On June 30, 2014 Mexican soldiers killed 22 civilians in the municipio of Tlatlaya, in Mexico state.  According to the official report, an armed clash erupted when troops patrolling an area near the border with the state of Guerrero came under fire from unknown assailants.  Yet that version of events fell apart when a witness

Edwin Chota, an indigenous leader and outspoken Peruvian opponent of illegal logging, was brutally killed in a remote region of the Peruvian Amazon bordering Brazil, along with three other Asháninka community leaders he was traveling with on foot.  Chota had received frequent death threats from illegal loggers during years of struggle by his community to

After the death of Brazilian presidential candidate Eduardo Campos in a plane crash on August 13, 2014, his running mate on the Partido Socialista Brasileiro (PSB) ticket, Marina Silva, took over as the official candidate.  She is a former minister of the environment and a former senator, who got almost 20 million votes in the

On August 11, 2014 Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto signed into law new rules governing the historic reordering of Mexico’s state-owned oil, gas and electricity sectors, opening them to levels of participation by foreign and private companies not seen since the 1930s.  In 1938 President Lázaro Cárdenas nationalized the Mexican oil industry, taking over from

The July 30, 2014 deadline for Argentina and its hold-out “vulture” creditors to come to an agreement and comply with the order of U.S. Federal Judge Thomas Griesa came and went.  In the lead up to the deadline Argentina remained defiant.  Argentine Cabinet Chief Jorge Capitanich stayed on message and insisted that the vulture funds

The tens of thousands of children showing up on the United States/Mexico border have generated plenty of interest in the Latin American media.  News outlets there have noted U.S. reactions, over reactions, and lack of reaction, the question of “security,” President Obama’s trip to Texas, and the political implications of the crisis.  They have explored

In mid June the U.S. Supreme Court declined to consider Argentina’s appeal of the ruling by U.S. Federal Judge Thomas Griesa of the Southern District of New York that it must pay holdouts to the restructuring deals it reached with creditors in 2005 and 2010.  The problem looming over the conflict is that if Argentina

The forty-fourth regular session of the General Assembly of the Organization of American States was held in Asunción, Paraguay from June 3 to June 5, 2014.  The theme proposed by the Paraguayan Foreign Ministry for general debate was “Development and Social Inclusion.”  Member states had various things to say about democracy, economic growth, inequality, and

In the months before the first round of Colombia’s presidential elections, incumbent Juan Manuel Santos of the Partido de “la U,” seemed headed for an easy victory, since his first term had benefited from steady economic growth, and he personally had gained popularity for initiating serious peace negotiations with the FARC guerrillas that have the

Demonstrations continued in Venezuela in early May 2014, as the government of President Nicolás Maduro moved to dismantle protest camps created by students.  His government also started to come under more international criticism of its handling of the crisis.  While Maduro contends that opposition forces want to destabilize the country, human rights groups, the United