President Juan Manuel Santos faces many challenges in the year ahead, including completing the peace process, navigating between opposition on the right and left, and maintaining national unity before regional elections.  For Mayor Petro, the most high-profile politician on the Colombian Left who was temporarily pushed from his office last year, time is running out

Former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has decided to take a more active role in PT dialogue with social movements and promises to help them press President Dilma Rousseff to meet their demands, while Franco-Brazilian thinker and academic Michel Löwy, who was on tour for the release of his new book on Weber and

Members of the PRD were responsible for the disappearance of the Ayotzinapa students, and this has devastated the party.  Yet President Peña Nieto and his cabinet seem to have lost the confidence of many former supporters.

Though APRA appears to have “returned to the center of the political stage,” in reality it could be “weaker than ever.” 

Obama’s announcement on Cuba deprives the Uribistas of their best arguments against the peace process. 

“Believing that Chilean society has turned to the Left can be a fatal error.” 

Former President Tabaré Vázquez got his old job back as president of Uruguay in the runoff election.  Now the ruling leftist coalition of the Frente Amplio (Broad Front) can add to its decade in power, and finalize a law legalizing the production and sale of marijuana, among many other projects. 

Amid pressures to reconfigure the route to reform, members of the ruling leftist New Majority coalition discuss options.  At the same time, commentators say the Chilean Right’s tactics don’t scare anyone.

Political confrontations can get ugly and personal. At the moment “a battle-hardened federal judge” is looking into a hotel company owned by President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and her two children in Patagonia, and she is pushing back hard. 

The “Partido Social de la Unidad Social,” or simply the “Partido de la U” (and even just “La U”), “is Colombia’s largest and most successful political party in modern history and member of the ruling ‘National Unity’ coalition.”