Ideas

Watching China, And The Western Trap Of Wishful Thinking

While many Chinese citizens are indeed fed up with the government’s Zero-COVID policy, predicting that a mass revolt is ready to overturn Communist rule is the latest sign of our deep misunderstanding of the Asian superpower. A view from Bogotá of a former Beijing correspondent.

Categories
Society

Parental Rights v. Children Rights? Why Courts Keep Getting It Wrong

Justice works around adults. Keen to uphold parental custody rights, family courts have effectively allowed violence against children by giving abusive parents access. So it is time the legal system stopped ignoring children.

Categories
Ideas Society

Let’s Not Forget The Original Sin Of The Qatar World Cup: Greed

Soccer is a useful political tool for dictatorships. But Qatar is able to milk the World Cup as much as possible because the sport is infected by unbridled capitalistic greed.

Categories
Geopolitics Ideas

How U.S. Airlines Are Doing Cuba’s Dirty Work On American Soil

American and Southwest Airlines have been refusing to allow Cubans on board flights if they’ve been blacklisted by the government in Havana.

Categories
Geopolitics Ideas Russia-Ukraine War

Nazis. Terrorists! Satanists!? Putin’s Rollout Of Big Lies Is Losing Its Punch

The Russian president has resorted to a string of changing lies to justify his war on Ukraine. He has shown contempt along the way for the Christian values he claims to defend. But like arms and ammunition, a regime can also run out of lies.

Categories
In The News

How Cuban Intelligence Helped Secure Maduro’s Grip On Power In Venezuela

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has managed to cling to power after an allegedly rigged 2018 presidential election. He did so with the help of Cuba, having enjoyed “working relations” with Cuban intelligence for decades.

Categories
Ideas

Cancel Culture And Censorship, A Necessary Enemy Of Art

Readers can be unduly critical of authors for a range of reasons, from old-fashioned spite to the modern phenomenon of wokeness. But writers should not consider these people enemies, but rather guides to help dig deeper.

Categories
Geopolitics Ideas

China, Russia And Iran: A New Axis Of Tyranny

A triad of powers is taking the world on a rocky ride to a new world (dis)order. Nobody quite knows where we’re heading, but the ride is sure to be bumpy.

Categories
Economy Ideas

The Folly Of ‘Degrowth’ Economics — A View From The Global South

Those touting degrowth for the sake of the planet should remember that the majority of the earth’s population has yet to taste a fraction of the material prosperity now blamed for destroying the natural world.

Categories
Future Ideas

The Metaverse: Lots Of Big Legal Questions And Virtually Zero Answers

The Metaverse evokes utopian visions of an escape from reality or a life lived online. But for now, it’s still just interactive gaming or networking spaces that does not have the rules or laws necessary to manage its full potential.

Categories
Green Green Or Gone Ideas special series

On Our Planet’s Future, And The “Art Of The Necessary”

States and technology have failed to stop the destruction of the natural world, but a deceptively simple rethinking of our habits could turn the tide.

Categories
Food / Travel Society

Colombia Celebrates Its Beloved Drug For The Ages, Coffee

This essential morning drink for millions worldwide was once considered an addictive menace, earning itself a ban on pain of death in the Islamic world.

Categories
In The News

The U.S.-Colombia ‘War On Drugs’ Has Failed: What Comes Next?

The Biden administration and Colombia’s new government seem to agree on the need for a new approach to drugs policy. But will they be able to find support in their countries to forge a new strategy?

Categories
Ideas

The Noble Absurdity Of Granting Constitutional Rights To Nature

Giving nature rights, as South American nations are keen to do these days, is well-intentioned, but far too limited in scope to make sense.

Categories
Economy Ideas

1970s China Revisited? Venezuela’s “Special Economic Zones” Are A Desperate Scam

Venezuela is to create free economic zones to attract foreign capital into the Venezuelan economy, but who would take “clean” money to a lawless land run by rapacious revolutionaries?

Categories
Green

Let’s Stop Calling It “Extreme” Weather

As measures to curb climate change move slowly in the face of deadly new weather patterns, we must immediately mitigate the havoc it has begun to cause around the world.

Categories
Green special series

Mineral Mining, The Dirty Secret Of The Clean Energy Industry

Green technologies are crucial to reducing carbon emissions, but they require ramping up the need for mining of minerals. And since mineral extraction can cause grave natural destruction, how can we ensure renewables are truly good for the environment?

