Why are Saudi Arabia and the UAE at odds in Africa? How will a new president change Chile? And why did Meta just buy a social network built for AI?

Olly Mann and The Week delve behind the headlines and debate what really matters from the past seven days.

A podcast for curious, open-minded people, The Week Unwrapped delivers fresh perspectives on politics, culture, technology and business. It makes for a lively, enlightening discussion, ranging from the serious to the offbeat. Previous topics have included whether solar engineering could refreeze the Arctic, why funerals are going out of fashion, and what kind of art you can use to pay your tax bill.

You can subscribe to The Week Unwrapped wherever you get your podcasts:

• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts
• Global Player

In December 1823, President James Monroe declared in his State of the Union address that “the American continents... are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonisation by any European powers”, setting out a vision of US dominance over the New World.

Now, President Trump has revived the so-called Monroe Doctrine to justify his aggressive foreign policy in the Americas

Why was the Monroe Doctrine established?

In the years before Monroe’s address, Spain’s vast empire in the Americas had collapsed. Venezuela, Mexico and around a dozen other former colonies had won independence and opened their once-closed ports to American and British trade.

Rumours were circulating that Spain might try to reconquer its New World possessions, while Russia claimed control of the Pacific Coast from Alaska to Oregon. Monroe’s statement was, at the time, quite limited: he said that the US would “not interfere” with existing colonies (Britain and Spain’s Caribbean territories; and Russia’s in Alaska, which lasted until 1867).

Did other countries take Monroe’s warning seriously?

Not initially. The young US was not yet a major military power, making the policy more of an aspiration than a declaration of intent; it was not known as the “Monroe Doctrine” until the 1850s. And it did not, for instance, stop the French from invading Mexico and installing a puppet monarch, the Austria-born Maximilian I, in 1864, while the US was distracted by the American Civil War. It was only as the century came to an end that America started to meaningfully enforce and broaden the doctrine, during what became the nation’s only period of out-and-out imperial expansion beyond the continental United States.

How did US policy change?

The Monroe Doctrine was invoked during the 1898 Spanish-American War, when the US helped liberate Cuba from Spanish rule – and also took direct control of Madrid’s former possessions of Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines (which the US held until 1946). In that year, the US also annexed Hawaii.

Emboldened, President Theodore Roosevelt would radically expand the doctrine after taking office in 1901. When British, German and Italian gunboats blockaded Venezuelan ports in 1902 to collect debts, he told the Europeans to strike a deal quickly with the dictatorship in Caracas or see a US fleet dispatched against their ships. The Europeans complied. In 1904, he laid out what became known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The US, he said, must act as “an international police power” to keep America’s backyard “stable, orderly, and prosperous”. A period of extensive interventionism followed.

What did that entail?

Between 1903 and 1934, US marines were deployed to half a dozen countries in the Western hemisphere. These included Honduras, where troops were sent seven times to quell revolutions; Nicaragua, which was occupied near-continuously from 1912 to 1933; the Dominican Republic, which US forces occupied in 1916; and Haiti, which the US controlled between 1915 and 1934.

Nicolás Maduro joins a long list of Latin American and Caribbean leaders who have been dislodged by the US, from Nicaraguan president José Santos Zelaya, in 1909, to Hudson Austin, who led a Soviet-backed coup in Grenada in 1983. The great exception, of course, is Cuba’s Fidel Castro, who resisted not only the Bay of Pigs Invasion (1961) but a series of attempts on his life.

Why did such interventions happen?

Their goals were to protect sea routes – including the new US-owned Panama Canal, completed in 1914 – and the interests of US companies such as United Fruit, which controlled the trade in bananas and other tropical fruits. A powerhouse in Washington, the company backed coups against elected leaders and the installation of accommodating puppet governments (hence “banana republics”).

These occupations became military quagmires, in which hundreds of US soldiers and tens of thousands of civilians were killed. The “Banana Wars” became very unpopular in the US; and in 1933, the president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, put an end to them with his Good Neighbour Policy, which stressed regional cooperation over military force.

Did FDR’s policy last?

It did in the sense that the US became, in theory, anti-imperialist again. But in the Cold War, the Monroe Doctrine was invoked to combat the spread of Soviet-style communism across Latin America. In 1954, shortly after CIA-backed insurgents toppled a Leftist government in Guatemala, the secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, said the “intrusion of Soviet despotism” there was “a direct challenge to our Monroe Doctrine, the first and most fundamental of our foreign policies”.

Over the following decades, the US covertly supported the overthrow of left-wing governments in Brazil (1964), Bolivia (1971), Chile (1973) and Nicaragua (the 1980s), among others. The historian John Coatsworth has detailed 41 interventions between 1898 and 1994, 17 direct and 24 indirect. In many of these cases (notably Guatemala and Chile), the US was implicated in atrocities: mass extrajudicial killings and forced “disappearances”.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, such interventions fell out of favour; in 2013, the then-secretary of state, John Kerry, won applause when he told an audience of Latin American officials, “The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.”

How has President Trump resurrected the doctrine?

Trump keeps a portrait of Monroe in the Oval Office, and his administration’s recent National Security Strategy laid out a “Trump Corollary” to the doctrine, known as the “Donroe Doctrine”. The US, it states, will keep the Western hemisphere “reasonably stable and well-governed”, and will insist that governments cooperate to combat mass migration, drug trafficking and “hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets”.

It soon followed through with the removal of Maduro – whom it accused of drug trafficking and hosting “foreign adversaries”. Trump later asserted that the US would “run” Venezuela. He has also threatened to use military force in Mexico and Colombia, to “take back” control of the Panama Canal, and to annex Greenland. The Monroe Doctrine “was very important, but we forgot about it”, Trump said last month. “We don’t forget about it any more.”

On Jan. 3, 2026, President Donald Trump authorized an attack on Venezuela that resulted in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his rendition to New York. Once there, he and his wife, Cilia Flores, were indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of drug trafficking and narco-terrorism.

While the episode was a departure from more recent, comparatively hands-off American policy in the region, it was very much aligned with a long post-World War II history of U.S. interventions designed to change unfriendly regimes into friendly ones. In addition to direct military interventions, the CIA supported numerous coups across the region during the Cold War.

Guatemala, 1954

The first major post-World War II intervention was in Guatemala. “Using psychological warfare, propaganda and economic pressure, the CIA helped create a rebel army that toppled the Guatemalan government” of Jacobo Árbenz in 1954, said Responsible Statecraft. The leader’s land reforms had been “met with fierce opposition from Guatemala's elite and the U.S. government, which had economic interests” tied to the United Fruit Company. As a ploy for stability, it didn’t work — Guatemala suffered through a 36-year civil war that began in 1960 and experienced multiple coups.

Cuba, 1961

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy authorized a covert program to train 1,400 Cuban exiles in Guatemala to invade and topple the still-young communist regime of Fidel Castro. A series of strategic errors, including the failure to keep the plans a secret along with a misappraisal of the Castro government’s military capabilities, led to an embarrassing disaster.

The exile force landed at the Bay of Pigs on the morning of April 17 and was immediately pinned down. More than 100 were killed and Kennedy was forced to bargain for the more than 1,200 survivors who were taken prisoner. A “major embarrassment for the United States and the Kennedy administration,” the Bay of Pigs fiasco “strengthened Castro’s power in Cuba and pushed him to pursue closer relations with the Soviet Union,” said The New York Times.

Brazil, 1964

In 1964, the U.S. threw its support behind a military coup to oust Brazilian President João Goulart. The U.S. “launched Operation Brother Sam, a plan to lend logistical support to the Brazilian military’s effort to take control of the Brazilian government,” said the Library of Congress, although “additional material support proved unnecessary” to complete the coup. The military would rule for the next 21 years as a close Cold War ally of the United States before a transition to democracy took place in 1985.

The Dominican Republic, 1965

In 1963, the U.S. had backed a coup against the democratically elected leftist government of Juan Bosch. In 1965, pro-Bosch military forces launched their own rebellion against the junta and the country was plunged into civil war. Under the pretext of protecting American citizens and preventing the emergence of another Castro-like regime, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson authorized the deployment of 42,000 Marines to the capital of Santo Domingo on April 28, 1965, where they collaborated with forces loyal to the junta and quickly defeated the rebels.

The following year, Bosch was defeated at the ballot box by junta-backed former president Joaquín Balaguer. During 12 years of “harsh rule” under Balaguer, “democracy was trampled, corruption ran rampant and social reform was denied,” said The Wilson Center.

Bolivia, 1971

While much less well-known than the 1973 coup in Chile, the CIA also provided support in 1971 to oust the leftist government of President Juan José Torres in Bolivia. Torres was replaced by a lengthy military dictatorship led by Hugo Banzer, during which “more than 14,000 Boli­vians were arrested with­out a judi­cial order, more than 8,000 were tortured — with elec­tric­ity, water, beatings — and more than 200 were exe­cuted or dis­ap­peared,” said Harper’s Magazine. The country remains politically troubled today.

Chile, 1973

The CIA backed the ouster of the democratically elected government of socialist President Salvador Allende in 1973. While the agency had a more prominent role in a failed 1970 coup attempt ordered by U.S. President Richard Nixon, the 1973 coup is widely considered one of the worst offenses of American foreign policymakers during the Cold War. Allende committed suicide that year when it was clear the coup had succeeded. His successor, General Augusto Pinochet, ruled with an iron fist for 17 years, leaving behind a trail of “40,175 victims, including torture, executions, detentions and disappearances,” said Amnesty International.

Nicaragua, 1979

A socialist government led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front took power in Nicaragua in 1979, and the recently inaugurated administration of Ronald Reagan wanted to overthrow the government as part of its Cold War policy of “rollback” against communist regimes. Reagan “approved an operation in which the CIA would aid Nicaraguan rebel insurgents — who were fighting the newly established socialist Sandinista government — with the goal of preventing the spread of Communism,” said The Miller Center. Because Congress refused to allocate money for Reagan’s Nicaragua venture, the campaign also led to the Iran-Contra scandal when the U.S. sold weapons to Iran and used the proceeds to back the Contras.

Grenada, 1983

The long shadow of the Bay of Pigs could be seen in the U.S. invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada, with a population of less than 100,000 people, in 1983. A socialist government had seized power in a bloodless coup in 1979, led by Prime Minister Maurice Bishop. Fearing a growing alliance with Castro’s Cuba and fixated on Bishop’s plans to build an international airport capable of accommodating Soviet aircraft, President Ronald Reagan planned for an invasion and finally got his opportunity when military hardliners deposed and later executed Bishop. On Oct. 25, 1983, Reagan dispatched a small combined military force to overthrow the regime. The intervention was “popular within the United States, serving as proof of concept that Reagan was a tough anti-Communist,” said The National Interest.

Panama, 1989

Before the Persian Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush authorized an invasion of Panama to topple the country’s de facto dictator, General Manuel Noriega. It was a dizzying turn of events, given that Noriega was only recently considered a reliable Cold War ally and CIA informant who had provided intelligence to the U.S. about leftist movements for decades. But his deepening involvement with Colombia’s Medellín Cartel and increasingly authoritarian rule triggered a crisis that Bush resolved with a swift invasion that began on Dec. 20, 1989, and concluded with Noriega’s surrender to U.S. forces just two weeks later. His overthrow was a “decisive assertion of U.S. military force for a new American president in a moment of global tumult,” said The New Yorker.

Haiti, 1994

In 1991, the democratically elected president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was overthrown in a military coup. The resulting military junta compiled a horrific human rights record and instigated a mass migration of Haitians to the United States, which became a campaign issue in the 1992 presidential election. The new administration of Bill Clinton began preparing to overthrow the junta. Ultimately, the U.S. did not have to fire any shots. With “American planes in the air” carrying 3,900 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division, the “generals buckled and agreed to leave” on Sept. 16, 1994. U.S. forces ended up facilitating the transfer of power back to Aristide rather than fighting the Haitian military. The intervention “has been all but forgotten by many Americans,” but may have been a “key contributor to many of the problems that now endure in Haiti,” said Time.

“I’m a president and prisoner of war,” Nicolás Maduro shouted as he was led away from a New York courtroom in tears on Monday.

It was a remarkable fall from grace for the former Venezuelan leader, who was sensationally captured by US special forces and whisked out of the country along with his wife, Cilia Flores, to face drug trafficking and weapons charges in the US.

The US operation in Caracas “put an end to Maduro’s contentious 12-year rule, which saw Venezuela lose millions of inhabitants, 72% of its economy, democratic legitimacy in the eyes of much of the world, and many of its most important international allies”, said Inés Capdevila on CNN.

Humble roots

Born in 1962 in Caracas to a working-class family, Maduro began his career working as a bus driver for Caracas Metrobus, serving the capital city.

A member of the Socialist League since his student days, he was an up-and-coming union leader when he met his future wife, Flores, in the 1990s. Later the first woman to lead the National Assembly, she would come to be seen by many as the real “power behind the throne”, Carmen Arteaga, PhD in political science and professor at Simón Bolívar University, told CNN.

Maduro’s union activities also brought him into contact with the man who would become his political mentor: Hugo Chávez. When Chávez took office in 1998, Maduro’s “loyalty, political skill and ideological commitment led to a rapid rise through the ranks of Venezuela’s ruling party”, said Jason Burke in The Guardian. After six years in the National Assembly, Maduro was made foreign minister, before becoming vice-president six years later.

In government he was a “good second, always obedient”, Ronal Rodríguez, researcher at the Venezuela Observatory at Colombia’s Universidad del Rosario, told CNN. “Always an underestimated leader”, Maduro emerged from a pool of possible successors when Chávez fell ill with cancer. “None achieved what he did: on one hand, Cuban support, and on the other, distributing power within chavismo”, the regime’s programme of nationalisation and social welfare. A month after Chávez’s death in 2013, Maduro narrowly won the presidential election to secure his first six-year mandate, despite lacking the charisma of his political idol.

From president to ‘narco-terrorist’

Almost immediately, Maduro’s presidency was “plunged into crisis”, said The Guardian. In a sign of the repressive tactics to come, security forces brutally cracked down on opposition protests led by the now-Nobel peace prize winner María Corina Machado, killing 42.

Having survived an assassination attempt in 2018, Maduro ran nearly unopposed in the presidential election that year after opposition parties were blocked from the ballot and some opposition figures were either imprisoned or fled into exile.

Along with allegations of rigged elections and human rights abuses, under Maduro’s leadership, Venezuela experienced a “severe economic collapse marked by hyperinflation and shortages”, said Modern Diplomacy. Amid the chaos, millions of Venezuelans left the country, sparking a refugee crisis across Latin America that exists to this day.

Hopes that economic reforms aimed at boosting the struggling economy and ending US-led sanctions and an oil embargo would lead to greater political freedoms and free elections were dashed in 2024 after a presidential election that was widely denounced as fraudulent.

Widely mocked – for his working-class roots, his belief that Chávez appeared to him in the form of a bird and a butterfly, and his presidential order bringing Christmas forward by two months to “lift the spirits of Venezuelans” – Maduro had nevertheless “proven for years that underestimating him can be a mistake”, said Capdevila on CNN.

That was until Saturday morning when he and his wife were dragged from their bedroom by US soldiers and put on a plane leaving Venezuela, most likely for the last time, with his second-in-command Delcy Rodríguez now in charge.

The United States intends to dominate Latin America. That is clear following the weekend’s operation to remove Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro from power. But the U.S. has competition. China is expanding its influence in the region, offering itself as an alternative to governments leery of American power.

China is Venezuela’s “largest creditor and biggest oil customer,” said The Wall Street Journal. That status is part of a larger push into Latin America, in which Beijing has “displaced the U.S. as the biggest trading partner” for a number of countries. The challenge to American regional preeminence is clear: A recent state television program depicted a “wargame simulation” showing Chinese confronting unnamed Western forces “around Cuba and Mexico.” The U.S.-China competition in the region has “only just begun,” said the Center for Strategic and International Studies in an analysis.

It is Beijing’s economic might that is taking center stage, however. China is ramping up imports of Latin American crops as it “pivots away from U.S. farmers” in the wake of Trump’s tariff hikes, said Investigate Midwest. Brazil has “stepped in as China’s biggest supplier of soybeans” while Chinese firms build “ports, railways, roads, bridges, metro lines” and more in places like Peru to cement the economic cooperation, said Henry Ziemer of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “These are long-term projects.”

What did the commentators say?

China’s Latin America strategy is “alarming,” said Jianli Yang at the National Review. A new strategy paper from Beijing portrays China as a “champion of the Global South” in contrast to American “bullying,” but its intentions are not purely altruistic. China aims to “impose opportunity costs” on Washington by forcing the U.S. to “devote greater attention and resources to its own hemisphere” instead of Taiwan and the Indo-Pacific region. U.S. leaders must build a smart response or “risk strategic overextension.”

Washington’s “obsession” with China’s moves in Latin America is a “familiar hysteria,” Leon Hadar said at Asia Times. But Beijing’s activities may not “actually threaten core American interests” in the region. China’s trade with Latin America has “increased tenfold” over the last 20 years, but that reflects China’s “massive demand for agricultural goods and minerals.” That is basic economics, “not geopolitical conspiracy.”

President Donald Trump’s return to the White House has actually “reduced and reversed” China’s influence among Latin American countries, said Arturo McFields at The Hill. Beijing has lost sway over the Panama Canal, seen Peru draw closer to Taiwan, and had a diplomat expelled from Paraguay. In the political contest between global powers, then, the U.S. “seems to be one step ahead.”

What next?

Beijing’s Latin America strategy will be “significantly tested” by the Trump administration’s actions in Venezuela, said The South China Morning Post. The White House is “moving aggressively to roll back Chinese influence” in the Western Hemisphere. Some Latin American countries “may adopt a more cautious approach in managing their relations with Beijing when facing pressure from Washington,” said Zhao Minghao, the deputy director at Shanghai’s Center for American Studies, to the outlet.

The public groping of its first female president has placed Mexico’s epidemic of violence against women into sharp focus.

Claudia Sheinbaum was speaking to a group of supporters in Mexico City on Tuesday when a man approached her from behind and tried to kiss her on the neck and touch her chest. The president moved his hands away before a member of her staff stepped between them, and the man was later arrested. Video of the incident “quickly ricocheted across the internet”, said Reuters, “underscoring for many in Mexico the insecurity women face” there.

Sheinbaum said that although it was something she had experienced in the past, when she was 12, she had decided to press charges because the suspect had allegedly harassed other women in the crowd. “My view is, if I don’t file a complaint, what will happen to other Mexican women?” Sheinbaum said at a news conference on Wednesday. “If this happens to the president, where does that leave all the young women in our country? No man has the right to abuse women’s personal space.”

The femicide capital

Rights groups say the incident shows the “extent of ingrained machismo in Mexican society, where a man believes he has the right to accost even the president if she is a woman”, said the BBC. Femicide is a “huge problem” – a “staggering 98% of gender-based murders” are estimated to go unpunished.

Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first female president, pledged as a candidate to tackle the problem, but since she was elected last October there has been “no discernible improvement in that area of violent crime”.

Mexico has one of the highest rates of femicide in the world. In the first seven months of this year, more than 500 women have been killed because of their gender. That’s almost 40% fewer compared with the same period in 2024, according to figures from the Federal Security Secretariat cited by Sky News.

And from a policy standpoint, Sheinbaum “has made clear progress” on women’s rights, said The New York Times. But “non-lethal violence against women has hardly budged”.

A personal affront

The incident has “sparked outrage” among Mexican women, who “saw their own fears and experiences reflected in her plight”, said The Guardian. For some, watching the country’s first female president being groped in public was a “personal affront”.

“If the president suffered assault with that level of protection and those guards it means that all of us women can be assaulted at any moment,” said Patricia Reyes, a 20-year-old student.

“It was really humiliating,” said María Antonieta de la Rosa, a feminist activist and artist. “I felt angry, enraged and impotent.”

“The issue of assault is like the base level on the violence thermometer and it culminates in femicide,” she added. “So living in a femicidal country, the issue of assault is always there.”

The situation has also turned a spotlight on the country’s anti-sexual harassment laws. Out of Mexico’s 32 federal entities – Mexico City and 31 states – “only 16 criminalise sexual harassment”, said Al Jazeera.

