It gives me no pleasure to say this but Barack Obama’s presidency of the United States of America is likely to be a disaster. Not, I must hasten to add, so much for the citizens of his own country. But certainly for us in the rest of the world.

The bad habits acquired by the world’s most heavily armed state over the last half century have become so ingrained [...]

A decade ago Hugo Chávez won a landslide victory in the Venezuelan presidential elections taking 3,673,685 votes of the five and a quarter million cast.

In last month’s elections which were equally as clean and legitimate as the ones in 1998 – if not more so – PSUV, the newly created and still rather uncomfortable party founded by Chávez and his supporters, won well over 5,000,000 votes in [...]

How can one put this diplomatically?

Barack Obama, who thrilled a majority of the US people with his electoral victory on Tuesday, has to be careful about the information he receives from his advisers about Latin America if he is not to repeat the blunders committed by his predecessor or indeed commit similar ones.

Much of the rest of the world has justifiedly been cheering the triumph of a [...]

There are acts that people commit which are so frightful and disgusting that over the centuries they have become known to some of us as “the sins crying to heaven for vengeance”. That striking and terrible term has always fascinated me and made me think hard whenever I have come up against it.

The principal one of these sins is murder committed by a person in full knowledge of what [...]

Presidente, you’ve let us down! Hugo, we expected better of you!

We learnt last week that you had closed down hundreds of hamburger joints in Venezuela run by a foreign company which for legal reasons I choose to call Joint X. You cited as your reason tax evasion.

At a time when many bonus-laden business leaders, not least in Wall Street and the world’s myriad financial boltholes, are seen as [...]

I’m confident in my ability to smell a non-governmental organisation when it goes bad.

Let me explain. I had a great time in the early 1960s when, under the enthusiastic and forceful inspiration of Peter Benenson, Amnesty was created. As a young journalist I was the most junior volunteer member of a little committee which met in Peter’s rather gloomy set of semi-basement chambers in Mitre Court in the Temple [...]

The black shadow of the Cuban missile crisis, that series of miscalculations and mishaps which brought the world closer to the abyss of nuclear war in 1962 than ever before or since, is rapidly falling over the Caribbean once again.

In July the US government decided to resurrect its navy’s Fourth Fleet for the first time since 1950 and get it sailing round the Western Hemisphere. The idea, according [...]

Those who aim to keep the indigenous peoples down, as has been the case for the past 500 years; to steal common land meant for peasants and smallholders; to keep a big pool of unemployed so that wages are depressed; to maintain a good flow of profits to foreign shareholders who own strategic assets; to contract cheap domestic service of a sort that has become a memory even among the [...]

Most of the Western media don’t do symbolism – or rather, can’t do symbolism. This was demonstrated by their reporting of the hugely symbolic assumption of the presidency of Paraguay last Friday by Fernando Lugo, former bishop of the poor diocese of San Pedro. Coverage was generally limp, grudging and dismissive of a ceremony of hemispheric significance, which should have presented any editor up to his job with a thrilling [...]

Now that the results of the referendum are in and - ignorant of the fact that when Voltaire composed this mot his tongue was firmly in his cheek - the racist opposition in Bolivia to the elected government of their country will be trotting out these words about the wicked animal which defends itself when attacked.

The reality is that up and down Latin America – from Chiapas and Guatemala [...]