Brazil has a new president\: Dilma Rousseff of the ruling Workers’ Party won a resounding 55-to-44-percent victory in Sunday’s second-round vote. She will take office – succeeding her close ally, popular two-term president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva – on January 1. She is the first woman ever to serve as president of Brazil.
Rousseff’s victory is unlikely to change the...
On October 7th, Mexico's President Felipe Calderón called Tijuana a "clear example" that his four-year-long security strategy against drug cartels in Mexico has a solution. "Tijuana went from being a city seized by terror and focused only on questions of crime to a city motivated by hope and focused on being competitive," Calderón said. President Calderón made his assertion despite evidence that the number of homicides in 2010 was well on track to surpass last year's 695 murders, with 639 already in...
A large U.S. delegation is in Colombia yesterday and today. Led by James Steinberg, the number-two official at the State Department, the visit initiates a “High-Level Partnership Dialogue” whose purpose is to “re-launch the agenda” of U.S.-Colombian relations.
Instead of the overwhelming past focus on aid to combat drugs and terror, the future relationship, in...
The Mexico Institute at the Smithsonian Institution's Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars and the University of San Diego's Trans-Border Institute held a conference at the Woodrow Wilson Center on October 22 entitled "Shared Responsibility: U.S. - Mexico Policy Options for Confronting Organized Crime." The event coincided with the two organizations' release of a book of the same name, and...
- Mexican authorities seized 134 tons of marijuana on Sunday near the Mexico-U.S. border. On Wednesday, the 15,300 bales were set ablaze. One heavily quoted excerpt from the New York Times on the "bonfire" no longer appears in the article, but is included in the ...