On Thursday, Sheinbaum unveiled a new national initiative against sexual abuse, including a push to make harassment punishable in every state, education for prosecutors and judges on crimes against women, and a new public campaign to encourage women to report crimes. She called for all states to come together “beyond politics…defending the integrity of Mexican women”.

The United States has a long history of meddling in Latin American politics: Teddy Roosevelt reshaped the region’s map to get the Panama Canal built, while Ronald Reagan’s presidency stumbled on his support for a Nicaraguan rebel group. President Donald Trump’s new military buildup targeting alleged drug traffickers and the Venezuelan regime is reviving unpleasant memories in the region.

Some administration officials have dubbed the president’s aggressive policies the “Donroe Doctrine,” said The Wall Street Journal. Where President James Monroe conjured his original Monroe Doctrine to “keep European powers out of the region,” Trump instead has treated Latin America as an “extension of the U.S. homeland.” In addition to Venezuela, he has vowed to reclaim the Panama Canal and taken tougher stances against Colombia and Nicaragua. America is newly focused on “defeating threats in the Western Hemisphere,” Trump said to a gathering of American generals last month.

What did the commentators say?

Trump’s moves have dredged up “bitter memories” from the “long record of U.S. military interventions” in Latin America, said The New York Times. The American government supported coups that “ousted democratically elected leaders in Guatemala, Brazil and Chile” during the Cold War, while Cuba, Haiti and Honduras all saw “repeated U.S. military landings” during the early 20th century. A revival of American interventionism would touch a “historic and deeply felt popular nerve,” said Christopher Sabatini, a Latin America expert at Chatham House.

America has a “long record of fomenting regime change” in Latin America, said Max Boot at The Washington Post. That approach has “seldom worked out well” and created “deep-rooted resentment” in the region, yet Trump wants to “reprise this ignominious history.” America did better with “fast, in-and-out operations” in Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989, but Venezuela has already “proved resistant” to U.S. efforts to drive out leader Nicolás Maduro. History suggests a new regime change push by Trump would “backfire and simply feed anti-Yanqui sentiment in Latin America.”

The U.S. has “treated Latin America as its personal piñata” for more than two centuries, said Gustavo Arellano at the Los Angeles Times. America has “propped up puppets and despots” while deposing “democratically elected governments,” sparking mass migrations that “forever altered the demographics of the United States.” Americans should object every time a “suspected drug boat” in the region is destroyed by the U.S. military with “no questions asked and no proof offered.” But few may actually care. “It’s Latin America, after all.”

What next?

Latin American leaders are pushing back against U.S. intervention, said Mother Jones. American actions could “inflame South America and lead to radicalization of politics on the whole continent,” said Brazilian presidential advisor Celso Amorim. “Gringos, go home,” said Armando Benedetti, Colombia’s interior minister. The crisis may be at a tipping point. America will soon have to decide “whether to escalate to military strikes inside Venezuela, or whether to declare victory and move on,” said The Atlantic Council’s Geoff Ramsey to The Hill.

Since Donald Trump began his second term, he has put increasing pressure on multiple Latin American nations – including US allies. And the seemingly haphazard nature of his attacks is raising questions about his motives.

The US president has imposed 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico, the US’s largest trade partner. He has threatened to seize the Panama Canal and has carried out mass – allegedly unlawful – deportations of Latin Americans. He has tried to use punitive 50% tariffs on Brazilian imports, in an attempt to influence the outcome of the trial of Brazil’s former president and Trump ally, Jair Bolsonaro.

The US military has sharply increased its presence in the southern Caribbean, deploying 10,000 troops and multiple warships and aircraft. It has struck at least seven Venezuelan vessels that Trump claimed were trafficking drugs – without offering evidence. At least 32 people have been killed as of Friday. Trump has slammed Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and admitted to authorising covert CIA operations against him.

And on Sunday, Trump escalated his feud with Colombia, one of America’s closest allies, slashing aid and increasing tariffs on its exports because it “does nothing to stop” cocaine production. Trump called Colombian president Gustavo Petro an “illegal drug leader”, after Petro accused the US of committing “murder” in the Caribbean. He warned that Petro “better close up” drug operations or the US would “close them up for him”.

What did the commentators say?

One “lament often heard from Latin America” is that the US has “paid insufficient attention to the region”, said the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But now Trump has given it “more attention in nine months than many past administrations of either party have since the Cold War” and those countries may well “regret getting what they wished for”.

The US pivot stems from a fear that, for too long, it has “prioritised power projection and policing global hotspots over attending to its ‘shared neighbourhood’”. This has led China to “expand its influence” in the region, and allowed organised crime, drug trafficking and migration to “threaten US security”. In response, Trump “seems to be adopting a ‘Monroe Doctrine 2.0’”: abandon soft-power initiatives in favour of threatening (or deploying) military force, while “relying on economic coercion” in the form of tariffs.

The problem is that the tariffs and the cutting of “already-slashed levels” of US development and aid to Colombia will “make it harder” for Bogotá to combat the cocaine trade, said Keith Johnson on Foreign Policy. Colombia is, by far, the primary source of cocaine in the US, and, historically, “the biggest chunk” of US aid “has come in the form of counternarcotics and law-enforcement support”.

“If the US were truly interested in countering drug trafficking, the last thing you would do is to alienate the one military in the region” capable of fighting drug traffickers, Elizabeth Dickinson, senior Colombia analyst at the International Crisis Group, told Johnson.

US military assets in the Caribbean “are not much use” in fighting the drug trade, said The Guardian’s foreign affairs commentator Simon Tisdall – especially if their focus is on Venezuela, through which only small quantities of cocaine are trafficked to America. So what is Trump up to here?

President Maduro claims the White House is attempting to “forcibly impose regime change” on his country and is waging “undeclared war”. Analysts suggest Trump “covets Venezuela’s abundant oil, gas and mineral resources”. And there’s a personal aspect: Marco Rubio is “a long-time critic of left-wing rulers in Cuba and Nicaragua” – for him, Maduro is “unfinished business”. But, given Trump’s “hapless blundering on other key foreign issues”, the most likely explanation is that “he hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing – in Venezuela or Latin America as whole”. There is no plan.

What next?

America is Colombia’s biggest trading partner, so Trump’s threats of further tariffs have “some potential leverage”, said Johnson on Foreign Policy. But “the pain will be felt as much by US consumers as by Colombian exporters”.

In Venezuela, the Trump administration thinks “its campaign against Maduro is working”, and that increased US military pressure will convince the Venezuelan leader “he can’t remain in power”, said The Wall Street Journal. “The idea is to make him miserable enough to go away,” a senior administration official said. But, far from weakening Maduro, it might “achieve the exact opposite”, said Tisdall in The Guardian. Maduro is using the crisis to increase his grip on power.

More broadly, Trump’s “bullying of other left-leaning Latin American countries”, including Colombia and Brazil, and his “presumptuous cheerleading for right-wing populists in Argentina and El Salvador”, is “spurring a regional backlash”. Trump’s efforts to “reprise the role of Latin American neighbourhood policeman” are ultimately “self-defeating”. Long-term, the “big winner” will be China.

Colombia has long battled a reputation associated with images of narcoterrorism and Pablo Escobar, but it has actually been in lockstep with the U.S. in fighting the war on drugs since the late 1990s. Now, though, the Trump administration has begun sparring with Colombia over its anti-drug efforts, saying the country has not done enough to stem the flow of illicit substances. Colombian officials have pushed back against the accusations, which could mark the end of close ties between the two countries.

‘Failed demonstrably’ to stop drugs

Since President Donald Trump retook office, there has been “anxiety in Colombia, where soaring cocaine production has stoked fears of sweeping U.S. sanctions,” said NPR. While the White House has not yet imposed sanctions on Colombia, it did take the significant step of decertifying it as a drug control partner nation. This marks the first time since 1997 that it won’t be on that list.

Colombia has “failed demonstrably to meet its drug control obligations,” the U.S. Department of State said in a memorandum announcing the decertification. Trump chose to decertify Colombia because the country’s “coca cultivation and cocaine production have surged to all-time records” under Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who has been in office since 2022.

The nation is indeed “behind a record-breaking year for the global cocaine market,” said NPR. From 2022 to 2023 (the most recent years with available data), the level of global cocaine production rose 34% to 3,708 tons, largely due to a 50% increase in Colombia's cocaine yield, according to a report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. In 2023, the UN also found Colombia's coca crop reached record high production.

Hitting back

Petro, Colombia's first democratically elected left-wing president, decried the decision by the United States, arguing that it was not grounded in reality. Colombia has “managed to slow down the growth of crops that has been occurring since 2013,” Petro said in a translated post on X. What is “happening with the current U.S. government, co-opted by the Miami far-right network, which is allied with the Colombian far-right, doesn’t worry me.”

The country has also “seized 1,000 tons of cocaine this year and more than 5,000 cocaine-making laboratories,” Petro said on X. The United States is “simply participating in Colombia’s internal politics; it wants a puppet president. The Colombian people will respond,” Petro said in a separate post, arguing the U.S. interests in the region were not actually based on the drug war.

But the rift between Trump and Petro means relations between the U.S. and Colombia have “frayed,” said Time. In response to Trump, Colombia has “suspended its arms purchases from the U.S.” and made clear that it has “dedicated resources to combating cocaine production and trafficking.”

There could also be bigger consequences for both nations, as the decision from the Trump administration is “likely to hit foreign investment, multilateral funding and tourism, as a long-time ally of Washington now finds itself in the same rogue category as Venezuela, Bolivia, Afghanistan and Myanmar,” said Bloomberg. For now, the U.S. has not cut off foreign aid to Colombia and isn’t changing its travel advisories for Americans visiting the country. But the “decision could potentially slash tourism revenue by as much as $1 billion annually if the U.S. were to intensify its travel warnings for Colombia.”

The closing phase of the trial of Brazil's former president Jair Bolsonaro – dubbed the "Trump of the tropics" – begins today: the first case of its kind in the country's turbulent history.

The popular far-right figure is accused of plotting to overthrow his left-wing rival, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, after losing his bid for re-election in 2022. The full ruling, by five judges in Brasília's Federal Supreme Court, is expected to be delivered by 12 September. A guilty verdict could send Bolsonaro to jail for decades, and further inflame his idol to the north, Donald Trump.

What is Bolsonaro accused of?

Attempting to use military force to overthrow democracy. After narrowly losing the presidential run-off against Lula in October 2022, Bolsonaro "declared the ballot rigged", said The Economist, and "used social media to urge his supporters to rise up". He allegedly tried to persuade military leaders to back a "correction" of the election, but failed to get enough support and left for the US.

On 8 January 2023, thousands of Bolsonaro's supporters attacked key government buildings in an echo of the 6 January attacks on the US Capitol in 2021. A federal investigation into the riots found evidence of a "criminal organisation" that had "acted in a coordinated manner" to keep Bolsonaro in power. The report alleged that Bolsonaro planned the attempted coup, which included a plot to assassinate Lula.

What does Bolsonaro say?

The former president and his alleged co-conspirators deny the charges, calling them "grave and baseless". He claims to be a victim of political persecution, but has admitted considering "alternative" ways of holding on to power after his defeat.

Bolsonaro insists he will challenge Lula for the presidency in next year's election, but the Supreme Court has banned him from seeking office until 2030 for spreading disinformation about Brazil's voting system. He was also placed under house arrest in August after violating a court order banning him from using social media.

How is Donald Trump involved?

Trump is Bolsonaro's "most powerful foreign friend", said The Guardian. The US president has "waded into the courtroom drama", imposing 50% tariffs on Brazilian imports in retaliation for what he calls a "witch hunt" against his ally.

His administration has also imposed Magnitsky sanctions on Alexandre de Moraes, the judge leading the case against Bolsonaro – measures usually reserved for those accused of "gross" human rights abuses.

Bolsonaro's son, congressman Eduardo, has relocated to the US and "busied himself lobbying Trump officials to target Brazil's top tribunal and Lula allies". But analysts believe the "US coercion campaign will fail to sway the judges".

Last week Brazilian police recommended more charges against Bolsonaro and his son, accusing them of obstruction of justice and interfering with the trial, citing Eduardo's meetings with White House officials. "Brazil will not give in to pressure," Moraes told The Washington Post last month. Brazil is "independent".

Why is the trial so significant?

Bolsonaro and his co-defendants, including a military admiral and three generals, are likely to be found guilty, which could exacerbate Brazil's febrile political landscape.

Brazil has endured 14 coup attempts and a brutal military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985 – a living memory for many. However, the country has "traditionally chosen conciliation over prosecution when it comes to alleged crimes against the democratic state".

But when democracy was restored, Brazil "began building a legislative framework to prevent another backslide into authoritarianism". These laws are "the basis for the charges against Bolsonaro".

Why are people watching footage from the ocean floor? What can we learn from a football club on the brink? And which jobs will fall to AI first?

Olly Mann and The Week delve behind the headlines and debate what really matters from the past seven days.

A podcast for curious, open-minded people, The Week Unwrapped delivers fresh perspectives on politics, culture, technology and business. It makes for a lively, enlightening discussion, ranging from the serious to the offbeat. Previous topics have included whether solar engineering could refreeze the Arctic, why funerals are going out of fashion, and what kind of art you can use to pay your tax bill.

You can subscribe to The Week Unwrapped wherever you get your podcasts:

• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts
• Global Player

One of the deadliest chemicals on Earth is being smuggled across Latin America – and is poisoning the environment along the way.

Mercury is a powerful neurotoxin and its use is banned or heavily restricted throughout the world. But it's "essential" to illegal gold mining, one of the Amazon's "most destructive criminal economies", said The Associated Press,

Once extracted from the Earth's crust, mercury "persists in the environment indefinitely", said The Guardian. Those who drink water and consume food contaminated by it are gradually poisoned. But, with the current record-high gold prices, the mercury trade has become "so lucrative that one of Mexico's deadliest cartels has entered the business".

The 'gold-mercury-drug trifecta'

Last month, Peruvian authorities seized about four tonnes of mercury hidden inside gravel sacks in a Mexican container on a cargo ship bound for Bolivia. It was the largest mercury seizure made in South America. Mercury mining in Mexico is "spinning out of control", according to a recent report by the non-profit Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA). More than 180 tonnes were trafficked from Mexico to Colombia, Bolivia and Peru between April 2019 and June 2025, as part of what the Washington-based organisation calls a "gold-mercury-drug trifecta".

Miners mix mercury with sediment and heat it until it vaporises, leaving the pure gold ore – and releasing toxic vapour into the air, water and soil. Leftover mercury washes into rivers, where it transforms into methylmercury: its most dangerous form. Artisanal and small-scale gold mining releases 800 tonnes of mercury into the rainforest every year.

In 2013, 128 countries signed up to the Minamata Convention and committed to restrict the production and export of mercury, before phasing it out by 2032. But "legal loopholes" in the UN-based treaty "benefit traffickers and illegal gold miners", said the EIA, warning that the trade is "fuelling violence, forest destruction", human rights abuses and "environmental devastation".

In Latin America, governments and law enforcement agencies have struggled to stem the flow. Peru and Brazil banned mercury imports in 2016 but, "in Bolivia, it is easier to import mercury than to import books or medicines", said Oscar Campanini, director of the non-profit Centro de Documentación e Información Bolivia.

'Profound impact'

The surge in mercury trafficking has been driven by soaring gold prices. According to World Gold Council estimates, 30% of gold mined around the world comes from "untraceable" sources – a $12 billion (£9 million) black market that has "created a toxic web of environmental degradation and public health risks", said AI Invest.

It's having a "particularly profound impact" on the health of Indigenous people, said Mongabay, a non-profit environmental media organisation. Communities that live near mining sites in the Amazon have been exposed to high concentrations of mercury. In Peru's Madre de Dios region, an "epicentre of illegal mining", mercury contamination has been detected in drinking water and even breast milk, said AP. Long-term exposure can cause "irreversible damage to the brain and nervous system, particularly in children and pregnant women".

There are equipment and methods that can replace mercury in the gold mining process, and reduce the risk of contamination – but there is currently little market incentive to adopt them.

The issue is "expected to take centre stage" at the Conference of the Parties to the Minamata Convention in November, where advocates "hope to eliminate legal loopholes" and enforce phase-out timelines. Authorities say last month's bust "marks a turning point in efforts to dismantle the supply chains".

Enduring support for former president Evo Morales has once again boiled over into violence in Bolivia, deepening the nation's political and economic crisis.

At least four first responders are dead after clashes between anti-government protesters and authorities, the justice minister said last week, adding that some had been shot. "We can't call these civilian protests any more," said César Siles. "We are talking about paramilitary groups, groups that carry weapons, and we have to respond firmly."

More than 300 people have been injured in weeks of unrest after the courts blocked Morales, 65, from seeking a fourth term in the 17 August election and thus defying Bolivia's constitutional two-term limit. The demonstrations have "strangled transportation by blocking highways", said Reuters. Protests have "gained momentum" in rural areas of the Andean nation, amid "frustration" over Morales' disqualification and the "deteriorating" economic landscape, with inflation at its highest rate in nearly 20 years.

Socialist hero turned exile

After Morales became the first Indigenous leader of Bolivia in 2006, the former coca farmer presided over a decade of economic prosperity driven by a boom in natural gas. But in 2016, Bolivians narrowly voted against his attempt to remove presidential term limits from the constitution in a referendum. Morales chose to ignore it, running again in 2019 for an unprecedented third term as president at the head of the Movimiento al Socialismo (Mas) party.

Morales claimed to have won a vote "marred by accusations of fraud", said The Associated Press, triggering weeks of violent protests. He was forced to flee to Mexico, where he backed his finance minister, Luis Arce, as the new leader of Mas.

In 2020, Arce swept to victory. But Morales' return from exile turned the socialist allies into "bitter" rivals for the leadership of Mas. The "depth of the schism" has "paralysed the government" and exacerbated Bolivia's worsening economic crisis.

The courts upheld Bolivia's two-term presidential limit – but in February Morales announced that he would seek re-election "in defiance" of that ruling, said France24. "We will win," Morales said in his "political fiefdom" of Cochabamba, central Bolivia. He said he would run as the candidate for a small leftist group named "The Front for Victory", which has no seats in parliament, instead of Mas.

The charges against Morales

But Morales is also facing criminal charges. Since October, he has been "entrenched in the coca-growing region of Chapare", said The Guardian. A warrant was issued in December for his arrest on charges of human trafficking involving a minor. The claim is that he had a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old girl while in office, and allegedly fathered a child with her in 2016. Hundreds of coca farmers have been protecting him from the police and military, who are trying to execute that warrant.

In the mining town of Llallagua, a 17-year-old student was reportedly "beaten to death by protesters who accused him of being a police informant". One of the police officers was "kidnapped by a mob", according to the government, and killed with dynamite.

"[The officers] were Bolivians who gave their lives at a time when the country is under siege, facing the risk that elections might not be able to take place," said Arce.

"Morales wants to enter the elections at all costs, and he won't succeed," said economic analyst Gonzano Chávez Alvarez, a professor at the Universidad Católica Boliviana. "So there's uncertainty over whether the elections will really happen because it's hard to say whether Morales will have enough strength to stop them."

Meat-loving Uruguay has been rocked by a "phantom cows" investment scam, with high-profile politicians, celebrities and even priests among the victims.

Thousands of people in the small South American nation invested an estimated $350 million (£259 million) in fraudulent "cow bonds". But, despite Uruguay's "model" cattle-tracking system, neither the cows (which could number more than 700,000) nor the money can be found, said Reuters.

Three companies – now bust – are under investigation for fraud, in what is shaping up to be one of the biggest financial scandals in the history of this "stable, farming nation". Uruguay's national cattle registry has declined to comment but the incident has "sent shockwaves through its bigger ranching neighbours, Argentina and Brazil", where there are similar livestock investment schemes.

'A safe bet'

Beef is big in Uruguay, where cows outnumber people by nearly four to one and the average Uruguayan eats "200lbs of meat a year", said Lola Méndez, who is of Uruguayan heritage, in the Los Angeles Times. Meat-eating is "inherent to our way of life".

It's also inherent to the economy: Uruguay is one of the world's top 10 beef exporters; its livestock sector is of "central importance", accounting for about 15% of overall GDP and about 18% of total exports, according to government data cited in Newsweek.

