South America

In late November and early December, Peruvian business leaders gathered in the industrial city of Arequipa for the 50th Annual Conference of Executives (CADE). When the polling firm Ipsos Apoyo asked CADE attendees whether they approved of the job performance of Peruvian president Ollanta Humala, a remarkable 75 percent said yes.

At a candlelight vigil for Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez in Bolivia, actor Sean Penn offered great praise for the sick strongman:

We are now less than two weeks away from an election that could either save or destroy what remains of Venezuelan democracy.

China’s interest in South America is easily explained: The Asian giant has a voracious appetite for commodities and raw materials, including Argentine soybeans, Brazilian iron ore, Chilean and Peruvian metals, Ecuadorean and Venezuelan oil, and Uruguayan beef. Therefore, Beijing has expanded trade ties with governments across the resource-rich continent, from Caracas to Montevideo.

Today in Washington, Argentine vice president Amado Boudou will be addressing a Council of the Americas conference on the global economic recovery. I have no idea what Boudou will say in his remarks, and I have no idea how the attendees will receive it. But I do know this: Having a senior member of the Kirchner government speak about responsible economic policy is like having a senior member of the Iranian government speak about religious tolerance.

In April 2009, four months after taking office, President Obama wooed Latin American leaders and liberal elites at the Summit of the Americas by apologizing for decades of U.S. foreign policy and promising a new era of cooperation. Obama said:

Like Hugo Chávez, Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa has used vast oil wealth to boost his personal popularity and camouflage the effects of his disastrous economic policies while steadily weakening his country’s democratic institutions.

However poor his health condition, Hugo Chávez must have enjoyed a certain measure of satisfaction earlier this month when leaders from across the Western hemisphere gathered in Caracas for the first meeting of the new Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), a hemispheric forum that explicitly does not include the United States or Canada.

It is by now a familiar story: A Bolivian government has sparked massive street protests, and it has subsequently caved to the pressure.

On October 21, President Obama signed into law the U.S.-Colombia free trade agreement (FTA), thereby giving American exporters greater access to one of South America’s fastest growing markets. The long, tiring debate over the FTA—which began five years ago, when the agreement was first completed—showed that popular perceptions of Colombia are stuck in a time warp. Not only has the country become a much safer and less violent place than it was in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, it has also become one of the most promising economies in the Western Hemisphere.

When Honduran leader Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo visits the White House today, it will be a watershed moment in the Central American country’s diplomatic rehabilitation.

Back in May, Ecuadorean voters approved a referendum that gave President Rafael Correa broader authority to regulate opposition journalists. At the time, Freedom House expressed concern that Correa was acquiring “undue influence over the country’s media,” and its senior program manager for Latin America, Viviana Giacaman, said that “Correa’s continuous demonization of independent media and the use of criminal defamation suits to silence journalists are having a chilling effect on the press in Ecuador.”