Latin America
December 5, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Economist Javier Milei is Argentina’s newly-elected president. Apparently inflation finally got so bad that in desperation, the voters turned to someone who actually understands economics. But in addition to being an academic, Milei is a media personality and an articulate advocate for libertarian and conservative positions. This minute and a half clip from an interview is the most cogent commentary I have seen from a politician in a long time.
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November 20, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Recalling from Power Line’s Lexicon of Political Terminology that “populism is when the wrong person wins an election,” the reaction this morning to Javier Milei’s victory in Argentina’s presidential election yesterday makes evident that the real threat represented by the the victory of Donald Trump (and Brexit) in 2016 is that it demonstrated that voters felt free to choose candidates not approved and certified by the established political class and
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September 11, 2023 — Steven Hayward
September 11, 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the left’s 9/11 world-historical catastrophe: the day Chile’s aspiring Communist dictator Salvador Allende was deposed in a military coup. Needless to say the left has always seen the deft hand of Nixon, Kissinger, and the CIA behind the event, and while it is certainly true the Nixon Administration was hostile to Allende’s proto-Communist regime, subsequent history ought to disabuse everyone that our
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September 6, 2022 — Steven Hayward
My old AEI colleague Mark Falcoff, whom I used to talk with frequently since his office was just two doors down from mine, is one of the preeminent Latin American experts of recent decades and author of Modern Chile, 1970-1989: A Critical History. He writes in with two propositions prompted by my item yesterday about Chile’s vote against a radical constitution: First, Chileans, in spite of the Allende experience (or perhaps
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September 5, 2022 — Steven Hayward
There’s an old joke that French libraries file their nation’s constitutions under “Periodicals.” I also recall Walter Berns once telling me the story of a visit he took to South America—it was either Argentina or Chile, I don’t recall which country he specified—where one of his academic hosts dismissed the American Constitution with the comment, “You’ve only had one constitution, while we’ve had lots of them.” This all came back
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January 13, 2022 — Steven Hayward
It’s hardly news any more that mainline Protestant denominations (Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, etc) have been shrinking fast in proportion as they’ve become politicized adjuncts of leftism, transforming themselves into the Church of What’s Happening Now instead of ministering to the horizon of eternity. Meanwhile, evangelical denominations continue to thrive and grow rapidly, not just here in the U.S., but around the world. But what about the Catholic Church? Many parishes
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December 19, 2021 — John Hinderaker
I didn’t know that there is an election going on in Chile. But there is, and observers say that the Left is favored to retake control of that country, which has seen unprecedented prosperity since it adopted free enterprise policies beginning in the 1980s. Dan Mitchell has the story. Most notable is this animation, which shows the opposite paths taken in recent decades by Chile and Venezuela, formerly one of
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November 2, 2018 — Scott Johnson
National Security Advisor John Bolton gave a speech naming and denouncing the Troika of Tyranny in our hemisphere — Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Bolton gave the speech in Miami, where the Miami Herald’s Franco Ordoñez wrote it up in a page-one story. Referring to the leaders of these leftist kleptocracies, Bolton called disparaged them as “clowns” and poured on the abuse: “These tyrants fancy themselves strongmen and revolutionaries, icon and
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November 29, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
President Trump has nominated Joseph McManus to be the U.S. ambassador to Colombia. McManus is an experienced diplomat, having spent 30 years in the foreign service. I don’t doubt that he’s a capable man. However, critics point out that McManus was one of Hillary Clinton’s top aides at the State Department and was deeply involved in the State Department’s initial response to the Benghazi attack. In addition, he became entangled
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December 13, 2016 — Steven Hayward
Steve Hanke of Johns Hopkins University is one of my favorite economists, and he has done some of the best original analysis of inflation around the world, calculating real inflation rates instead of just going by official government-reported rates or World Bank figures, which have defects. He is the originator of the Hanke-Krus World Hyperinflation Table, which found, among other eye-popping findings, that the world’s worst hyperinflation was not Germany
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April 16, 2015 — Paul Mirengoff
On Tuesday, President Obama announced that the U.S. is removing Cuba from its state sponsors of terror list. Hours later, FARC, a terrorist group long supported by Cuba, murdered 10 Colombian soldiers and wounded 17 others in a terror attack on a military base. As David Steinberg of PJ Media shows, providing safe haven to members of a terrorist group has long been sufficient to warrant inclusion on the U.S.
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December 21, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
Our restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba and the accompanying swap of prisoners have overshadowed the release of six terrorists detained at Guantanamo Bay, after the government of Uruguay agreed to accept the six. On the face of things, the two stories seem unrelated. But if we are to believe the president of Uruguay, there is a connection. And the common thread may be President Obama’s laxity (to put it
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December 17, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
You knew this was coming, right? You knew that, with all of the national elections that will take place during his presidency behind him, Barack Obama would do everything in his power — broadly defined — to assist the Castro regime. President Obama was a good friend to Mohammad Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s man in Egypt. He has made nice with the mullahs in Iran, bailing their country out of
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June 25, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
There is no genuine dispute that President Obama is responsible for the sudden mass influx into the U.S. of adolescent immigrants from Central America. Dreams of sanctuary under the DREAM Act and via Obama’s pen convinced Central American families to hand their children over to coyote networks that would take them across Mexico and the Rio Grande. But Michael Gonzalez of the Heritage Foundation, writing in the National Interest, shows
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