The country's national identity is "tied to ranching and bountiful weekend barbecues", said Bloomberg. For generations, ranchers, cattle brokers and banks have "provided the credit that made ranching a linchpin of the economy". But in the 2000s, the country suffered both a banking crisis and "devastating outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease". Cattle investment companies switched to retail investors as "a new funding source".

Then, once the disease was eradicated, the "steep depreciation" of currency and cheap land made ranching "a lucrative business" again. And Uruguayans, burnt by the banking crisis, wanted to "park their money outside the traditional financial sector". For 25 years, a small number of firms "leveraged the sector's prestige to collect nearly $500 million (£370 million) from patrons in return for stakes in cattle ventures".

One firm, Conexión Ganadera, advertised fixed 7% to 10% dollar returns, alongside "bucolic" pictures of cattle, said Reuters. Investors had the option of owning cows outright, which would then be sold for profit by livestock firms, or buying an investment stake in the overall scheme. Investors would be able to track the cows via "a state-backed online portal" showing each animal's breed, age and location. For many, owning such a "tangible asset" seemed "a safe bet".

'Scrambling' for savings

For years, investors received fixed dollar returns, as promised. But when some went in search of their cows, they couldn't match the cattle registry tracking numbers to the tags in the ears of the animals in the fields. Uruguay's central bank began launching investigations into cattle investments in 2018 but it was the broadcast of a "scathing" TV documentary in October 2024 – which included testimonials from investors claiming to have been defrauded – that brought the scandal to the fore, said Bloomberg.

Conexión Ganadera was one of the three funds to be investigated. Soon, its payments were arriving late and then it began warning that it was unable to fulfil obligations to investors. By January, investors were "scrambling to withdraw savings amid reports of fraud", said Reuters. The company admitted that it was short of nearly $250 million (£185 million) and, in February, it was forced into receivership. An official investigation by the Prosecutor's Office for Money Laundering Crimes is ongoing.

An inventory of Conexión Ganadera by a bankruptcy trustee estimated that as few as 70,000 of the 804,604 cattle the company claimed to manage have ever actually existed. "We don't know if the cows were ever bought, whether they're alive or dead," one investor told the news site.

"I thought all the Nazis ran away to Argentina." That line in the 2024 film "The Holdovers" got "a big laugh in cinemas in Buenos Aires", said Sam Meadows in The Spectator. Audiences recognised the uneasy truth: the flight of thousands of Nazi party members to Argentina after the Second World War remains "an extremely uncomfortable period" in the country's history.

Argentina has not been good at "reckoning with its past as a haven for war criminals". President Javier Milei, however, "appears to have changed tack". On 29 April, he released 1,850 documents from the national archives containing details, said the Buenos Aires Herald, of "prominent Nazi criminals who escaped to Argentina" – including Josef Mengele, the notorious Auschwitz doctor known as the "Angel of Death".

'A haven for Nazis'

Most of the documents, a mix of police and intelligence agency files, were declassified in 1992 but "remained almost impossible to access", said The Times. They were only viewable "by appointment, in a single designated room".

Milei pledged to "lift the shroud with which Argentinian governments have long concealed the level of assistance that their predecessors provided to war criminals". And the documents, now viewable online, confirm "a long-known dirty secret": the "ease" with which senior Nazis lived in Argentina. "At one point," said defence minister Luis Petri, "Argentina became a haven for Nazis".

Mengele, "notorious" for his inhumane experiments on prisoners, arrived in 1949 and lived under "various aliases", said The Times of Israel. The documents include "nearly 100 pages detailing his time in Argentina" and show, for the first time, that he filed a request to travel from Argentina to West Germany in 1959, using his real name, according to German public broadcaster MDR. This means "several countries likely had more accurate information on Mengele than previously thought," said historian and Nazi expert Bogdan Musial.

There are also several files on Adolf Eichmann, another SS officer and one of the principal architects of the "Final Solution". He arrived in Argentina in 1950 under an alias.

The Supreme Court in Buenos Aires has also discovered Nazi material among its archives, reported The Associated Press on Sunday. An anonymous judicial authority said the court had come across boxes of photos, postcards and propaganda "intended to consolidate and propagate Adolf Hitler's ideology" in Argentina during the Second World War. The court's president, Horacio Rosatti, has ordered "a thorough analysis".

Exposing the 'ratlines'

The Nazi officials who fled to Argentina may be "long dead" but "their hunters insist their work is not done", said The Times. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a US-based human rights organisation, wants to "expose" the so-called "ratlines" – the networks, individuals and institutions that helped Nazis flee Europe and start new lives in South America. For nearly 20 years, the NGO has petitioned successive Argentine governments to release the files.

In January, the US Senate Judiciary Committee released two reports into Swiss bank Credit Suisse, concluding that "70 Argentine accounts with plausible links to Argentina-based Nazis" were opened with the bank after 1945. And, the report claimed, one of these accounts was still active as recently as 2022.

A previous investigation had found also "significant connection" between Credit Suisse and individuals who ran the ratlines, said Le Monde. "Money is not innocent," Ariel Gelblung, the Latin America director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told the paper. Credit Suisse, which was taken over by the UBS Group in 2023, has pledged to provide "all necessary assistance". And after meeting with representatives from the Simon Wiesenthal Center earlier this year, Milei ordered the release of the documents.

In a 1999 report by the Commission of Enquiry into the Activities of Nazism in Argentina, historian Holger M. Meding "identified the facilitators of Nazi exfiltration to Argentina" as the Catholic Church and the Red Cross, said Le Monde. But the role of then-President Juan Perón was "decisive". Perón had "a preference for all things German", wrote Meding.

It might have been this that spurred Milei's decision to release the files, said The Spectator's Meadows. The president has "made no secret of his hatred of Peronism", and these documents could lead to "further scrutiny" of Peron's role.

In 2021, El Salvador caught the world's attention by becoming the first country to make cryptocurrency legal tender, alongside the US dollar.

Last December, as the price of bitcoin broke $100,000 (£77,765) for the first time, the young president Nayib Bukele posted on social media that the Central American nation's crypto holdings had more than doubled in value. But now – as the price for securing a $1.4 billion (£1.1 billion) loan deal from the International Monetary Fund – the country has had to roll back its controversial bitcoin policies.

Salvadoran businesses are now free to decide whether or not to accept bitcoin, and taxes are no longer payable in the cryptocurrency. "The potential risks of the bitcoin project will be diminished significantly, in line with Fund policies," the IMF said. Effectively, bitcoin's days as legal tender in El Salvador are over.

'Cryptocurrency paradise'

Bukele's embrace of bitcoin was part of an attempt to "rebrand the tiny and impoverished" nation as a "surfing and cryptocurrency paradise", said the Financial Times. He announced plans to build a "Bitcoin City" in the jungle, "powered by geothermal energy on the slopes of a volcano".

The president claimed cryptocurrency would bring the "70% of Salvadorans who do not use traditional banks into the financial system", said France24. "Swatting away warnings about volatility risks", he ploughed an "undisclosed amount of public money into cryptocurrencies".

But the IMF always opposed Bukele's adoption of bitcoin, said the BBC, and warned that it would be an obstacle to any financial assistance. For a long time, the Salvadoran economy has "teetered on the edge of default", as the IMF stayed "wary" of lending to the country while the volatile currency – with its "potential use in money-laundering and other crimes" – was legal tender, said The Economist.

'More costs than benefits'

El Salvador is still "a focal point for the global bitcoin community", said Forbes. But the mood is now "somewhat subdued" among crypto enthusiasts, one local journalist told the news site.

"A lot of international bitcoiners moved to El Salvador for the Bitcoin Law; some Salvadorans returned," said Joe Nakamoto. "Now, doubt about the country's future with regards to bitcoin has crept in."

But bitcoin's "demotion may be more of a blessing than a concession", said The Economist. Crypto has brought El Salvador "more costs than benefits". The much-promised investment and tourism "have been small beer", while financial gains have been "meagre at best", because the currency "never really caught on". According to a poll published in January by Universidad Centroamericana, 92% of Salvadorans didn't use it at all last year.

Overall, the policy has cost $375 million (£291 million), according to estimates by rating agency Moody's – a sum that "far exceeds the profits on bitcoin holdings, which could still evaporate". There is still no Bitcoin City.

Bukele's "obsession with cryptocurrency has done little to ease El Salvador's economic woes", said the magazine. He is "just the latest crypto-utopian to see his wild ideas dissolve on contact with reality".

A public showdown between the leaders of the US and Colombia has rippled across Latin America, increasing the anxiety many nations felt about the return of Donald Trump.

On Sunday, Trump imposed 25% tariffs on trade with Colombia after President Gustavo Petro turned back US military flights carrying deported Colombian migrants. The "dramatic clash" unsettled a region already reeling from Trump's threatened tariffs on Mexico, his anti-immigration policies, and his threat to take control of the Panama Canal, said the Financial Times. China will likely view Trump's unpredictability as "an ideal opportunity".

What did the commentators say?

The "dust-up" showed yet again that Latin America will "bear the brunt" of Trump's policies, said CNN's Patrick Oppmann. The rift "immediately galvanised" the region, with some leaders "quick to cheer Petro on".

Latin America accounts for 21.3% of the US's foreign trade, according to the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean: more than $1 trillion. By treating Latin American nations as if they were "still banana republics that would bend over backward to fulfil the US government's wishes", wrote Cruz Bonlarron Martínez in The Hill, Trump "gravely underestimates their power as a united bloc".

But it's not a united bloc, said Flavia Bellieni Zimmermann in the Australian Institute of International Affairs. Trump can call on two "key strategic allies", including Argentina's Maga-adjacent Javier Milei and Brazil's former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, who is seeking a comeback.

So far, Brazil's centre-left President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has taken a "cautious approach" towards Trump, said Andre Pagliarini in The New Republic. There is currently "no clear coordinated strategy among Latin American leaders" for dealing with Trump.

Perhaps, but most "do not like how the US government is behaving", said Quico Toro in The Atlantic. "Trump's hyper-aggressive approach to Latin America risks tying up the region with a bow and leaving it on Beijing's doorstep."

What next?

Xiomara Castro, the president of Honduras and head of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac), called an emergency summit of the region's leaders following a request from Petro, which takes place tomorrow. The summit of the "leftist" regional body could "revive a unified anti-Trump block", said CNN's Oppmann.

Regardless of Trump's threats, Latin American leaders are unlikely to defer to Trump, said Michael Shifter, a fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue think-tank in Washington.

"Celac is the platform for China in Latin America," he told the FT. The summit is "a kind of proxy for showing [Washington] that if [it is] really going to punish us, then China's willing to fill the gap".

Russia is scrambling to enlist more soldiers to replace the vast numbers killed or wounded in the nearly three-year war in Ukraine.

That demand is increasingly being met by fighters from abroad, from North Korea to Africa. Thousands of foreign nationals have joined the Russian army, "lured by the promise of hefty paychecks and fast-tracked citizenship for themselves and their kin", said Politico.

In Cuba, Russia's old Cold War ally, the repressive regime, economic crisis and nationwide blackouts make the promise of a Russian passport "a major draw". But the document "comes with a noose attached": Moscow is "trapping foreigners" on the frontline.

What's the relationship between Russia and Cuba?

The ties between the two nations are political as well as economic. After Fidel Castro's Communist revolution in Cuba ended in 1959, the Soviet Union supported Havana against a US trade embargo. In the 1970s and 1980s, tens of thousands of Cubans fought in Angola alongside Russia in a proxy war against the US and its allies.

These days, Russia is Cuba's main creditor. Last year Moscow sent tankers carrying crude oil to the island to "help ease the economic slump", said Bloomberg.

Cuba also relies on Russia for wheat, and while it has remained formally neutral on the Ukraine invasion it has "publicly kowtowed to Putin", said Politico. But while Moscow's allies like Iran and North Korea have provided Russia with artillery, "impoverished Cuba has little else to offer but honeyed words" – and manpower.

According to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the number of Russian troops killed or wounded has reached more than 800,000. While it's difficult to verify numbers, experts are "unanimous" in concluding that Russia's casualty figures are "in record numbers", said Al Jazeera: the highest since the Second World War.

So what's the appeal for Cuban fighters?

Last January, President Vladimir Putin signed a decree allowing foreigners to obtain citizenship in return for a year's service in the Russian army.

A Russian passport allows visa-free travel to 117 destinations (compared with just 61 for a Cuban one). Some Cubans hoped that enlisting would "buy them a new life", said Politico. Others say they were "hoodwinked into travelling to Russia", after responding to posts on social media for "what they thought would be low-skilled, civilian jobs".

Darío Jarrosay, a 35-year-old teacher and musician, said he responded to a Facebook appeal for construction workers. "It wasn't to enter the war; I never agreed to enter the war." He was imprisoned by Ukrainian troops while fighting with Russian forces.

Russia "takes advantage of the need and desperation" in Cuba, said Arturo McFields Yescas, the former Nicaraguan ambassador to the Organization of American States. It offers $2,000 a month (the average Cuban makes only $30), Russian citizenship, and 15 days' holiday every six months, he wrote on The Hill. "This is an attractive promise that Putin has only half-fulfilled, generating desertions and discontent."

What is happening to them in Ukraine?

Reports have emerged of Cuban recruits suffering beatings, abuse and unpaid wages in the Russian army, as well as the withholding of passports. "They have not given us documents," a Cuban mercenary said in a viral video. "They keep scamming us, they keep deceiving us, we keep dying and no one does anything."

For many, Russian citizenship also turned out to be a poisoned chalice. As "newly minted Russians", Cuban recruits – even if they only signed up for a one-year stint in the army – are "no exception" to Russia's mass mobilisation, said Politico.

"Now they're telling us that, since we're Russian citizens, we have to continue fighting until the end of the war," said one Cuban.

What is Cuba's position?

Cuba forbids its citizens to fight abroad for personal benefit – with the threat of hefty jail sentences or even capital punishment. But Havana has sent "contradictory signals" over citizens' involvement in Ukraine, said Bloomberg.

After reports emerged of hundreds of Cubans fighting in 2023, Cuba's ambassador to Russia said Havana did not object to its citizens joining the Russian army. But "hours later", Cuba's foreign ministry said Havana's "unequivocal" position was to oppose any involvement. "Cuba is not part of the war in Ukraine," it said in a statement.

The predicament of Cuban fighters was "further complicated" by an announcement that Cuba would treat them as "illegal mercenaries", said CNN. For Cubans fighting on the other side of the world, "their choices now seem to be exile in a war zone, or prosecution and a lengthy jail sentence back home".

US President-elect Donald Trump has the Panama Canal in his sights, blasting the "exorbitant prices and rates of passage" levied on US ships, and threatening to retake control of the US-built shipping route, which connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

"The fees being charged by Panama are ridiculous, especially knowing the extraordinary generosity that has been bestowed to Panama by the US," Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

Accusing Panama of "ripping off" the US, Trump added that the canal "was not given for the benefit of others, but merely as a token of co-operation with us and Panama. If the principles, both moral and legal, of this magnanimous gesture of giving are not followed, then we will demand that the Panama Canal be returned to us, in full, and without question."

Why was the Panama Canal built?

The 51-mile waterway, through the middle of Panama, connects the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, and allows ships to avoid the long, treacherous journey around the southern tip of South America.

Creating such a passageway was the "elusive goal of several empires that had colonies in the Americas", said CNN. The US took control of a strip of land and began construction in 1904, after backing a revolt that helped Panama win its independence from Colombia.

When the canal was completed in 1914, it "cemented the US's status as an engineering and technological superpower" – despite the "enormous human cost". An estimated 5,600 people died during its construction.

Now, up to 14,000 ships pass through the canal every year, transporting cargo worth about $270 billion (£214 billion). And the US is its biggest customer.

Who owns the Panama Canal?

Ownership of the canal has long been a bone of contention. After the canal opened, the US controlled it, to the exclusion of Panamanians – which, over the years, "created tensions between locals and US visitors", said The Guardian. These tensions reached critical mass in 1964 when anti-US riots broke out in the canal zone, leading to several deaths and a brief severing of diplomatic ties between the two countries.

In 1977, the US began ceding control back to Panama, under a treaty signed by President Jimmy Carter. But the move wasn't supported by all, with then-presidential candidate Ronald Reagan stating that "the people of the United States" are "the rightful owners of the Canal Zone", said CNN.

After a period of joint custody and official neutrality – "marred by a 1989 US invasion" to overthrow Manuel Noriega – Panama took full control in 1999, and has since operated the canal through the Panama Canal Authority.

Trump has now suggested that the canal is in danger of falling into the "wrong hands" – an apparent reference to China, the canal's second-biggest customer. A "Chinese company, based in Hong Kong, controls two of the five ports next to the canal", said The Guardian.

After Trump raised the issue again in a speech on Sunday, Panama's President José Raúl Mulino said that his country's sovereignty and independence were "non-negotiable", and that China had "no influence" or control over the canal. "Every square metre of the Panama Canal and its adjacent zones is part of Panama, and it will continue to be," Mulino said in a video statement.

Trump responded: "We'll see about that!"

Why is Trump interested in the Panama Canal?

The canal is "running dry", said the BBC. A lack of rain and the El Niño weather phenomenon mean that water levels in Lake Gatún, which feeds the canal, are "falling critically low". This drought has "hampered the canal's ability to move ships between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans", said Bloomberg. As part of its water-saving measures, Panama has reduced the number of ships allowed to pass through, and the weight they are allowed to carry, exacerbating existing pressures on supply chains.

Despite the restrictions, the canal's profits increased by about 9.5% in the year ending in September, said Reuters, to $3.45 billion (£2.7 billion). But authorities have imposed higher and higher fees to pass through the canal, and this "appears to form one part of Trump's issue", said CNN. His other claim that China is seeking to exert more control "is not without merit", either – China's influence in the area around the canal has grown since Panama vowed in 2017 not to maintain any official ties with Taiwan.

Trump also has form for "threatening to take or encroach on territory belonging to a friendly foreign power". He has "taunted" Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau by suggesting that Canada should be made the 51st US state, and, during his first term, he "repeatedly floated the idea of the US buying Greenland from Denmark" – a notion he also "resurrected" last weekend.

His "not-so-subtle threats" are a reminder that Trump "does not always see the sovereignty of other nations' borders as sacrosanct", said The New York Times. Instead, he displays "the instincts of a real-estate developer who suddenly has the power of the world's largest military" to back him up.

Haiti's gangs have crossed a "red line", after allegedly killing at least 184 people they suspected of witchcraft.

Gang leader Micanor Altès is said to have ordered the knife-and-machete "massacre" in the capital Port-au-Prince last week because he suspected people of practising witchcraft to make his child ill. At least 127 of the victims were elderly, according to Haiti's National Human Rights Defense Network (RNDDH), said CNN.

Altès – also known as Monel Felix, Alfred Mones, "Mikanò" and "King Micanor" – took "advice from a voodoo priest", who "accused elderly people in the area" of using witchcraft to harm his child, an RNDDH report said.

The transitional government of the violence-ridden Caribbean nation has vowed to bring the perpetrators to justice. "A red line has been crossed, and the State will mobilise all its forces to track down and annihilate these criminals," said a statement from the Haitian prime minister's office.

'100% voodoo'

Voodoo, or Vodou as it's known in Haiti, is one of the country's official religions, along with Christianity. It is widely practised in all parts of society. A "common local joke", according to the Los Angeles Times, is that Haiti is "70% Catholic, 30% Protestant, and 100% voodoo".

Vodou is thought to have its roots in "tribal religions" that were brought to Haiti, then known as the French colony of Saint-Domingue, by West Africans taken as slaves, said Al Jazeera.

Practitioners believe that all living things – including animals and plants – have spirits, and use rituals, prayers and dances to connect with them.

But Vodou has long been "attacked by other religions", and negative stereotypes about Vodou, in "racially coded language", have been used to "pathologise Haitian culture".

Just this year, Donald Trump accused Haitian immigrants in Ohio of eating pet dogs and cats, and "disinformation flooded the internet". Elon Musk, Trump's most prominent backer, shared a video, on his social-media platform X, showing a woman of apparently Haitian origin describing animal sacrifice as common Vodou practice – a claim that has been widely debunked.

Vodou has also been the focus of Haitian gang violence before. Altès is believed to have ordered the killing of 12 elderly female Vodou practitioners in 2021.