Categories
In The News

Venezuela-Iran: Maduro And The Axis Of Chaos In The Americas

With the complicity of leftist rulers in Venezuela, Bolivia and even Argentina, Iran’s sanction-ridden regime is spreading its tentacles in South America, and could even undermine democracies.

Categories
Geopolitics Ideas

The Meaning Of Petro: A Former Guerrilla As President Is Colombian Democracy At Work

Gustavo Petro’s victory is not only a response to the social ills of today, but having been part of a Marxist guerrilla group that negotiated with the state decades ago, and returned to the social fold, he embodies the nation’s democratic future.

Categories
Geopolitics Ideas

Showdown Of Populists From Left And Right Looms In Colombia Presidential Runoff

Colombians spurned the establishment candidates in the first round of presidential voting. In the second round, on June 19, they will have to choose between Gustavo Petro, a former Marxist guerrilla, and Rodolfo Hernández a “tough-talking” businessman being compared to Donald Trump.

Categories
Economy

The Bogus Concept Of “Carbon-Neutral” Oil

The Colombian president recently said that the country had exported one million barrels of carbon-neutral or offset oil. But in an unregulated carbon market, such a claim is pure greenwashing.

Categories
Ideas Society

García Márquez And Truth: How Journalism Fed The Novelist’s Fantasy

In his early journalistic writings, the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez showed he had an eye for factual details, in which he found the absurdity and ‘magic’ that would in time be the stuff and style of his fiction.

Categories
Geopolitics Ideas

Why Chile’s Radicals Are Already Sinking Their Own Leftist President

After becoming Chile’s youngest president in December’s elections, former student activist and socialist Gabriel Boric has disappointed his most radical voters. Will they prolong the social unrest and creative chaos that have smashed the country’s fame as a conservative backwater?

Categories
Green Ideas

Biophilia Or Bust? Ecology Is Not About Empathy For Other Living Creatures

When humans care about the natural world, it means revising our place in it and acting accordingly, not giving nature “rights and concessions” that are figments of our self-serving imagination.

Categories
In The News

The Club Of Tyrants: Putin And His Western Comrades, Past And Present

Russia’s President Putin may speak of denazifying Ukraine, but his words and actions — from the Mariupol maternity hospital to the atrocities of Bucha to Friday’s missile attack on the Kramatorsk railway station — show that he’s taken up the mantle of Europe’s line of fascist dictators. Take a look at those today who still lend him support.

Categories
Economy Geopolitics

Saddam, Putin, Maduro: How Dictators See Their Oil Differently

The West is paying the price for buying oil from one tyrant in Russia, and must think carefully before rushing to Venezuela to do the same with another dictatorship. Business is not always business.

Categories
Geopolitics Russia-Ukraine War

Taiwan, Past And Future: Two Lessons For China From The Russia-Ukraine War

China is already profiting from the West’s economic divorce from Russia. But its biggest interest may be to learn from Russia’s experience of invading a land it claims for itself.

Categories
Geopolitics

Welcome To The End Of Western Dominance

We are no longer in the age of liberal democracy’s inevitable triumph. Instead, we are living in a new multipolar world of ideological turbulence in which the West is not the main player.

Categories
Geopolitics Ideas

Russia’s Prime Export Under Putin: Chaos

Russia’s president is neither clearly right-wing nor left-wing. As his dubious allies around the world suggest, he simply hates Western liberal democracy and seeks to expand his personal power, at home and abroad, by sowing unrest and conflict.

Categories
Geopolitics Ideas

Like EU For LatAm: Why And How To Build A Latin American Union

Most Latin American countries fear civil conflicts more than international invasion. A regional union is the best way to assure stability and lawfulness in a troubled but culturally cohesive continent. The EU shows us what that would look like and how to make it happen.

Categories
In The News

Welcome To The Age Of Instability

As Russia and China push their way to the top of the power heap, and the United States balks at playing global police force, expect fundamental changes to accepted norms governing international affairs.

Categories
Geopolitics Society

New Revelations Of García Marquez’s Ties To Cuba And Nicaragua

Like other intellectuals of his time, the celebrated Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez admired Cuba’s Fidel Castro. What’s just been revealed, however, is also, as one text reveals, the Sandinista rebels who have stifled Nicaraguan democracy in past years.

Categories
Geopolitics

Ingrid Betancourt, A Hostage Heroine Reinvented As Feminist For President

Although Betancourt is best known for surviving six years as a hostage of the Colombian terror group FARC, and is considered a centrist politician, her unlikely new campaign for president will be centered on gender issues.

Exit mobile version