The Right & Far Right

Two years into Evo Morales’s tenure as president of Bolivia, he and his party, the MAS, face difficult challenges. In

When Vicente Fox of the National Action Party (PAN) assumed the presidency of Mexico in 2000 after running as “the

Now that much of Latin America has shifted to the left, Paraguay remains a key Washington ally. The country’s political

On December 9, 1998, British Minister of the Interior Jack Straw ruled that General Pinochet could be extradited to Spain

Mexican president Felipe Calderón strode off to the World Economic Forum with a bold agenda. At the forum and in meetings with European business leaders and heads of state, he presented Mexico as the guarantor of economic orthodoxy and explicitly criticized Latin American nations that have deviated from the path laid out by the international financial institutions and the U.S. government.

For Felipe Calderón, the second president of Mexico to come from the conservative National Action Party, this is year zero for his governance of Mexico from the hard right. Elected in a disputed, polarizing process with just 35% of the popular vote, unrecognized as Mexico's legitimate president by his principal opponent, he has chosen, despite his soft-spoken manner, to rule with an iron fist.

As millions of immigrants and their supporters took to the streets last year, the anti-immigration movement mobilized its own forces. The number of state and local anti-immigration groups in the United States has exploded, growing by 600% in the last two years. In 2005, there were fewer than 40 groups; today, there are more than 250.

Buenos Aires has just elected a mustachioed, millionaire mayor who owns Argentina's most popular soccer team. Mauricio Macri is Argentina's answer to Italy's Silvio Berlusconi or New York's Michael Bloomberg. The only difference being shades of ideology, gradations of fabulous wealth and the fact that Macri's high-profile business is not media, but sport. In the fractured Argentine capital where the sentimiento for soccer is virtually the only language that cuts across class and ideological differences, that counts for a lot.

In early January, the Independent Press Association, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, quietly announced via e-mail to its members that it was ceasing operations, effective immediately. The news had already broken on the Internet, thanks to a former IPA staffer, but it would take a week before everyone confirmed the rumor that was circulating in independent publishing and media activism circles: The IPA was dead.

General Alfredo Stroessner, Paraguay's long-time dictator, died on August 16 at the age of 93 after almost two decades of exile in Brazil. His thirty-year reign was so repressive that even the selectively principled Reagan administration decided to distance itself from his authoritarian rule.