'Spiral into the abyss'

Haiti has been "convulsed by violence" since earlier this year, when gangs banded together in a coalition known as Viv Ansanm (Living Together) to "attack government institutions", including prisons and hospitals, said The New York Times.

In the spring, the gangs succeeded in "forcing out a prime minister", and they now control about 85% of the capital and vast swathes of the countryside – despite the presence of a UN-backed police force. Overall, about 5,000 people have been killed by gang violence this year, and more than 700,000 displaced, according to the UN. More than half of those displaced are children.

Attempts by gangs to gain new territory have led to "particularly bloody incidents in the past two months", said the BBC. Ordinary residents, rather than rival gang members, are increasingly being targeted.

The brutality of these latest killings reflects the country's "accelerating spiral into the abyss", William O'Neill, the UN's human-rights expert for Haiti, told the New York Times.

The "slaughter" centred on a "sprawling slum" in the Cité Soleil area – in one of the most "impenetrable gang strongholds", known as Wharf Jérémie. "Mutilated bodies were burned in the streets," said the RNDDH report, and then flung into the sea.

It is now "a ghostly place," said El País. "Its narrow streets, once full of life, remain desolate", and "the few residents who dare to go out do so with their eyes fixed on the ground". The bodies of some massacre victims remain "covered by white sheets", a testimony to "the scale of the horror."

A group of Venezuelan media organisations has launched a news show using AI-generated anchors, said CNN.

"Venezuela Retweets" is hosted by two AI avatars named "La Chama" (the girl) and "El Pana" (the dude). They share real news created by journalists who have found "reporting the news an increasingly dangerous business".

Many Western journalists may view artificial intelligence as a "looming threat to livelihoods" but these Venezuelan journalists see it "more favourably", as a "protection". The AI news anchors can "shelter their real-life journalists" from the crackdown launched by authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro since he claimed victory in July's disputed election.

"Right now, being a journalist in Venezuela is a bit like being a firefighter," Carlos Eduardo Huertas, the director of Connectas (a Colombia-based platform coordinating the initiative) told the US broadcaster. "You still need to attend the fire, even though it’s dangerous. The Girl and The Dude want to be instruments for our firefighters: we don't want to replace journalists but to protect them."

Response to repression

"Restrictions on freedom of speech in Venezuela are nothing new," said CNN.

But at least 16 journalists have been detained in the recent anti-government protests that erupted after Maduro claimed victory, according to Espacio Public, a Venezuelan organisation that measures freedom of the press. Some face charges of terrorism or incitement to hatred; others are "unsure even of what they are accused", said CNN.

Journalists are now using "Venezuela Retweets" to report the news that Maduro's regime "deems unfit to print", said The Guardian. The initiative involves about 20 Venezuelan news and fact-checking outlets and about 100 journalists, whose content is turned into daily newscasts read by the AI-generated avatars.

Intense government censorship and threats against anti-Maduro content means that most Venezuelans get their news through social media. So, "Venezuela Retweets" is specifically designed to be shared on social media: the avatars read news in clips that can be posted on Instagram or Facebook, or forwarded on WhatsApp – which makes the videos harder to track.

In the debut broadcast in August, the female presenter explained that she and her co-host hoped to spread the word about "what is really happening in Venezuela".

"But before we go on – in case you haven’t noticed – we want to let you know that we aren't real," the avatar added.

The use of AI is a response to "the persecution and the growing repression that our colleagues are suffering in Venezuela", where the uncertainty over the safety of doing their job "grows by the minute", Huertas told The Guardian. The increasingly authoritarian regime meant that "being on camera is no longer so sensible".

Even the name Venezuela Retweets – "Operación Retuit" in Spanish – is an ironic nod to the chilling euphemism coined by Maduro's regime for its harsh crackdown: "Operación Tun Tun" or Knock Knock.

AI as freedom of expression

Maduro's government has also cancelled the passports of "dozens of journalists and activists" without explanation since the vote, said the Financial Times. Rights groups have described it as an "intensifying campaign of repression", following what most nations have denounced as a stolen election.

The number of cancelled passports is likely to be far higher, the Caracas-based human-rights organisation Laboratorio de Paz told the FT, because of Venezuelans' "fear of reporting cases".

"Unlike murder or torture, which have a higher political cost, the government has found that passport cancellation is an effective way to neutralise and muffle critical voices with minimal effort," said Rafael Uzcátegui, co-director of Laboratorio de Paz.

One journalist only discovered her passport had been cancelled while she was abroad. "I asked myself, 'Now where do I come from?'," she told the paper. She is not sure whether she will try to return home.

Maduro has also "moved to stifle online dissent", said the FT, "blocking access to X" and "encouraging citizens to uninstall" WhatsApp.

"It's a policy to instigate fear," another Venezuelan journalist told the paper.

But "Venezuela Retweets" is "gaining traction", said CNN. Organisations involved in freedom of the press elsewhere in Latin America have been in touch, said Huertas. He hopes to make the content available in Russian, Chinese and other languages to reach audiences in countries allied with Maduro.

In authoritarian nations, said CNN, there is a "widespread interest for using AI as a freedom-of-expression tool".

A cloud forest in Ecuador could be recognised as an author: the latest development in a burgeoning global movement to grant legal rights to nature. The More-Than-Human-Life (Moth) Project, an initiative that works to advance non-human rights, has petitioned Ecuador's copyright office to recognise the Los Cedros forest as the co-creator of a song composed there. The move by the NYU School of Law-based group is the world's first legal attempt to "recognise an ecosystem's moral authorship of a work of art", said The Guardian.

The song, which includes sounds of bats, monkeys and leaves recorded in Los Cedros, was "written with the forest", said writer Robert Macfarlane, who organised the expedition for his upcoming book about the rights of nature movement. "We were briefly part of that ongoing being of the forest, and we couldn't have written it without the forest."

Pacha Mama: a global phenomenon

The Los Cedros reserve in the northwest Andes is home to a "vast" number of species, said BBC Future. From jaguars and bears to 400 species of bird, the biodiversity is "astonishing". Most of the reserve is in a "cloud forest", where "the air is heavy with moisture from drenching rain and permanent condensation". Despite "extensive deforestation" in the surrounding region, the forest's nearly 12,000 acres "buzz and thrum with life".

But that is largely thanks to a "powerful, and increasingly influential, global legal movement" that began in the 1990s. In 2008, lobbying by Indigenous groups led Ecuador to adopt a new constitution, which enshrined the rights of Pacha Mama (Mother Nature). It became the world's first country to state that nature had the same rights as people: one of the first "major steps" in the rights of nature movement.

The idea is rooted in a "common Indigenous belief", said Yes Magazine: that nature, from the Andean mountains to a "single soldier ant", is a living system with which humans must "harmoniously coexist". Conservation efforts hit a "major stumbling block" in 2017, when Ecuador granted the state-owned mining company concessions in most of Los Cedros. After a prolonged legal battle, in 2021 Ecuador's Constitutional Court decided to revoke the mining permits and grant Los Cedros legal personhood: a world first, transforming the rights of nature from a "theoretical constitutional text into a tangible, real-world policy".

The decision is influencing rulings all over the world. Initiatives to recognise the rights of animals, rivers and mountains have been pursued in 44 countries, including New Zealand. "It's a phenomenon that's catching fire and that's spreading very rapidly around the world," said César Rodríguez-Garavito, professor at NYU School of Law and founding director of the Moth Project.

The more-than-human world

Thanks to the "landmark" ruling, Los Cedros has remained a "sanctuary", said a Moth Project report published in June. Such rulings "can be effective tools to protect endangered ecosystems" – but they alone are "not sufficient" to protect threats to the "more-than-human world". Since his election last year, Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa has been "aggressively" courting investment in the country's mining sector, touting it as a means to create jobs in a nation "ravaged by criminal activity" and drug trafficking, said Inside Climate News.

Nevertheless, "no other nation has come close to Ecuador's growing jurisprudence on the issue". In two referendums last year, voters chose to block mining in another cloud forest, and to stop oil production in part of the Amazon rainforest. "We now have a whole generation of young people who have grown up only knowing that nature has rights," said Ecuadorian political scientist and environmental activist Natalia Greene. "The law has influenced people's understanding of nature and that is very powerful."

The 2021 ruling also "gives us confidence and a firm legal foundation" for the latest claim on moral authorship, Rodríguez-Garavito told The Guardian.

"So much art, arguably all art, is made collaboratively with the living world, but the law doesn't recognise this," said Macfarlane. Having a "more-than-human being" recognised as a moral author in a work of art would be "both incredibly exciting and drastically overdue".

When the US agreed to normalise relations with Venezuela, it was on the proviso that Nicolás Maduro would hold "free and fair elections".

The authoritarian president, who inherited power from the late revolutionary Hugo Chávez in 2013 and whose re-election in 2018 was widely condemned as fraudulent, is not recognised as legitimate by most of the world. The Trump administration responded to the sham elections with harsh sanctions on Maduro and the oil-rich yet desperately poor South American nation.

But an agreement last October, which allowed Joe Biden to lift most of the sanctions, may give Venezuelans the chance to vote a deeply unpopular incumbent out of the Miraflores Palace on 28 July.

How is the election campaign going?

After years of negotiation, the Maduro regime and the opposition signed a US-backed agreement in October to hold a fair election. But authorities disqualified hugely popular opposition leader María Corina Machado, who had won more than 90% of the vote in the primaries, on "trumped-up grounds", said The Economist. The government-allied Supreme Court upheld the ban in January, which led the US to reimpose most sanctions.

Machado has since "ceded all her political capital" to proxy Edmundo González Urrutia, a 74-year-old diplomat who "until now had moved behind the scenes of power", said El País, and now leads in the polls by 20 to 30%.

This has "prompted Maduro to launch a charm offensive", said the Financial Times, appearing on TikTok and at rallies "with a spry, avuncular persona". A leader responsible for "economic disaster" now presents himself as a "relatable everyman" from the barrio, who "dances, poses for selfies and sings for his audience".

For the first time since 2013, the Maduro government "looks scared", said Foreign Policy. "It fears democracy," wrote Christopher Sabatini, senior research fellow for Latin America at Chatham House. About two-thirds of Venezuelans say they would support any opposition candidate against Maduro. "Stealing this contest won't be as easy as it was for Maduro in 2017, 2018 or 2020."

Will they be 'free and fair' elections?

The regime's internal polling shows that in a fair vote, Maduro would be "totally doomed", a source told The Economist. But he "appears determined to cling to power – through intimidation".

At least 37 opposition activists have been arrested this year, and 10 elected mayors who supported González have been ousted. Maduro also withdrew an invitation to the EU to send a delegation of election observers. 

Only 69,000 out of at least 3.5 million eligible Venezuelans abroad were able to register to vote, due to cumbersome bureaucracy and expense, according to rights groups. The "vast majority" would have voted for the opposition, said the FT. 

Maduro controls most state institutions, including the courts, the electoral authorities, the army and much of the media – "not to mention violent paramilitary gangs", said The New York Times (NYT). There is "widespread doubt" that he would accept or even publicise an opposition victory.

That's if the election even happens. The prospect of postponing the ballot is being "openly talked about", said El País. A manufactured incident in the ongoing territory dispute with neighbouring Guyana, or a purported threat to Maduro's life, could provide the pretext.

What are the stakes?

Maduro's tenure has been marked by economic collapse, growing authoritarianism and the largest exodus of people in Latin American history. Nearly eight million Venezuelans – more than a quarter of the population – have fled since 2014. 

Over the past decade, GDP has declined by about 73%, said Reuters. Venezuela suffers the second-highest level of hunger in South America, and, for the 10th consecutive year, the highest inflation in the world. This election, the "dire straits in which many live" will be "top of people's minds".  

If Maduro claims victory, Venezuela will "remain paralysed", said El País. A second hostile Trump presidency would "complicate things even further".

That could also have a knock-on effect on the US elections. More than half of migrants crossing the Darién Gap into the US are Venezuelan, which has already become a "dominant theme" in campaigns, said the NYT.  

If González wins, experts believe millions could return home, but if Maduro clings to power, "even more will be tempted to head to the US border", said CNN.

In the US, Maduro still faces criminal charges of "human rights abuse, corruption and involvement in the narcotics trade", said the FT. If Maduro does give up power, it would almost certainly be with a deal that would shield him from prosecution.

Also at stake is the future of Venezuela's oil reserves – the largest in the world – and the strength of its alliances with China, Russia and Iran. Those authoritarian nations have "already embedded efforts to expand their economic and political presence in Venezuela and the hemisphere", said Sabatini. Russia will be "doing everything it can to scuttle international interests in a free and fair election".

Bolivia is pushing for the global decriminalisation of coca leaf – the main ingredient of cocaine – to export the plant and ease its economic crisis.

The South American nation is the world's third-largest producer of both the ancient leaf and cocaine itself. But outside of Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, the leaf is still classified as a narcotic by the United Nations and is on its list of prohibited drugs. The US and other Western nations have long "blocked Bolivia's attempts to decriminalise the leaf", blaming coca farmers – cocaleros – for "many of the world's drug problems", said The Independent.

But a "landmark" recent decision by the World Health Organization to launch a study into the non-narcotic benefits of coca has "rekindled the old hopes of Bolivian farmers". This study, which a committee will consider in October, is "the first step in a lengthy process to decriminalise the leaf worldwide". 

Coca, Morales and UN prohibition

Indigenous communities in South America – including the Quechua and Aymara in Bolivia – have long used coca leaf in spiritual rituals and medicinal concoctions. But Bolivians' legal right to chew the leaf was lost when the country (then under a dictatorship) joined the UN's 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which has since underpinned international drug policy. 

In 2011, President Evo Morales (the country's first Indigenous ruler and a former coca producer and union leader) notified the UN that Bolivia would be withdrawing from the convention. 

Morales, who had already famously thrown the US Drug Enforcement Agency out of Bolivia, argued that the ban contravened the new 2009 constitution, which promised to "protect native and ancestral coca as cultural patrimony". The leaf, the argument went, was "not a narcotic" in its natural state. In 2013, Bolivia reacceded to the convention – with an exemption for chewing coca leaves.

But Morales's push for a WHO study on coca ended in 2019, when he ran for an unconstitutional third term in office. Protests swept the nation, leading to his resignation. 

The push for exportation

It is currently legal to grow coca plants in several countries – as long as they are not used to make cocaine. Colombia was responsible for almost two-thirds of total cultivation in 2022, followed by Peru and then Bolivia, according to Statista.

Cocaleros farm the plant to sell inside Bolivia as a mild stimulant, or as "a modern-day miracle cure that relieves altitude sickness, boosts stamina and dulls hunger", said The Independent. 

More recently, the "well-heeled" have been able to enjoy a "deluge of coca-related products", including vodka, rum – and a new $2 beer from a government-authorised distillery. But the coca-infused products remained "limited to artisanal fairs" and the landlocked country's borders. 

Now, the government is "reviving its decades-long push" to make the plant legal to export, and "create a global market" for coca products like liquor, soap and toothpaste.

"Exporting is a desire that my people and I have had since I was a child," said Lizzette Torrez, leader of one of Bolivia's main coca-grower unions.

President Luis Arce urged the UN to see the WHO review as an opportunity to correct a "grave historical error".

Bolivia's economic crisis

Bolivia's state-regulated coca business already generates about $279 million a year – but global decriminalisation would bring far more much-needed revenue. 

The nation is facing "one of the worst economic and financial crises in its history", said The Diplomat this month. GDP growth is "at its lowest level in two decades", while the nation is struggling with a recession, high inflation and high rates of unemployment. 

The country's central bank is also "running out of foreign currency", especially US dollars, which much of the middle class "relies on for financial stability". Arce's socialist-led government is seeing "souring" relations with the US, while long-term shortages of natural gas and electricity "add to the turmoil". 

Getting coca products into global markets could prove "challenging", however, said GZERO. The WHO began its review of the leaf last autumn and will submit its research to the UN by October for a vote next year. 

"We'll be watching," said GZERO, a subsidiary of the risk analysis firm Eurasia Group, "to see whether we can toast their decision with this new coca brew."

What happened

José Raúl Mulino, a last-minute stand-in for barred former President Ricardo Martinelli, won Panama's presidency Sunday. Mulino, 64, was Martinelli's running mate before the former president was convicted of money laundering and sentenced to five years in prison. He has been campaigning for Mulino from inside the Nicaraguan Embassy, where he was granted asylum. Mulino's 35% put him 9 percentage points ahead of his main challengers, all of whom conceded Sunday night.

Who said what

When Martinelli "invited me to be vice president, I never imagined this," Mulino told supporters. It is "a very bizarre situation, unprecedented" not just in Panama "but any other Latin American country that I can think of," Michael Shifter at Inter-American Dialogue said to The Associated Press. It's still unclear whether Mulino will be "Martinelli's puppet" or chart his own path, he added.

What next?

With Panama's crippling drought, slowed economic growth and endemic corruption, "this next president will have to be a masochist president," Daniel Zovatto, a global fellow at the Wilson Center, said to The New York Times.

For nearly a decade, Costa Rica has generated 99% of its electricity from renewable sources of energy.

In 2015, the Central American nation "made global headlines" when it generated 100% of its electricity from renewable energy for 75 days in a row, said The Verge. "For comparison, the US generates just over 20% of its electricity from renewable sources." 

But even Costa Rica's consistent 99% is not "a perfect system", said the technology site. Climate change poses risks to country's power grid and there is "a lot of work left to do to get more solar and wind farms online". 

How did Costa Rica achieve this?

Most of Costa Rica's electricity – about 73% – is generated by hydropower, thanks to the country's heavy rainfall, tropical location and natural topography. It also boasts a high concentration of rivers, dams and volcanoes, as well as a small population of only 5.1 million and no major industry. The Reventazón River hydropower dam, inaugurated in 2016, is the largest public infrastructure project in Central America after the Panama Canal. 

But the other factor is man-made. A 1949 law, which established the state-run electricity utility Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad (ICE), said that Costa Rica should develop its natural resources for its electricity supply – and at the time, hydropower was the only source available. 

"The secret of this achievement is mainly planning," said Kenneth Lobo Méndez, a director of planning and sustainability in electricity management. In the winter, the country has low wind, but its hydropower plants get "surplus flows". In the summer, there is lower hydropower, so other sources of energy "complement the electricity supply" – mainly wind power. 

Having one state energy company, as opposed to multiple smaller private electric utilities, also helps simplify the planning process. ICE "can make a plan for the country", only sell what it needs to, without "interference" from different stakeholders, Lobo Méndez told The Verge. 

But there is a "less-than-green truth about Costa Rica's energy use", said The Guardian in 2017, when reports of the country's 271 days of "fossil-fuel free electricity" made their way around the world. The country's demand for oil is increasing, as its population (and the number of cars and its transportation sector) grows. In 2022, 50% of the total energy supply was made up of oil, according to the International Energy Agency. Its heavy reliance on dams also carries an environmental cost, affecting wildlife. 

How might climate change threaten its renewable energy sector?

When the weather pattern known as El Niño brought higher temperatures and lower rainfall last year, it gave Costa Rica an inkling of the future impact of climate change. Hydropower reservoirs suffered a 16% reduction in inflow, according to Lobo Méndez, while demand for electricity rose as people used more air-conditioning. 

"In the rainy season, our reservoirs normally recover," he said. However, they were "extremely low" in 2023, so the hot season this year will likely be "a little bit complicated". 

In the south of the country, rainfall is forecast to increase due to climate change. But "we can't get that rainfall into our system", said Marco Jiménez Chavez, an engineer for ICE. Hydroelectric plants in that region are "not ready to harness that amount of waterfall", he told The Verge.

To prepare, the country must "diversify" the system, so it won't only be reliant on water. Although hydropower will continue to generate "a great percentage" of the country's energy, new sources will be needed: solar power, wind and geothermal – the only renewable source that does not depend on climate variability.

Another option is to rely more on electricity from the regional market of Central American countries, said Lobo Méndez – but those countries are grappling with the same effects of climate change. 

"They've also got low hydropower; there's not a lot of resources in the region to share."

In the 1960s, a revolutionary literary movement burst on to the global publishing scene in what would become known as the Latin American boom. 

The international success of authors like Colombia's Gabriel García Márquez, Argentina's Julio Cortázar and Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa brought Latin American fiction to the literary forefront in the 20th century. Now, we are witnessing a second boom, according to judges of the International Booker Prize. South American authors account for "almost a quarter" of the longlist for this year's prize, said The Bookseller. 

Argentinian poet and novelist Selva Almada, Venezuelan writer Rodrigo Blanco Calderón, Brazilian short story writer Itamar Vieira Junior and Peruvian "chronicler" Gabriela Wiener have all been longlisted for the prize, which recognises the best novels and short stories with translations published in the UK or Ireland last year. The list "highlights the growing pool of talented South American writers, signaling a second 'boom' in Latin American fiction", said prize administrator Fiammetta Rocco. 

What was behind 'el boom'?

Last year, when four Irish authors appeared on the Booker Prize longlist, the eventual winner Paul Lynch was asked why Ireland produced such talented writers. The author of "Prophet Song" replied: "Can I let you into a secret? I think South America has the best writers."

The original "el boom" was born out of the political turmoil that overtook Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s. Long and bloody wars, military coups, repressive dictatorships, revolutions and the threat of nuclear war apparent in the Cuban Missile Crisis all stirred authors to depict their own nations. 

But the boom was amplified by the economic development of Latin America, mass media and the growing attention on the region, according to Randolph D. Pope, author of "The Spanish American novel from 1950 to 1975", published in 1996. European publishing houses such as Barcelona's Seix Barral and the work of translators brought Latin American boom novels to international renown.  

What might be driving a second boom?

Over the past few years, a similar wave of political upheaval and violence has swept the region, amid economic instability, poverty and the failure of the war on drugs. 

Argentina has experienced record inflation, political turmoil and the election of the anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei as president. 

Wiener's native Peru suffered a series of corruption scandals ending in a presidential impeachment and three presidents in a week, not to mention one of the world's worst Covid-19 death tolls. Her novel "Undiscovered" grapples with the search for post-colonial Peruvian identity.

In Brazil, the dramatic presidency of far-right Jair Bolsonaro was marked by rising crime, social division and the devastation of the Amazon rainforest. Last year, Bolsonaro's supporters stormed the seat of government after his successor's inauguration, echoing the Trump-supporting Capitol riots in the US. Vieira Junior's "Crooked Plow" tells the story of two sisters haunted by a history of violence.

Venezuela has suffered a mass exodus of citizens fleeing the corruption and desperate poverty of Nicolás Maduro's authoritarian regime. The longlisted "Simpatía" by Blanco Calderón offers an allegory set in Caracas during the dictatorship.

Elsewhere in the region, poverty and drug-related gang violence have engulfed Ecuador, Haiti, Honduras, Colombia, Mexico and many other areas. El Salvador now boasts one of the most repressive dictatorships in the world.

This year's longlist, chosen from 149 books published between May 2023 and April 2024, comprises works that "speak of courage and kindness, of the vital importance of community, and of the effects of standing up to tyranny", said Rocco. 

A number of the books "highlight the struggles of individuals and minorities in the face of oppression", said the prize website. "History, both personal and national, weighs heavily on characters", including "the legacy of slavery and land theft in Brazil".

What next?

The judging panel – this year chaired by broadcaster and journalist Eleanor Wachtel – will reveal a shortlist of six on 9 April, while the winner will be announced in London on 21 May. 

Both the author and translator of the winning novel each receive £25,000, while shortlisted authors and translators receive £2,500. 

Chile has reopened a long-running investigation into the death of Pablo Neruda, its Nobel prize-winning poet and former communist politician.

For more than 50 years, Neruda's death has been "a mystery", said The Times. His family and the country's Communist Party have "long argued that he was assassinated", while the "official version" is that Neruda died from prostate cancer and malnutrition aged 69 in September 1973 – just 12 days after General Augusto Pinochet "overthrew Neruda's friend, President Allende, in a coup". 

For more than a decade, experts in Canada, Denmark and Chile "have pored over the poet's remains in a bid to establish what killed him, but have been unable to provide a definitive answer", said the BBC. Last week an appeals court unanimously voted that an investigation that ended last year "has not been exhausted as there are precise procedures that can be carried out to clarify the facts".

What happened to Neruda?

Best known for his lyrical love poetry, Neruda became increasingly political through his life. In 1936, he was radicalised towards communism by the Spanish Civil War and the assassination of his close friend and famed Spanish poet, Federico García Lorca. 

By the time he died, he was known as Chile's most important intellectual, a friend of the democratically elected leader Salvador Allende and a vocal opponent of Pinochet. 

Neruda planned to go into exile in Mexico after the US-backed coup of 1973, as a strong voice of opposition – but one day before his departure, the poet (who was already suffering from prostate cancer) fell ill, was taken to hospital in Santiago and died just days later. Pinochet's regime would go on to kill about "3,200 left-wing activists and other suspected opponents", said The Times. 

Suspicions that Neruda's death "had nothing to do with his disease" have lingered in Chile since Pinochet's military dictatorship ended and the country returned to democracy in 1990, said Remezcla. 

In 2011, Neruda's driver and personal assistant Manuel Araya claimed the poet had been given a deadly injection of poison by agents of Pinochet's junta, leading the Chilean government to investigate his death.

Neruda's body was exhumed in 2013, and two years later the government admitted that it was "highly probable that a third party" was responsible for his death, said Sky News. 

In 2017, a group of scientists from McMaster University in Toronto and the University of Copenhagen concluded that Neruda had not died of cancer. Last year, they delivered their long-awaited verdict: they had found "a great quantity" of Clostridium botulinum in one of Neruda's teeth. "The botulism strain produces one of the deadliest toxins known to mankind, botulinum, and is known to have been used as a biological weapon in several countries," the scientists said.

Although they stressed there was no proof that the toxin had killed Neruda, their report led Neruda's family to call for judges to reopen the case. "We need clarity," Neruda's nephew Rodolfo Reyes told the BBC last year. A judge rejected the request, but the decision has now been overturned. 

A divisive legacy

While the cause of his death remains a mystery, Neruda's legacy has become increasingly divisive. 

"Radical feminist groups" fiercely opposed a 2018 campaign to rename Santiago's international airport after him, said MercoPress. They argued that, at the height of the MeToo movement, "it portrayed a bad image of the country abroad", because Neruda "abandoned" his seriously ill daughter and, in his memoirs, described raping a maid in Sri Lanka.

While Chile is "at war" over the relevance of Neruda, the country remains "deeply polarized" over its recent history, said The New Yorker. Last year, around the 50th anniversary of the coup that brought Pinochet to power, Chileans rejected an attempt to write a new constitution to replace the "heavily amended" one adopted by Pinochet's regime – for the second time. 

In September 2022, they rejected a "left-wing reform" in a landslide vote; in December, a right-wing alternative was "soundly rejected". The conundrum underscores the difficulty of coming to agreements in modern Chile, said the magazine.

Another constitution vote seems "highly unlikely" until at least 2025 while the leftist president President Gabriel Boric focuses on reforms, said Al Jazeera. 

But as to what really happened to Neruda all those years ago, Chileans may never agree on an answer. 

Being in Mexico City feels, I imagine, like being in Paris in the 1920s, or London in the 1960s: at the epicentre of a new world. 

Art, design, music, fashion, food… Mexico's thriving capital wasn't named Time Out's 2023 top cultural destination in the world for nothing. A high-altitude valley ringed by mountains is an appropriately dramatic setting for a megalopolis built on ancient ruins: the famed Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan. Even for this lifelong Londoner, the sheer scale of Mexico City is dizzying. I was grateful for the 17th-floor rooftop restaurant of my hotel, the Andaz Mexico City Condesa: its 360-degree views of the city, with the high rises of the bohemian La Condesa neighbourhood reflected in the infinity pool, offer a way to get your bearings. 

There's so much to do in a city of over 20 million people that it's best to narrow your focus. With its 170 museums, innumerable galleries, a world-famous annual art fair, architectural history and punchy street murals, the home of Frida Kahlo sits deservedly alongside Rome or Barcelona as an art capital of the world. If you know your avant-garde from your art deco, this is the city for you. 

What to see and do

The newly opened hotel, Andaz's second in Mexico and 25th globally, is inspired by the work of famed Mexican architect Luis Barragán, so it would be spurious not to begin with Casa Estudio Luis Barragán, the studio-turned-museum of the 20th-century titan, 10 minutes' walk away.

The nearly intact 1948 building is considered one of the most important 20th-century homes. It blends modern landscaping with light, colour and clever use of corners to bring the outdoors inside, emblematic of Barragán's style. This stylish-but-soothing Unesco World Heritage Site, with its floor-to-ceiling windows, will give you the worst kind of interior design envy – and that's to say nothing of its art collection, with works by Picasso and homegrown Diego Rivera. The warm, glowing pink walls make Farrow & Ball's Dead Salmon look like… well, dead salmon. 

Head around the corner to the tiny Kurimanzutto, a large warehouse room that's one of Mexico City's trendiest galleries and contemporary art spaces, showcasing 33 international artists.

Next, walk via the artificial 19th-century lake to another of the many artistic offerings in the bosque de Chapultepec (Chapultepec forest): the National Museum of Anthropology. It's an ode to the country's rich pre-Hispanic history, and one of the world's foremost archaeological museums. Contemporary art lovers also shouldn't miss the Museo de Arte Moderno (MAM) or nearby Rufino Tamayo Museum.

If street art is preferred, the tree-lined nextdoor neighbourhood of La Roma is home to a corner of delight: La Romita. A little plaza and its adjoining tiny cobbled streets are plastered in the type of spontaneous murals most cities would commission at great cost. The brightness of the colours, and the ambition of the murals, contrast with the shabby, pre-gentrified village vibe. 

Walking around the shaded avenues of Roma Norte and La Condesa gives design fans something to look at. There seems to be some sort of local competition for the most attractive, art nouveau-style security bars on the windows, usually ringed by bright colours beloved of Mexicans or a dramatic flourish of flowers. 

It's a fair way south from artistic La Condesa, but a must-see is the Frida Kahlo Museum. Her Casa Azul (Blue House) was home to arguably the most famous female artist of all time – and certainly, the international face of Mexico – as well as tempestuous Diego Rivera, who she married twice, or one of their many lovers. 

It's hard to describe the sensation of seeing her familiar work in the context of her cobalt home. Looking out from her bedroom window to her lush jungle of a garden, or standing by her painting table to see your own face in the mirror, surrounded by her pre-Columbian artefacts, European antiques and Mexican folk art, as well as her crutches and carefully adapted indigenous costumes that hid her broken body is like a glimpse inside her mind. 

A word of warning: you have to buy your tickets (270 Mexican pesos, or about £12.50) via the official website, at least a week in advance. If you do not have the right ticket for the correct time slot, you won't get in, even if you are a reincarnation of Kahlo herself. 

Where to stay: Andaz Mexico City Condesa

Andaz, a luxury boutique brand, is a Hindi word for "personal style". Andaz Mexico City Condesa can attest to that. 

The neon-lit mirrored staircase that goes up to the lobby is outrageously flamboyant, while the lobby itself is understated elegance in soothing earthy colours, neatly encapsulating the two faces of this hotel. 

Downstairs there are little touches like QR codes with information about the contemporary artwork and a discreetly tucked away Pasa Spa & Wellness centre, where you can have one of the most effective massages I've ever experienced. 

The relaxed Derba Matcha Café is a popular spot for young professionals for a smoothie or latte. The warm pastel velvets, plentiful plants and pastries are an influencer's paradise. The chef claims his concoctions are better than any you can get in Paris, which I put to the test.

The compact, ultra-modern rooms are also everything you'd expect from five-star boutique luxury: off-the-charts thread counts, sophisticated lighting systems and gleaming marble bathrooms. But the designers evidently had fun, with the bright pink obelisk and the vinyl records that seemed to have been chosen for their tantalising covers. 

The Tulum beach-style 17th-floor Cabuya Rooftop, a boho bar and restaurant, is accessible via a bright pink geometric-patterned lift. The walls are covered with vibrant murals by artist Edoardo Aldama: whales, turtles, octopuses and seabirds in primary colours, lit by lanterns dangling from the foliage ceiling. 

This is a destination: a place to be seen. The seafood-dominated menu, inspired by the flavours of the Baja and Yucatán regions, make it too compelling to leave. I particularly adored the sweet and sour octopus and fresh ceviche. 

The hotel goes on an unexpected tangent with its 'Wooftop' Beer Garden & Canine Club, a dog-friendly restaurant with a terrace. You can sip a beer and enjoy some nachos or a blackened fish taco, made in a street-food truck, while your pampered pooch sits on a bean bag next to you. There's also a doggy exercise area and – you'd have to see it to believe it – a special dog menu serving "vegan barkcini", non-alcoholic "beer for dogs" and the "woof slider" of ground beef, rice and beet. 

It's the kind of place a certain type of influencer would come to celebrate their dog's birthday – out-of-place kitsch, but very fun.

While this hotel might not be right for honeymooners or families with young kids, it's ideal for trendy professionals, fashion designers or bohemian art lovers.

How to get there

There are direct flights from London to Benito Juárez International Airport, with British Airways or Virgin Atlantic, but at nearly 12 hours it's a big ask. Stop off en route on Mexico's east coast – direct flights from all over the UK will get you to Cancún in just over 10 hours – and fend off the jet lag on the beach. 

Then it's just a 2.5-hour flight west to Mexico City, and a short cab or subway ride into the city. 

Harriet Marsden was a guest of Andaz Mexico City Condesa, and luxury tour operator, Untold Story Travel, which offers bespoke travel experiences to Mexico and destinations around the world. 

Sign up to The Week's Travel newsletter for destination guides and the latest trends.

To right-wingers, it's a beacon of light for the rest of the continent; for liberals, it's a warning signal to all of Latin America. Either way there's no denying the significance of what has been happening in El Salvador, said Ishaan Tharoor in The Washington Post. 

Under President Nayib Bukele, who has just won re-election in a landslide, the country has shifted from a functional multiparty democracy "to a de facto one-party state".

In his first term, he packed the constitutional court with loyalists, thereby managing to sidestep a ban on presidents seeking consecutive terms. And, last week, he duly triumphed again at the polls, winning 87% of the vote for himself as president, while his Nuevas Ideas party won control of the national legislature. His astonishing popularity hinges on one thing only: his sweeping crackdown on El Salvador's gangs and cartels. Within the space of a few years, El Salvador's once "world-leading homicide rates" have been dramatically reduced, and Salvadorans have enjoyed a sense of safety they could previously only dream of.

A self-styled 'philosopher king'

With his "sunglasses and leather jacket", Bukele once jokingly styled himself on X/Twitter as "the world's coolest dictator", said Carmen Quintela in El Diario (Madrid), though now he calls himself "philosopher king". Born into a wealthy family with Palestinian roots, he was still at school when El Salvador's 13-year civil war ended in 1992. As a youth, he hardly had the makings of a right-wing dictator: he dropped out of law school, spent much of his 20s managing nightclubs, and joined FMLN, a left-wing rebel group turned political party. 

At 34, he was elected mayor of San Salvador on an FMLN ticket, vowing to reclaim dangerous areas from gangs, but was expelled from the party and set up his own. And it was on an anti-crime agenda that he was first elected president in 2019. Within a year, he'd embarked on his "Territorial Control Plan" to rid El Salvador of the "gang violence and extortion" that was plaguing the country.

His success has been extraordinary, said Diario El Salvador. Before Bukele came to power, El Salvador was one of the world's most dangerous countries: the streets of the capital, San Salvador, "were filled with corpses". Yet Bukele's "courage and determination" has changed all that. In 2018, the homicide rate was 51 per 100,000 people: last year it was just 2.4 per 100,000 (about half the level of the US); shops no longer have to pay protection money; people can leave their homes without fear.

Bukele's inhumane crackdown

None of that has been achieved by some miracle of good governance, said Catherine Ellis on Al Jazeera (Doha): it's the result of a truly draconian clampdown on civil liberties. Bukele has let police arrest anyone they suspect of gang links. Some 75,000 people have been jailed since he imposed a state of emergency in 2022, said Juan Diego Quesada in El País (Madrid). 

Those arrested, seldom given a proper trial, are housed in El Salvador's hideous 40,000-capacity "mega jail". Their heads are shaved, their hands and feet shackled, and they never see daylight. Bukele's crackdown might be popular, but it's astonishingly inhumane.

Nor have Bukele's policies – including his eccentric decision in 2021 to make bitcoin legal tender – done anything to improve the economy, said Julia Gavarrete in El Faro (San Salvador). El Salvador is still one of Central America's weakest economies; much of its 6.5 million-strong population can't afford basic staples. But that hasn't stopped other leaders in the region looking to El Salvador as the nation to copy, said Will Freeman and Lucas Perelló in The New York Times. 

But in truth, a Bukele-style crackdown is unlikely to work elsewhere. Unlike the big cartels in other Latin American countries, Salvadoran gangs – poorly financed and less well armed – have never been big players in the drugs trade: their focus has been extortion. When Bukele arrested their foot soldiers, they collapsed. That won't happen in places such as Mexico, Colombia and Brazil. Latin American leaders might envy Bukele for his popularity, but they face a chaotic battle with their own gangs if they try to take them on – and will do "lasting damage to democracy" in the process.

Many people, when asked what country is "the therapy capital of the world", might reasonably guess the United States, thanks to navel-gazing La La Land, or neurotic New York. 

But the answer is Argentina. According to 2016 data from the World Health Organization, it had 222 psychologists per 100,000 people; the US had 30. But the high supply of psychologists, especially in the cosmopolitan capital of Buenos Aires, can barely cope with demand, said Drew Ambrose, presenter of "Mindset", Al Jazeera's video series on mental health. 

"We are very peculiar in Argentina," one Buenos Aires resident told Ambrose. "Everybody goes to the psychologist."

'A very important battle was won'

Porteños (residents of Buenos Aires) "don't have the same stigma about seeking mental health treatment as Americans", said CNN. Mental health is seen as just another aspect of wellness, along with fitness and nutrition. "In Argentina a very important battle was won, which was giving space to emotional health," said Gabriel Rolón, a psychoanalyst and author. 

And what a battle it has been. Over the past 100 years, Argentina went from being seen as a paragon of stability and success to brutal military dictatorship, experiencing violent coups and, at the turn of the century, economic collapse. Although reported rates of anxiety, depression and psychological illnesses have risen sharply all over the world since the Covid-19 pandemic, Buenos Aires endured the world's longest continuous lockdown – of 234 days, in 2020. 

In the past two years alone, the country has endured intense political instability and an inflation rate that hit 211% at the end of 2023, largely thanks to the shock election of far-right President Javier Milei last autumn. 

The self-described anarcho-capitalist, chainsaw-wielding economist beat both establishment coalitions with the promise of an economic panacea. Ironically, his election provoked the sharp devaluation of the peso. At the time of writing, four in 10 Argentinians live in poverty, a rate that has been rising.

'The paradox of Buenos Aires'

Some Argentinians are actually going hungry to pay for therapy, reported Phoebe Hennell in The Times last summer, seeing it as better value nourishment than food amid such high inflation. 

"We have to focus on the short term," said Renata Anelli, 21, who skips two meals a week to make up the cost of her sessions, "so we spend our money on overpriced psychoanalysis that will get us through the week."

It is the "paradox of Buenos Aires", Gabriela Goldstein, president of the Psychoanalytical Association of Argentina, told the paper. "In the middle of a brutal economic crisis, [both] during and after the pandemic, consultations are on the rise."

Buenos Aires is also the only city where psychoanalysis, popularised by Sigmund Freud, remains the most popular form of therapy. The practice, which explores the unconscious mind via dreams and childhood memories, took the world by storm in the 1960s, but is now "viewed as somewhat obsolete" elsewhere in the world, said CNN. But more holistic, physical forms of group therapy are growing in popularity in the city.

In 2004, maestros of the nation's two passions, psychology and tango, joined hands in Buenos Aires to create what became known as "psicotango" – part group dance class, part meditation. "Tango remains from its origins as a hug, an embrace, to rescue us from pain and loneliness, central pathologies of consumer society," said the founders. 

Milei's 'shock therapy'

Even the Pope, born in Buenos Aires, is "not immune to the national pastime", said Hennell. When Pope Francis was still known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, he visited a psychoanalyst for six months at the age of 42 – a process that he said left him feeling spiritually "free".

Therapy itself isn't free – but to put it in context, the price of one session last August was 5,600 pesos (roughly £15.86). It had been 3,300 pesos in January. The question is, how quickly will that price rise again?

In December, the new president unveiled what he called a "shock therapy" economic plan – which, Reuters explains, "will likely hurt Argentines" rather than heal them. The high rate of inflation isn't coming down any time soon. 

This week, Milei faces the first major challenge to his radical "shock therapy" legislation, with the unions preparing for a general strike and protest on Wednesday. Argentinians' need for therapy is set to continue. 

Charles Darwin once described Isabela as "the most desolate of the Galápagos Islands".

Now, more than 100,000 tourists visit the white sandy beaches of this "almost extraterrestrial outpost" every year, said The Washington Post, with the crowds attracted by "the giant tortoises and marine iguanas found nowhere else in the world". 

But the "beloved Unesco World Heritage site" is being pulled into "the booming drug trade consuming much of Latin America". Last year the US navy seized nearly 25 tons of cocaine around the Galápagos Islands, reported Samantha Schmidt and Arturo Torres for the paper: a 150% surge from the year before, and up from just one ton in 2019. 

The idyllic islands have become known as the "petrol station of the Pacific", said The Daily Telegraph, where traffickers stop to refuel. Smugglers are increasingly turning to long ocean routes to smuggle drugs out of the continent via Ecuador, and meet growing global demand for cocaine. 

Ecuador was once a peaceful "symbol of stability", but violence and drug activity there has skyrocketed in recent years, said Graham Keeley for the i news site, as gangs vie for control of trafficking networks. It plunged into further chaos this month when gangs declared violent war on the government, in revenge for new President Daniel Noboa declaring a state of emergency following the escape of the country's most notorious drug trafficker. "We are in a state of war," Noboa has said.

Ecuador, the new cocaine capital

Ecuador "was once spared the worst of the narco-warfare and insurgencies that have plagued Latin America", wrote Niko Vorobyov in The Spectator. "No longer."

"Strategically positioned next to Colombia and Peru", the world's most prolific cocaine producers, Ecuador has long acted as a transit point for traffickers moving the drug from South to Central America, said Vorobyov, freelance journalist and author of "Dopeworld". 

But the 2016 peace process in Colombia, and disbanding of the Farc rebels, "left a cartel-shaped hole in the drug trade that was swiftly filled by Mexican narco-traffickers", he wrote. 

Amid tightening security in Colombia, these gangs looked for easier ways to ship drugs to Europe or Australia, said Keeley for the i news site, where profits are higher than in the US. 

They subcontracted Ecuadorian gangs for shipping, said Vorobyov. By 2019, "as much as a third" of Colombian cocaine was leaving through Ecuador's port city and economic capital, Guayaquil. 

Some, bound for Australia, Europe and North America, "was hidden among cargos of Ecuador's most prized export: bananas", said Vorobyov. "If you used cocaine this week," he concluded, "there's a good chance it came through Ecuador".

Galápagos Islands, the 'petrol station of the Pacific'

In an attempt to evade Ecuador's crackdown, and "stricter US patrols in the Caribbean and North Atlantic", drug gangs have "turned to the Galápagos route" through the Pacific, said The Telegraph. 

Boats are "harder to detect and trace in open seas", said the paper. But this 600-mile detour means the vessels must refuel, and "the secluded labyrinth of waterways through the 127 islands" offers "the perfect cover".

Many fishermen around the islands are "taking advantage of government-subsidised fuel" to engage in "the lucrative business of gas smuggling", Samantha Schmidt and Arturo Torres reported for The Washington Post. 

Navy officials told the paper that fishermen who save their discounted fuel for smugglers can earn up to $30,000 per job. "Lots of people have become millionaires off of this," one anonymous fisherman told the paper. 

The vast waters around the islands are extremely difficult for authorities to monitor. Ecuador is responsible for nearly 500,000 square miles of ocean, about five times the size of its land mass. US presence on the coastline is "minimal", added Schmidt and Torres, since former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa "ousted" US forces from a military base near the port city of Manta. 

Correa's decision "was like an invitation to the drugs gangs", Carlos Malamud of the Madrid-based think-tank Real Elcano Institute told the i news site. 

The cash-based local economy on the islands also creates "ideal conditions for money laundering", said Schmidt and Torres, while airports and docks "have little to no security". Many inhabitants are "afraid to report" illicit activity, as everyone knows each other in the small population. Drug trafficking on the archipelago is an "open secret". 

"Little by little, the drugs are taking over the island," one inhabitant of Isabela told the paper. "And there is no help."

A new and highly regarded film that has just arrived on Netflix tells the incredible story of the survivors of a plane crash in the Andes mountains. 

But rather than mere fiction, "Society of the Snow" is a faithful dramatisation of a real-life disaster that occurred in 1972.

Similar stories of survival such as "Lord of the Flies", "Lost" and "Yellowjackets" have delved into "the dark side of human nature", said Time, often focusing on how the survivors eventually turn on one another. But "Society of the Snow" looks at how a Uruguayan rugby team "managed to survive 72 days in one of the world's harshest environments by doing the opposite".

While the movie is "plenty harrowing", the magazine said, it is also "a moving account of how those who lived" somehow "banded together to overcome nearly two and a half months of starvation".

What is the true story?

The disaster that is the subject of "Society of the Snow" has become known as "The Miracle of the Andes", said The Independent, and "is one of the greatest survival stories of the last century".

On 13 October 1972, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which took off from Montevideo bound for Santiago, Chile, lost its wings when it hit a mountain ridge in the Andes and crash-landed on a glacier.

The passengers were an amateur rugby team – mostly in their late teens and early twenties – on their way to play an exhibition match in Chile, travelling with their friends, family and supporters. 

Of the 45 people aboard, 12 were killed immediately in the crash. That, though, "was only to be the start of a horrifying, two-and-half month ordeal, trapped 12,000ft above sea level without any food or water supplies", The Sun said.

At first, the survivors attempted to eat shoes and clothes in order to fill their stomachs. As the weeks passed and starvation set in, "the survivors were ultimately forced to resort to cannibalism in order to stay alive", Time said.

Somehow 16 of the 45 people on board survived the harrowing ordeal.

What does the movie focus on?

It would be easy to concentrate on the grim aspects of the crash and its aftermath, but Spanish director J.A. Bayona "focuses on the humanity", said NPR.

Bayona became interested in the story of the plane crash around the time he began making "The Impossible", his 2012 Oscar-nominated film about the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami that devastated territories around the Indian Ocean.

Before he began filming "Society of the Snow", producers spent more than 100 hours interviewing the 15 remaining survivors, now all over 70, as well as the loved ones of those who died.

While the story has been dramatised before – most notably in director Frank Marshall's 1993 film "Alive" starring Ethan Hawke – this is the first time the survivors and families of the dead have allowed their real names to be used.

Bayona issued an open call in Uruguay and Argentina to find his cast, yielding a crop of young, relatively unknown actors who were encouraged to improvise dialogue to add authenticity. 

The group then rehearsed together for months to build their rapport, and once filming began gradually lost weight, supervised by nutritionists and doctors. 

"The actors were brave and committed wholeheartedly to their performances, experiencing a small measure of the cold and hunger the survivors would have endured," Bayona told The Independent.

The director has also drawn praise for his "sensitive handling" of the cannibalism in the story, exploring the "complexity of the situation and the different ways the men dealt with it", the paper said.

"We preferred to evoke emotions rather than show explicit images," Bayona said.

How has it been received?

Guy Lodge of Variety called "Society of the Snow" a "brawnily effective tear-jerker". He said the film "grips with alternating waves of dread, horror and heart-swelling relief, even as it can hardly surprise".

Deadline's Pete Hammond wrote that Bayona has made a "story of how humanity comes together for each other in the worst of circumstances, how faith can see us through, and the sheer will to live involved in just simply pulling off a miracle by never giving up".

"Society of the Snow" has been shortlisted for Best International Feature Film at the Oscars, and longlisted for Bafta's Best Film not in the English Language. It has also already won prizes at the European Film Awards, and was nominated in numerous categories at Spain's Goya Awards.

Ecuador's gangs have unleashed violent war on the government, after the president declared a state of emergency following the escape of the country's most notorious drug trafficker from jail. 

Hooded gunmen carrying grenades and dynamite burst into a public TV station yesterday in Guayaquil, the country's economic capital, and forced employees to the floor during a live news broadcast. A woman was heard pleading, "Don't shoot, please don't shoot!",  before the signal cut out after 15 minutes. 

A cameraman was reportedly shot in the leg, and another's arm was broken, during the attack, following which 13 gunmen were arrested.

The attack is part of a wave of violence that broke out after new President Daniel Noboa declared a two-month state of emergency, following the disappearance of gang lord José Adolfo Macías Villamar from prison. 

At least 10 people have been killed in what "appears to represent a declaration of war on the country’s fragile democratic institutions", said The Guardian's First Edition newsletter. Thousands of authorities are still hunting the feared gang boss, while explosions have been reported all over the nation.

Noboa, Ecuador's youngest-ever elected leader, said the country is in a state of "internal armed conflict", which as Sky Newsnoted, allows authorities to "suspend citizens' rights and send the military into prisons".

"Facing an unprecedented test, the president must rise to the challenge or step aside," wrote the editorial board of one of Ecuador’s biggest newspapers, La Hora.

What happened?

Adolfo Macías, better known as Fito, disappeared on Sunday from low-security La Regional prison in the coastal city of Guayaquil. The leader of Los Choneros, one of the country's most powerful gangs, with links to Mexico's feared Sinaloa cartel, he was serving a prison sentence of 34 years, and previously escaped for a few weeks in 2013. 

The 44-year-old was scheduled to be transferred to a maximum security prison, but was discovered missing from his cell. Prosecutors have filed charges against two guards as part of their investigation, Sky News reported.

Noboa declared a two-month state of emergency and nationwide curfew, a measure that was widely used by his "beleaguered predecessor" to confront the country's rising violence, said CNN – "to little success", noted Al Jazeera. 

The response from the gangs was "unambiguous", Dan Collyns, a Peru-based journalist, told The Guardian. Riots broke out in at least six prisons, with inmates seizing dozens of guards as hostages. 

One guard was videoed reading out a message at gunpoint. "You declared war, you will get war," he said. "You declared a state of emergency. We declare police, civilians and soldiers to be the spoils of war." 

The gangs are now "collectively fighting the Ecuadorian state", Collyns said. 

One of the gunmen at the TV station reportedly said the break-in was the result of people "messing with the mafia". 

"Everything has collapsed," the head of news for TC Televisión told The Associated Press. "All I know is that it's time to leave this country, and go very far away."

What is the background?

Ecuador is "living a real nightmare", former president Rafael Correa said in a video shared on X. The situation was "the result of the systematic destruction of the rule of law, of the errors of hatred accumulated over the last seven years", he claimed. 

Violence in the "once relatively peaceful" Andean nation has skyrocketed, said the Financial Times, as rival gangs battle for control of the drug trafficking networks. Since 2018, Ecuador's murder rate has increased eightfold, and is among the highest in the region.  

The violence "reached new highs" with the assassination of the presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio last year, said Sky News. Villavicencio, a vocal critic of the gangs, was killed in Quito in the run-up to the August election, days after he said he had received death threats from Fito and Los Choneros.

Noboa won the run-off vote with promises to stem the violence. The former businessman "vowed to retake control of the prisons, which have become both gang headquarters and recruiting centres", said The New York Times. 

Last month he pledged to imitate El Salvador's president, Nayib Bukele, and construct two maximum security prisons inspired by the country's notorious CECOT – the biggest jail in the Americas. Since 2022, Bukele has held the Central American nation in an extended state of emergency and thrown large swathes of the male population into prison. The controversial crackdown has sent his approval rating soaring.

But Ecuador's government has blamed the recent surge in prison violence on the president's plan to imitate him, said Al Jazeera.

Olly Mann and The Week debate the big changes that didn’t necessarily make headlines this year but began slowly affecting our lives. With Harriet Marsden, Holden Frith and Jamie Timson.

You can subscribe to The Week Unwrapped wherever you get your podcasts:

• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts
• Global Player

In this end-of-year episode, we discuss:

Venezuela

Venezuela is coming in from the cold, with the US agreeing to ease some sanctions on the country's beleaguered oil industry. In exchange, President Nicolás Maduro has promised to hold free elections for the first time since he came to power in 2013 – a tenure marked by economic devastation, poverty and the mass exodus of his citizens. But why is the US courting an anti-western dictator, and ally of Russia and Iran? How important is Venezuela to the oil trade? And will Maduro comply with the deal, or will he start Latin America's first continental war for 75 years?

Gold price

The price of gold has been a puzzle for economists during 2023. They had expected it to stay fairly flat, as inflation began to decline, but in fact it has risen by more than 13%. This month it reached an all time high of $2,135 per ounce. Various theories have been put forward to explain the rise, from increasing demand for jewellery in China and India to central banks seeking to boost their gold reserves. What does it mean for the world's economic outlook?

Pandemic art

The first pieces of culture about Covid (either based on, or written during the lockdowns in 2020/21) have appeared this year, and unlike other historical traumas  –  the first and second world wars, or September 11th  –  the pandemic’s impact on art has so far been fairly muted. Is it too difficult to accurately portray what it was like? Are we still too close to it? And why have horror films done so well at the box office?

Thanks to the reckless bravado of Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro, Latin America is at risk of "major continental war for the first time in 75 years", said Alexandra Sharp in Foreign Policy (Washington). 

Caracas has long staked a claim to Essequibo, a mineral-rich swathe of the Amazon that accounts for two-thirds of neighbouring Guyana – the former British Guiana. That claim acquired added urgency in 2015, when US energy giant ExxonMobil discovered oil reserves off Essequibo's coast – some 11 billion barrels' worth to date. 

And last week, in a referendum staged in order to rubber-stamp Venezuela's claim to Essequibo, Maduro claimed he now had the mandate to put that claim into effect. But the vote was held in defiance of a ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, and has raised fears across Latin America that Venezuela could be about to use military force to grab another country's land.

'A vile plunder'

Venezuela's claim to this region dates back centuries, said Luis Alberto Perozo Padua in El Universal (Caracas). Essequibo was administered by Dutch colonisers for 200 years or so until, in 1814, those same colonisers sold a swathe of territory along South America's northern coast to the British. Britain then proceeded to launch a series of incursions into the territory of the recently independent Venezuela – a "vile plunder" that robbed us of vast tracts of resource- and oil-rich land.

Naturally, Caracas tried to resist; but in 1899 an international tribunal in Paris ruled that Essequibo was a part of British Guiana. And ever since Guyana won independence in 1966, the dispute has rumbled on and remains the subject of proceedings in the ICJ. As pretty much all Venezuelans view Essequibo as part of their nation's territory, Maduro had assumed his referendum would boost his waning popularity ahead of next year's elections, said Rafael García Marvez in El Nacional (Caracas). But a vast majority of voters stayed at home, making a mockery of his claim of 95% support. Desperate and disillusioned, Venezuelans had no appetite to hand Maduro a meaningful victory.

'Just sound and fury'

Be that as it may, the vote has still powerfully unsettled us in Guyana, said Frederick Kissoon in The Guyana Chronicle (Georgetown). Maduro is a ruthless dictator, and has already ordered state firms to exploit oil deposits in Essequibo. Will his next step be to deploy the army? Actually, that's not at all likely, said James Bosworth in World Politics Review (Tampa). Venezuela's claim to Essequibo is disputed by virtually every country in the world – even by Maduro's allies in communist Cuba.

So any military intervention would lead to a fresh round of international sanctions on Caracas that the regime could ill afford, to say the least. Besides, Venezuela's army can barely maintain control of its own territory, let alone seize control of a dense area of jungle almost the size of Florida. Unless Maduro has actually lost his marbles, this is all "just sound and fury".

Money matters grabbed the headlines in the UK this week, as Chancellor Jeremy Hunt delivered his highly anticipated Autumn Statement. 

The latest update on the government's spending plans followed a welcome drop in inflation, down to 4.6% in October, that left the Treasury with more fiscal "headroom" than anticipated. But Hunt still surprised many with some bigger-than-expected tax cuts.

Critics warned that the cuts could harm efforts to keep inflation down. And the government's decision to freeze many tax thresholds has pulled more earners into the higher bracket – known as "fiscal drag".

Over in the US, commentators warned that Joe Biden might count the cost of devoting his time to Thanksgiving events including the annual turkey pardoning ceremony. Some commentators argued that the president should be focusing on his re-election campaign, as Donald Trump steams ahead with his bid to secure the Republican presidential nomination and a second term in the White House.

In shock election news from Argentina, Trump admirer and far-right libertarian Javier Milei was voted in as president of South America's second-largest economy. 

The Netherlands was also rocked by a far-right victory, with Geert Wilders's Party for Freedom winning the most seats in the country's parliament after running on an anti-Islam and anti-EU platform. The result has "shaken Dutch politics", said the BBC, "and it will send a shock across Europe too".

To find out how closely you’ve been paying attention to the latest developments in the news and other global events, put your knowledge to the test with our Quiz of The Week.

1. Joe Biden hosted an early screening of which upcoming film at a Thanksgiving event for US service members and their families?

• 'Wonka'
• 'Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom'
• 'Migration'
• 'Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget'

2. A bicorne hat worn by Napoleon Bonaparte sold for how much at a Paris auction this week?

• €600,000
• €950,000
• €1.9 million
• €2.1 million

2. Elon Musk's X is suing which organisation for defamation over reports of ads on the platform appearing next to antisemitic posts? 

• Media Matters
• Correct the Record
• Snopes 
• Fox News 

4. Cybercriminals demanded £600,000 for data stolen during a ransomware attack on which UK institution?

• British Library 
• The British Museum 
• Natural History Museum 
• Imperial War Museum London 

5. Novak Djokovic's victory in last weekend's ATP Tour Finals finale brings the Serbian tennis champ's total tally of title wins in the season-ending championship to how much?

• Five
• Six
• Seven
• Eight

6. Which pop duo are embroiled in a legal battle after one obtained a restraining order against the other? 

• Hall & Oates
• Simon & Garfunkel
• The Righteous Brothers
• The White Stripes

7. Who is now CEO of OpenAI following Sam Altman's sacking from the role last week?

• Greg Brockman
• Mira Murati
• Ilya Sutskever
• Sam Altman

8. Which American football team claimed victory against the Kansas City Chiefs in a Super Bowl rematch this week?  

• Detroit Lions 
• San Francisco 49ers
• Philadelphia Eagles
• Baltimore Ravens

9. The UK's new home secretary was accused of referring to which constituency as a "shithole"?

• Stockton North
• Birmingham Hodge Hill
• Blackpool South
• Bishop Auckland

10. A bottle of Macallan 1926 whisky set a new auction record by selling for how much?

• £210,000
• £620,000
• £1.2 million
• £2.1 million

1. Wonka
The president and First Lady Jill Biden kicked off the Thanksgiving holiday week with a visit to naval installations in Virginia, where they shared a "friendsgiving" meal with service members and their relatives after welcoming youngsters to a screening of the upcoming film about Roald Dahl's fictional chocolatier Willy Wonka. Introducing the movie, the president told the audience that "I like kids more than adults", and added: "I wish I could stay and watch 'Wonka' with you."

2. €1.9 million
The faded black felt hat, which was valued between €600,000 and €800,000, was the centrepiece of an auction of the 19th century French emperor's belongings. The price surpassed the €1.8 million paid for another of his hats in 2014.

3. Media Matters
In a lawsuit filed on Monday, Musk accused the media watchdog of defaming X, formerly known as Twitter, after companies including Apple, IBM and Disney pulled adverts from the platform following reports of antisemitic content. Media Matters, which stood by its reporting, is accused of manipulating algorithms "to bypass safeguards and create images of X's largest advertisers' paid posts adjacent to racist, incendiary content".

4. British Library
Ransomware group Rhysida is demanding 20 bitcoin (about £600,000) for internal data stolen from the world's biggest library during a cyberattack. Find out more with The Week Unwrapped podcast.

5. Seven
Djokovic beat home favourite Jannik Sinner 6-3, 6-3 in the final in the Italian city of Turin on Sunday. The 36-year-old Serb finishes the year as world No.1 for a record eighth time.

6. Hall & Oates
Daryl Hall is suing his musical partner John Oates and has obtained a restraining order against him as part of the sealed lawsuit. The case between the US duo, who are the most commercially successful duo in the history of pop music, reportedly involves "contract/debt".

7. Sam Altman
The OpenAI co-founder was ousted as CEO of the Silicon Valley giant last Friday and was hired by Microsoft the following Monday to lead a new artificial intelligence unit. But after OpenAI employees rallied behind Altman and threatened to resign, the company's board reinstated him to his original post. 

8. Philadelphia Eagles
After being defeated by the Chiefs at the Super Bowl LVII in February, the Eagles got their revenge on Monday with a 21-17 win.The game marked the ninth time in NFL history that two teams from the previous Super Bowl have faced off the following season.

9. Stockton North
Following a question in the Commons about why child poverty rates in the County Durham constituency were so high, James Cleverly was allegedly heard saying: "Because it's a shithole." Cleverly subsequently claimed he had actually said Labour's Alex Cunningham, who asked the question, was a "shit MP".

10. £2.1 million
The rare bottle was expected to sell for a maximum of £1.2 million at the sale at Sotheby's in London on Saturday, but instead smashed the auction record for any bottle of spirit or wine. The previous record was set in 2019, when another of the total 40 bottles of the oldest-ever Macallan vintage sold for £1.5 million at Sotheby's. 

A self-avowed "tantric sex coach" and chainsaw-wielding far-right libertarian might seem an unlikely attraction for a country grappling with serious financial woes.

But Javier Milei, a former economics professor and daytime TV star, has been elected president of Argentina, "catapulting South America's second-largest economy into an unpredictable and potentially turbulent future", said The Guardian. The "volatile" Milei, 53, secured 56% of the vote, with 44% going to his opponent Sergio Massa, the economy minister in Argentina's centre-left Peronist government. It was a result that shocked the political establishment. 

Argentina's "sharp swing to the right" comes amid an economic crisis, said Politico, with inflation "soaring" to 143% and two-fifths of the nation "living in poverty". Milei, a "self-described anarcho-capitalist" and admirer of Donald Trump, campaigned on "radical changes" like swapping the Argentine peso for the US dollar, shutting the central bank and "gutting public spending".

"Today the reconstruction of Argentina begins," Milei told supporters at his campaign headquarters in Buenos Aires, calling his victory a "miracle".

'An academic, not a politician'

Milei's popularity with voters is partially down to his use of social media, said the Buenos Aires Times. There are "hundreds of accounts online that support him", including one – "Juego de Milei" (Milei's game) – that includes a link to a mobile game through which users can play as Milei and "fight against leftists, the political caste and the central bank". 

Milei's online campaign used a form of "horizontal communication", according to the journalist and data analyst Diego Corbalán, in which the candidate himself is not in control of the flow of information, but many social media accounts endorsed by him disseminate his message. The message is conveyed through what Corbalán calls "a natural movement of the young people" on social media that are sharing content, as opposed to the more traditional "vertical" campaigns that are based on information coming from the candidates. 

Indeed, one key factor has been "the devoted following he has whipped up among young, largely male voters", said Al Jazeera: some are "devoted libertarians"; others "merely curious" and "disaffected" with the political establishment. Milei has "consistently led polls of voters between the ages of 16 and 35", unlike other right-wing populists like Trump and Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro, who "struggled to win over younger generations". 

"I think what moved me the most was the simple way he explained concepts," David Urbani, a 20-year-old economics student from Mar del Plata, told Al Jazeera. "The guy is an academic, not a politician."

Massa's 'electoral millstone'

Despite the "fervent" support for Milei, his success owes more to the failures of his opponent, said Sam Meadows in The Spectator. Sergio Massa took the lead in October's first poll, with Milei coming second, but the finance minister's "inability" to tackle the nation's economic woes over the past year "ultimately proved an electoral millstone he was unable to shrug off". Inflation is the fourth highest in the world, and the country owes "gargantuan" debts to the IMF. 

In order to "halt the slide", the majority of voters have placed their trust in Milei's "radical ideas", said the South America-based Meadows. He intends to do this by "smashing up years of economic orthodoxy", and even suggesting liberalising markets for guns and human organs. However, "perhaps in a bid to appeal to moderates", Milei "had rowed back on his commitment to these ideas in recent weeks". 

Amid these uncertainties, for many Argentinians the "overwhelming reaction" to his success was "fear at what their country could become". 

After spending most of a century "in thrall to one self-destructive economic ideology", said the Financial Times' newsletter "Trade Secrets", Argentina has "decided to have a shot at another" after Milei takes office in December. "How a country manages to hop straight from Peronism to reactionary anarcho-capitalism without ever having a go at boring old liberal social democracy is a wonder to behold."

A prominent activist and Mexico's first openly non-binary judge has been found dead in a suspected murder that has led to "an outpouring of grief" from the country's LGBTQ+ community.

Jesús Ociel Baena, 39, was found at home on Monday "slain with a razor blade", reported Reuters. A person identified by local media as Baena's partner Dorian Nieves Herrera was also found dead. Candlelit vigils and demonstrations have taken place in several cities, where "many shed tears and speakers lashed out at the insults and acts of violence that remain a common occurrence for many gay, transgender and non-binary Mexicans".

The authorities said that Herrera, 37, appeared to have killed Baena before taking his own life. But LGBTQ+ leaders in the country are "questioning whether such a swift assessment fits what they say is a pattern by authorities of effectively dismissing grisly killings involving LGBTQ people as crimes of passion", said The New York Times (NYT).

Baena's death has provoked calls to "determine if the magistrate had been targeted for promoting the rights of nonbinary people".

Who was Jesús Ociel Baena?

Baena, a "pioneering nonbinary figure", made history in 2022 when they became the first openly non-binary member of the Mexican judiciary, said the NYT. Their appointment "was viewed as a breakthrough moment for LGBTQ individuals" in the country, said Al Jazeera.

This year, Baena became one of the first Mexicans to receive a non-binary passport, and the first in their home state of Coahuila to be described as non-binary on their birth certificate. "Deal with it!" they posted on Twitter in May. 

Just weeks before their death, they succeeded in being officially referred to as the gender-neutral "le magistrade" for magistrate, rather than "el magistrado" or "la magistrada".

Baena would "regularly publish photos and videos of themselves in skirts, heels and toting a rainbow fan in court offices", said The Guardian. They said they had regularly received death threats.

What happened?

The bodies of Baena and their partner were found by their cleaner, according to the Aguascalientes state prosecutor, Jesus Figueroa. Baena had suffered 20 cuts from a shaving razor, including one to the neck that was likely to have been fatal. Later, the prosecutor's office said Herrera had "tested positive for methamphetamines", according to The Associated Press.

But many of Baena's friends and family have rejected the state's hypothesis, according to Reuters. "It's not true," said their father, Juan Baena, at the funeral, next to the pair of coffins draped with rainbow flags.

Baena's death could intimidate or even incite violence against other LGBTQ+ people, said Alejandro Brito, director of the LGBTQ+ rights group Letra S. "If this was a crime motivated by prejudice, these kinds of crimes always have the intention of sending a message," Brito said. "The message is an intimidation, it's to say: 'This is what could happen to you if you make your identities public.'"

What is Mexico like for LGBTQ+ people?

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador "has long had a trying relationship with Mexico's LGBT community", wrote Genaro Lozano, professor in political science at Mexico City's Iberoamerican University, in the Americas Quarterly journal in 2020. But his time in office since 2018 "has coincided with unprecedented progress for LGBT rights" in Mexico, despite his attempts to "keep those rights at arms' length".

All of Mexico's 32 states recognise same-sex marriage, as of October 2022, and people can legally change gender and name in 18 states – making Mexico something of an outlier in Central America. Access to antiretroviral drugs to treat HIV has also drastically improved. However, violence connected to the crackdown on the drug trade affects the LGBTQ+ community "in unique and often hidden ways", said Lozano.

In 2019 alone, 117 LGBTQ+ people were killed in Mexico, up almost a third on 2018 and the highest number since 2015, according to Letra S. More than half the victims were transgender women. In 2021, Mexico recorded the highest number of murders of transgender people in the world behind Brazil, according to data collated by Transgender Europe.

Any attack on LGBTQ+ figures "shakes people and instils fear", non-binary activist Alex Orué told the NYT, but Baena's death was "even more painful". 

"If someone with that level of visibility, with that public position being a magistrate, and also with the protection of the state because they were living under threat, has this happen to them, what can the rest of us expect?"

Venezuela may be coming in from the diplomatic cold as the US is considering easing long-standing sanctions on its oil in exchange for holding free and fair elections in the country for the first time since 2013.

The Biden administration and President Nicolás Maduro are expected to announce a "breakthrough" agreement on the sanctions in the coming days, said The Times. 

It coincides with the promise of a return to democracy in the beleaguered Latin American country. The government and the US-backed opposition agreed on Tuesday at mediated talks in Barbados to hold presidential elections later next year, according to The Washington Post. The deal "would be the most significant progress in Venezuela's political stalemate in years". In response, Washington has agreed to lift some sanctions, which could allow PDVSA, the state oil company, to resume trading with the US and other countries. 

The US has long promised to lift some of its sanctions on Venezuela "in exchange for democratic concessions" from Maduro, reported Reuters. On Sunday, for the first time since Maduro came to power in 2013, opposition coalition the Unitary Platform will hold a primary to choose its candidate, which could be "a chance for the opposition to rally support from voters in Venezuela, whose economy has been in deep crisis for years". 

What are the oil sanctions?

Venezuela "boasts the largest proven oil reserves on the planet", said the Financial Times, and "in its heyday pumped about 3mn barrels a day". In 2016, oil accounted for 95% of the country's exports. However, the US-led sanctions and "years of mismanagement" has left production below 1 million barrels a day.

US sanctions on the country's oil production were significantly tightened after the Venezuelan presidential elections of 2018. Maduro claimed to have won a second term in an overwhelming victory, which was widely viewed as "fraudulent" by the US, EU and the Venezuelan opposition, said the FT. In the run-up to the election, opposition leaders had been barred from running and international observers were denied access. 

Since then Venezuela has suffered "hyperinflation, rolling blackouts, food shortages and the exodus of more than 7 million citizens" – more than a quarter of the population, many of whom headed to the US.

After Maduro was inaugurated in 2019, the UK and the Trump administration in the US "refused to recognise the legitimacy of his rule", said The Times, "and labelled him a dictator". The US sanctioned the state oil company, the central bank and dozens of officials, including Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. 

What has changed?

These agreements represent "a dramatic shift in US foreign policy in Venezuela", said The Washington Post, after long-term pressure "failed to bring solutions to the country's crisis".

Talks between the two administrations began last year during Russia's invasion of Ukraine, as the US "sought to drive a wedge between Venezuela and its close ally, Russia".

"That changed the calculus, not just in terms of energy, which is an important element, but the fact that it's 2023, not 1993," said Caleb McCarry, a senior staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "We're living in a different world."

Last year, the US began to ease sanctions on Chevron, its main oil company with assets in Venezuela, and announced that it would resume direct deportation flights to Venezuela, "another sign of thawing relations between the two countries", said the paper. "The strained relationship had limited the United States' ability to return undocumented Venezuelan migrants."

What next?

Maduro is "widely expected" to run again next year, said the FT. But it is unclear what would happen if María Corina Machado, the opposition frontrunner, were to win the nomination. 

She has been banned from holding public office since June because she supported the US sanctions on Maduro. Venezuela's opposition claims the government uses these bans "unlawfully to prevent them from competing in elections", said Reuters, and the US has condemned the ban. But in a joint statement, the government and opposition agreed that "each side can choose its candidate according to its own internal rules". 

The US will likely "put a time limit on any sanctions relief", said The Washington Post, "so that it could be reversed if Maduro didn't comply with his end of the deal".

"This is not going to be a magical overnight solution," Geoff Ramsey, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told the paper. "Now the hard part begins."

The 2010s saw a surge in protests across the Middle East, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the US, yet very few achieved any meaningful change and in some parts of the world, the situation became materially worse.

That is the thesis of journalist Vincent Bevins, whose new book "If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution" sets out to explore the protests that coloured the years from 2010 to 2020, through 250 interviews across 12 countries.

Many movements that began with demonstrations in public squares in numerous world capitals "lost out", said Vox, and many countries "ended up with leaders even more repressive than the autocrats that protests toppled". Figuring out why "has bedevilled activists since". 

The question is critically important, the site added, because if an answer can be found, "the next generation of protesters can get things right". 

'Lit the world on fire'

When a street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in protest against the Tunisian government in 2010, he "lit the world on fire", said The New Republic. 

Even though many people may not have heard of him, he is "among the most influential individuals of our century thus far" and the "millions he unintentionally inspired teetered and toppled governments".

Many protesters who followed Bouazizi experienced a sense of "euphoric victory" and saw their demonstrations "met with optimism in the international press", said Bevins in an extract adapted from his book and published in The Guardian. But years later the outcomes that have emerged are "very different from the goals of the protesters… [and] in many cases, things got much worse".

'Leaderless protest hurt more than helped'

Bevins's interest in the subject began in 2013 when, while working as a correspondent in São Paulo, he witnessed the start of a national protest movement by an anarcho-punk collective focused on bus-fare activism. 

Despite successfully lowering transit costs, the movement escalated beyond control, destabilising the left-wing government and contributing to the rise of right-wing forces, culminating in Jair Bolsonaro's rise to power.

This became the starting point for his book which "ends by giving Bevins's protagonists, the activists who saw their movements shift and warp in front of their eyes, a chance to reflect on what they could have done differently", said the LA Times. 

All of them "land on the idea, to differing degrees, that the anarcho-punk culture of leaderless protest hurt their causes more than they helped them".

'A big protest begins with a question mark'

It isn't surprising that we have tended to think that big protests ought to "reliably bring about social change", said Zeynep Tufekci in The New York Times. Not least because they have often done so in the past.

But there have been "common patterns" in the 2010s movements' failures, she added. "The quickly sprung large movements often floundered for direction once the inevitable pushback came". Not only this but they also "didn't have the tools to navigate the treacherous next phase of politics, because they hadn't needed to build them to get there".

In part, this is because in the social media age, movements could build quickly rather than as the "culmination of long-term organising, an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence… But since the early 2000s, a big protest has started to feel more like a sentence that begins with a question mark."

'A glimpse of the way that life is supposed to be'

Even when they looked back on the experience of their respective movements' failures, Bevins said his interviewees were split.

Some felt a "horrible comedown", and a "plunge into depression that came after things did not work out".

Others still felt elated by it, feeling they had experienced "a stunning, momentary glimpse of the way that life is really supposed to be". 

Despite the failures of the last decade's protests, Bevins's book, which on the surface might look like "a pessimistic reading of history" is also "an optimistic project that looks toward the future", he told Vox. For protest to achieve, he argued, "all you have to do is match the tactics to this huge, demonstrable desire for change in the global system". 

And when that occurs, "you have something that you can work on in the next decade".

Argentina's federal police have raided and closed down an online bookshop that sold Nazi content and material after a two-year investigation.

Police found "hundreds of books plastered with swastikas" when they raided a home in San Isidro, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, said The Washington Post, some of which "glorified Adolf Hitler" while others denied the Holocaust. According to officials, it was the largest seizure of Nazi propaganda materials in recent Argentinian history.

More than 200 texts in total were produced by a "prolific" clandestine printing press, known as Librería Argentina. 

The online bookshop's alleged owner, a 45-year-old man who has not been identified, was arrested after police raided his parents' home. The raid "was the tipping point" in an investigation that began in 2021, said The Washington Post, after the Delegation of Israelite Associations of Argentina (DAIA), who represent the country's Jewish population, "raised alarms".

"We're still astonished by the amount of material," federal police chief Juan Carlos Hernández said. "It's historic. It's truly a printing press disseminating and selling Nazi symbology, books and indoctrination." The arrested man, Hernández said, sold "high-quality material" and had "a high level of purchases and inquiries".

Librería Argentina sold books with "images of swastikas, iron crosses and the imperial eagle" of the Nazi party, said Reuters, as well as "Nazi propaganda texts". Displaying Nazi symbols is a crime in Argentina.

"We are shocked by how profuse the material is," said Marcos Cohen from the DAIA. "I don't remember anything like this being found before."

According to El País, the man was "operating as Argentina's largest Nazi material distributor from his family home". The investigation began when the DAIA made a complaint about a website disseminating antisemitic content and selling it through Mercado Libre, South America's foremost e-commerce platform. Police said the man's account was terminated, but he began to sell the materials through his own website.

Argentina has the largest Jewish population in Latin America, with many moving there after their expulsion from Spain and pogroms in Eastern Europe, and during the Nazis' rise to power before the Second World War. After the Nazis were defeated, many of their officials also emigrated to Argentina to avoid trials for war crimes.

A “tantric sex coach” and Donald Trump admirer has capitalised on Argentina’s economic woes to pull off a shock landslide win in the primary elections.

The value of the peso plummeted by more than 20% after Javier Milei, 52, gained more than 30% of the total vote with his coalition, La Libertad Avanza (Liberty Advances) in Sunday’s primaries, in a result that has “upended Argentina’s political universe”, said The Guardian.

The far-right economics professor “shot to daytime TV fame” in the 2010s, a self-described “tantric sex coach who spoke openly about his preference for threesomes”.

He beat candidates from the governing centre-left Peronist coalition, Union for the Homeland (27%), and the main opposition coalition, hard-right Together for Change (28%), which have traded power back and forth for a decade.

Milei won in 16 out of 24 of the country’s regions, “appealing to voters angry about inflation at 116% and the country’s cost-of-living crisis”, said Sky News. He is frequently compared to Donald Trump, and told the news website Infobae in 2021 that his alignment with the beleaguered former US president was “almost natural”.

The “deeply unpopular” president Alberto Fernandez is not seeking re-election in October, said Al Jazeera, and, against all predictions, Milei goes forward as a “real contender”, said AP News.

Who is Javier Milei?

Milei was born in Buenos Aires in 1970, the son of a bus driver who became a businessman. He decided from a young age to pursue a career in economics, according to El Cronista.

He gained a bachelor’s degree and two master’s degrees in economics, and has held various high-profile positions including as a government consultant. He has written nine books and more than 50 academic papers.

The “libertarian” economics professor entered the public eye in the early 2010s, said Economist Intelligence, with “blusterous diatribes against the political establishment” in newspapers and television interviews.

He was initially dismissed as a “buffoon”, said The Guardian, but began to attract support by calling for Argentina to replace the peso with the dollar. He founded his far-right coalition in 2021, which secured two seats in the lower house of Argentina’s Congress.

Despite “boasts over his sexual prowess”, Milei “claims to be a staunch Catholic”, said The Telegraph. The “anarcho-capitalist” has “built ties with Spain’s hard-Right Vox party”, and pledged to “spearhead an austerity programme to help pay off the country’s $44 billion debt”.

According to the Buenos Aires Herald, Milei told a journalist that anyone who supports abortion rights is “brainwashed by a homicidal policy”. He said he would hold a referendum on the country’s abortion law, which allows the procedure up to 14 weeks.

Milei has been nicknamed el peluca (“the wig”) for his unkempt hair. He previously sang with a band known for its Rolling Stones covers, and sings songs to his supporters.

He has also pledged to abolish the central bank, which perhaps explains why it devalued the local currency by 22% after the primaries.

What are his chances?

He is an “outsider candidate”, said The Associated Press: a “shaggy-haired”, leather-jacketed singer who has described sex education as “a ploy to destroy the family”, wants to legalise the sale of human organs and believes climate change is a lie.

The primaries are effectively “a dress rehearsal for the general election”, said The Telegraph, as voting is obligatory for most adults. They give a “clear indication” of the favourite.

The results are “a stinging rebuke” to the Peronist Union for the Homeland coalition, said CNN: a reflection of political frustration and a repudiation of Kirchnerism.

It seems unlikely, said The Guardian, that the Peronist candidate and economics minister, Sergio Massa, will win in the first round. Thus Massa might, in a second-round November run-off, face an “unbeatable” alliance of Milei and the hard-right United for Change candidate, Patricia Bullrich.

However, turnout was under 70%, the lowest since primaries were first held in the country a decade ago. To win, Milei will have to increase his share of the country’s votes by 15%, to 45%: “a high hurdle even in a nation where voters tend to favour candidates they see as winners”, said AP News.

Nevertheless, says Al Jazeera, his rise reflects a wider trend in Latin America, of outsiders gaining prominence by “pledging to break up the status quo”.

Human rights groups may be raising the alarm over El Salvador’s brutal crackdown on gang violence, but the policy is winning huge support for the country’s young president both at home and abroad.

Since March last year, President Nayib Bukele has held the Central American country in an extended state of emergency and thrown large swathes of the population into prison, as part of his war against the notorious criminal gangs that “had made El Salvador one of the deadliest countries in the world per capita”, said the Financial Times (FT).

The world’s former murder capital now has the world’s highest incarceration rate, said The Wall Street Journal – “almost double that of the US”. More than 71,000 people have been arrested – about 7% of the country’s male population aged 14-29, according to The Economist. “Anyone suspected of ties to a criminal gang can be thrown into a crowded jail indefinitely”, with little evidence or due process.

This week, Bukele claimed on Twitter: “We turned the world’s murder capital into the safest country in Latin America”. But human rights groups say that thousands of innocent people have been wrongly imprisoned, and have raised concerns over torture, forced disappearances and Bukele’s increasingly authoritarian grip on power.

What is the background?

The crackdown was “prompted by a bloody killing spree by gangs” in March last year, said CNN, in which 92 people died. On 27 March, there were 62 murders in a single day, “the deadliest day on record since the country’s civil war ended”, said The New York Times. The notorious Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang was blamed.

Bukele asked the Legislative Assembly (in which his party, Nuevas Ideas, has held a two-thirds majority since 2021), to declare a 30-day state of emergency. This suspended various constitutional rights, even allowing prosecutors to jail children aged 12 and above. It has been repeatedly extended ever since.

According to a joint report by the Human Rights Watch (HRW) organisation and Cristosal (a Salvadoran rights group) in December, the state of emergency has allowed widespread human-rights violations, including torture, forced disappearances and deaths in custody, the circumstances of which “suggest state responsibility”.

The campaign of “mass, indiscriminate arrests” has led to the detention of hundreds of people “with no apparent connections to gangs’ abusive activity”, said HRW, often for long periods of time in harsh conditions and without trial.

Bukele “glories in brutality”, said The Economist, “tweeting photos of suspects cuffed, half-naked and packed tighter than battery hens”.

Last month, justice minister Gustavo Villatoro said he would allow up to 900 people to be prosecuted at the same time. These “Kafkaesque trials”, said El Pais, “would undermine access to justice for victims of gang violence, hinder the release of innocent people, and violate due process guarantees”.

Has it worked?

El Salvador’s homicide rate has fallen from a peak of 106 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2015, to 7.8 in 2022, said The Wall Street Journal – “well below some major US cities”. Going by homicide data, said Unherd, there is now “good reason” to believe Bukele’s claims that El Salvador is in fact the “safest country in Latin America”.

While analysts dispute how much can be credited to Bukele, “he can surely claim some”, said The Economist. But “his scrapping of due process carries costs that will outweigh these benefits”.

Bukele’s crackdown has pushed the country down the Freedom in the World index from “free” to “partly free”, with the report citing corruption that undermines democracy and the rule of law.

The peace may not hold: in the past, gangs have “benefited from policies of mass incarceration by using prisons to recruit new members”, said Human Rights Watch, and strengthening bonds behind bars.

“When massive rights violations become commonplace, it’s very rare for this to result in lasting peace,” Noah Bullock, executive director of Cristosal, told Al Jazeera.

What has the response been?

Bukele is “highly undemocratic, highly abusive – and highly popular”, wrote Juan Pappier, acting Americas deputy director for Human Rights Watch, for El País.

About 93% of Salvadorans endorse his presidency, according to a recent report: one of the highest rates in the world. In June, a poll by Salvadoran think tank Fundaungo reported that 53% of respondents had a positive view of the state of emergency. Only 9% had a negative view. About 40% of respondents said that crime reduction was the greatest achievement of Bukele’s tenure.

The crackdown has bolstered Bukele’s bid for re-election in 2024, despite a long-standing interpretation of the Constitution that forbids leaders serving a second continuous term. “The way the rules [of the Constitution] were redefined has raised fears Bukele could cling on beyond one more term,” said the FT.

Latin American politicians are praising Bukele. In Peru, “there is talk of building a monument in his honour”, said the Los Angeles Times. In Honduras and Ecuador, “leaders have copied his draconian security policies”, while in Chile, Costa Rica, Colombia and Guatemala, “citizens have taken to the streets calling on their own governments to embrace his extreme strategies”.

The “brash young autocrat has won legions of fans” throughout the continent, and the criticism by human rights advocates “seems to only feed his cult-like status as a renegade willing to get things done, whatever the cost”.

Bukele’s security model “threatens democratic institutions in the region”, said El Pais. “His methods are ripe for copying anywhere with high crime and weak institutions,” said The Economist, and could “tip such places into autocracy”.

Puerto Rican musician Bad Bunny can add another feather to his global stardom cap: his 2022 release “Un Verano Sin Ti” has become Spotify’s most streamed album of all time.

The fourth studio album from the Latin trap and reggaetón phenomenon, it racked up more than 356 million on-demand streams in the first week after its release in May, according to Billboard: the “largest streaming week ever for a Latin music album”.

The singer-songwriter, rapper and producer “dominated several year-end music lists in 2022”, said Forbes, topping the list of most streamed artists on Spotify for the third consecutive year. He’s reached “a new stratosphere of stardom”, said Rolling Stone; he is “virtually everywhere”.

And his “unabashed pride for Latino communities and the Spanish language, defiance of traditional gender norms and push for justice on a range of social issues” makes him a “de-facto political icon”, said The Washington Post.

Who is Bad Bunny?

Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, known professionally as Bad Bunny, was born in 1994, to truck driver and teacher parents. He grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the oldest of three brothers, surrounded by traditional Latin music like salsa and merengue. He began composing songs and beats from the age of 13.

A “self-described class clown”, said NPR, he was forced as a child to dress in a bunny rabbit costume. “He was pretty angry about it, but the name stuck.”

Studying at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo, he would upload Spanish-language singles to SoundCloud while bagging groceries at night.

Bad Bunny got his big break in the Anglosphere when he collaborated with American rapper Cardi B in 2018 on “I Like It”. The multi-platinum hit “transformed Bad Bunny into a household name”, said Vulture, and “set the stage” for his full-length debut, “X 100pre”.

In less than two years he became “an unequivocal superstar across Latin America and the diaspora”, said The Fader. He was ubiquitous on both Spanish and English-language charts for his collaborations with everyone from Daddy Yankee to Nicki Minaj.

By 2022, he had broken Ed Sheeran’s touring record, grossing $435 million in the year. This year, aged just 29, he became the first Spanish-speaking artist to headline Coachella music festival, a show that referenced Cuban salsa greats, reggaetón predecessors and Puerto Rican icons.

Even controversies – this year, his ex-girlfriend Carliz Hernández sued him for alleged unauthorised use of her voice, and a video emerged of him throwing a fan’s phone into bushes, to widespread criticism – seemingly haven’t dented his astonishing success.

He bought a mansion in the Hollywood Hills for $8.8 million, reported Dirt, and this summer he followed in the footsteps of Michael Jackson and Britney Spears by starring in a Pepsi advert.

He has become a figure of intense cultural scrutiny. America is awash with symposiums and classes dedicated to analysing his influence.

“I never dreamed I wanted to be the biggest one or No. 1,” he told Billboard last year. “I did it because I loved it, and my only dream was to be able to make a living out of it.”

Political significance

Bad Bunny’s refusal to sing in English is “deeply political in itself”, said Foreign Policy. But he is also overtly political, taking stands on everything from LGBT rights to Puerto Rican issues.

With a penchant for painted nails, short shorts, flamboyant outfits and “get-ups that would make David Bowie tip his fedora in admiration”, said NPR, “he boasts about stealing your girl while rocking a gender-bending style”, dressing in drag and kissing a male dancer on stage.

The video for his hit single “El Apagón” (The Blackout) deals with the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria in 2017, and the struggles the island has faced since. In 2019 he cut his tour short to join Puerto Rican protests against corruption.

“I always say that’s the life of people in Puerto Rico,” he told Rolling Stone. “We love to celebrate and act like nothing matters, then we clash against a reality that is often very painful.”

Puerto Rico is a US territory, “neither a state nor an independent country”, explained History. So “islanders” – despite being US citizens, subject to federal laws – can’t vote in presidential elections, and “lack voting representation in Congress”.

But once Puerto Ricans move “stateside”, they gain the right to vote. The island population has decreased by about 11% in the past decade: an “exodus” to the mainland in search of better economic opportunities. With a population of about 5.8 million, Puerto Ricans now make up the second largest Hispanic group in the continental US, after Mexicans.

So Bad Bunny’s popularity is “of particular resonance to young Puerto Ricans on and off the island”, said The Washington Post. “Boricuas [Puerto Ricans] have taken note – as have members of Congress.”

Latin America is serving as a proxy battleground for a new Cold War as China, Iran and Russia seek to build influence, exploit resources and undermine the United States in the region.

Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, will visit Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela next week, according to state news agency IRNA – all countries currently under US sanctions. The tour will “give Raisi face time with three regional allies”, said Reuters, each of whom have “leftist governments that have been accused by critics of human rights violations”.

The tour comes as reports emerged that China had secretly made a deal with Cuba, agreeing to pay “several billion dollars” to build an electronic eavesdropping facility on the island. This would allow Chinese intelligence services to listen in to communications throughout the southeastern US, according to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

In a “brash new geopolitical challenge” by Beijing to the US, the paper quotes US officials as saying China has agreed in principle to pay “cash-strapped Cuba” to build a facility only 100 miles (160km) from Florida. US Central Command headquarters is located in the state, in Tampa.

What’s been happening in Cuba?

Authoritarian regimes such as Russia, China and, increasingly, Iran, are seeking to “expand their spheres of influence” in Latin America, wrote McKayla Swan, staff assistant at the US House of Representatives, for the International Republican Institute (IRI), “enticed by the promises of investment” and anti-US sentiment.

A Chinese “intelligence facility within 100 miles of Florida and the United States” would pose a “serious threat to our national security and sovereignty”, said the chairman and vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in a joint statement.

John Kirby, spokesman for the National Security Council, told Reuters that the WSJ report of the alleged spy facility was not accurate. The Cuban embassy in Washington said the article was “totally mendacious and unfounded information”, said the WSJ. The Chinese embassy told The Guardian it was “not aware of the case” and couldn’t comment.

But the US has had “real concerns” about China’s relationship with Cuba, Kirby told Reuters.

The situation harks back to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when an American spy plane photographed Soviet nuclear missile sites being built on the island. The ensuing confrontation brought the US and the Soviet Union closer to nuclear warfare than at any other point during the Cold War.

Iran’s ties with Cuba have also been strengthened in recent months, said The Hill. Iran's foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, spoke in 2021 of the “spoke of the ‘unlimited’ potential to expand Tehran-Havana ties”, said the Middle East Institute.

Iran has also set up more than 80 Shia Islamic cultural centres in the Latin American and Caribbean region, said Swan for the IRI, and its state-controlled broadcaster IRIB funds a Spanish-language news outlet, HispanTV.

What about Venezuela?

Iran has long been strengthening its ties with Venezuela, mainly via the oil industry. Both countries are major exporters of oil and members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

Venezuela’s beleaguered state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) relied on its allies, Russia and Iran, to circumnavigate US sanctions against Venezuela and supply it with crude oil, selling it at a heavy discount. In 2019, President Nicolás Maduro ordered PDVSA to move its European office from Lisbon to Moscow, said Reuters.

Last June, during Maduro’s first visit to Iran, the two countries signed a 20-year agreement to cooperate on defence and expand production of oil and petrochemicals.

Maduro also praised Iran for sending fuel tankers to the poverty-stricken nation, despite US sanctions. “Tehran’s delivery of oil to Caracas was a great help to the Venezuelan people,” he said.

How does Nicaragua compare?

In April the sanctioned Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega held talks with Iran about common interests, military cooperation and countering American influence in Latin America, according to a report leaked to The New York Times.

Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov also visited Caracas in April. “As authoritarianism deepens in Nicaragua, the elephant – or bear – in the room is Moscow’s creeping influence in Central America,” wrote Robert Muggah for Foreign Policy.

Russia has been supplying Nicaragua with military equipment since 2016, and Nicaragua allows Russia to train its forces in the country. Last year, it allowed Russian troops temporary access, leading to fears that Russia was expanding its surveillance in the region.

The two countries are old Cold War allies. During the Nicaraguan civil war, the USSR and Cuba supplied resources to the Sandinista National Liberation Front revolution, led by Ortega, who has been president since 2007, while the US backed a right-wing group called the Contras.

Nicaragua has also restored relations with China after a 20-year hiatus, as Beijing expands its reach in Central America. China’s Belt and Road Initiative has invested heavily in Nicaragua. Meanwhile, Chinese-owned Huawei routers are increasingly supplying internet in the country, rivalling the dominant US-based company, Cisco.

“As the Ortega administration shores up support from Russia and China, it has hastened Nicaragua’s decoupling from the West,” Muggah wrote.

What is the West doing in these countries?

Western nations have been attempting to shore up support for Ukraine and condemnation of Russia’s invasion among Latin American countries.

Last month, James Cleverly conducted a week-long tour of Latin America, including talks in Brazil, Colombia and Chile, becoming the first UK foreign secretary to visit the region in five years.

He was the latest senior Western diplomat in an “extended charm offensive” to try to win over the “neutrally minded” continent to Ukraine’s cause, said Politico, as part of the “broader geopolitical battle” with Russia and China.

Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but has so far refused to provide military support for Ukraine or sanction Russia.

The war in Ukraine brings up the question, “how much do people in Latin America hate the US?”, said Bloomberg, as countries “loudly committed to the principle of non-intervention shrug off the decision by an autocratic oligarch to send in the tanks to take over a smaller neighbor”.

Dozens of business figures and politicians have been arrested so far this year in a £17bn corruption scandal that has rocked Venezuela and its state-run oil company.

Senior officials in President Nicolás Maduro’s government have been among those arrested in an ongoing crackdown that has had “government insiders scurrying for cover”, said The Associated Press.

It is “one of the biggest scandals to hit Venezuela in years”, said The Sunday Times. It has already led to the resignation of “the once seemingly untouchable” oil minister Tareck El Aissami and there are “fears that up to £16.7bn may have been stolen from the coffers of the nationalised oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA)”.

The investigation, led by Tarek William Saab, Venezuela’s attorney-general, “has fed a splurge of lurid headlines, as the excesses of a corruption network fleecing a nation emerge”, the paper reported. Confiscated assets include 28 mansions, 19 aeroplanes, a hotel and 361 luxury cars, and there are allegations of a prostitution ring dubbed the Oil Dolls.

“They gave themselves a life that not even Gulf princes have,” the paper quotes Saab as saying.

The episode “offers a rare window into the chaos and corruption at the top of PDVSA”, said The Economist, “the state oil giant which Mr Maduro, following in the footsteps of his late predecessor, Hugo Chávez, has driven to near-ruin”.

The unfolding of a scandal

Oil has been “the backbone of Venezuela’s autocratic regimes for decades”, said The Economist. The country has one of the world’s largest oil reserves, and “successive presidents have been accused of stealing the easily tapped profits for their own use”, wrote The Sunday Times.

PDVSA was once the second largest oil company in the world, during the oil boom in the early 2000s, when record high prices allowed the leftist Chávez to launch “numerous initiatives” for public services, reported Al Jazeera.

“But a subsequent drop in prices and government mismanagement”, first under Chávez’s government and then his successor, Maduro, “ended the lavish spending”, the site reported. “And so began a complex crisis that has pushed millions into poverty and driven more than seven million Venezuelans to migrate.”

In 2016, the then opposition-led National Assembly said $11bn had gone missing at PDVSA between 2004 and 2014.

El Aissami, who headed the Ministry of Internal Affairs under Chávez and served as vice-president from 2017 to 2018, was accused by the US in 2017 of participating in corruption, money laundering and drug trafficking: a “narcotics kingpin”, according to Al Jazeera. He denies all the accusations.

Two years later, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on PDVSA to try to pressure Maduro into resigning, after the Venezuelan president “blatantly rigged the previous year’s election”, said The Sunday Times. The company’s losses came about partly because it had become “more reckless” in order to evade the sanctions, The Economist said.

PDVSA became reliant on fellow sanctioned allies Russia and Iran to import and sell oil at a heavy discount. In 2019 Maduro ordered PDVSA to move its European office to Moscow. Venezuela began accepting payments in rubles or cryptocurrency.

‘Corruption and incompetence’

When the pandemic caused a global slump in demand for oil, production at PDVSA plummeted. In April 2020, El Aissami was appointed Venezuela’s minister of oil.

An audit of PDVSA’s accounts in March this year showed “corruption and incompetence on a monumental scale”, said The Sunday Times. The anti-corruption police issued a communique on 17 March, which led to the first round of arrests.

Saab told reporters the alleged scheme involved selling Venezuelan oil through the country’s cryptocurrency oversight agency, in parallel to PDVSA. Some cryptocurrency payments reportedly turned out to be either scams, or to lead to huge losses.

El Aissami stepped down on 20 March. He has not been mentioned as a target for the investigation, and has pledged to help investigators while also publicly declaring his support for Maduro’s anti-corruption campaign.

Stabilising the economy

Venezuela is considered one of the most corrupt countries in the world, ranked by Transparency International in 2022 as 177th out of 180 countries.

Officials “are rarely held accountable”, said Al Jazeera, “a major irritant to citizens, the majority of whom now live on $1.90 a day, the international benchmark of extreme poverty”.

“It would be very difficult for even a much less corrupt state to implement all the necessary controls,” Francisco Monaldi, who heads the Latin America energy programme at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, told The Associated Press.

Internal PDVSA documents showed that more than half of its fleet of 22 oil tankers are so run down that they are at risk of “sinking, fires, or spills”, Reuters reported, and should be immediately taken out of service or repaired.

Analysts suspect Maduro may be seeking to stabilise the economy before next year’s presidential elections. The local currency, the bolívar, has slumped sharply against the dollar.

The anti-corruption drive, said OilPrice.com, could also be an attempt to persuade the US to lift sanctions on Venezuela.

​Argentina’s president Alberto Fernández has announced he will not stand for re-election in 2023, plunging the country into further political uncertainty following corruption charges and an alleged assassination attempt on current vice-president and two-time former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

In a video message on Friday, President Fernández said he would “hand over the presidential sash to whomever has been legitimately elected at the polls by the popular vote” in October and not seek a second term in office, “throwing open a race to lead the ruling Peronist coalition at the ballot amid a deepening economic crisis”, said Reuters.

The president and vice-president have “at times been at loggerheads”, added the news agency, and Fernández de Kirchner, often known as CFK, had been thought to also be stepping down at the next election too.

But the Buenos Aires Times reported earlier this month that CFK told a meeting of trade union officials: “Those who are thinking that I am going to devote myself to looking after the grandchildren… it would be better for them to forget about it.”

The prospect of an unlikely third presidential term for CFK has caused some consternation in the South American country, with the 70-year-old having faced an alleged assassination attempt in September and been found guilty of corruption in December.

Why is President Fernández stepping down?

Fernández has seen his opinion poll ratings tank as Argentina “has been stuck in economic doldrums for years, with more than 50% of children living in poverty and a galloping annual inflation rate of more than 100%”, said Le Monde.

“The economic context put too much pressure on him,” Mariel Fornoni, director of Management & Fit, told Reuters. She said that “internal pressures” had forced Fernández’s hand, though in reality with his approval rating under 20% he never had much chance of winning.

“Alberto Fernández is taking himself out of a race he was never really in,” Fornoni said.

The question of who takes over the leading party’s coalition remains up in the air though. Agustino Fontevecchia, digital director for Argentine weekly newspaper Perfil, wrote for Forbes in February that Fernández and economy minister Sergio Massa “have an explicit agreement” to try to sideline CFK in favour of Massa. Despite repeatedly saying himself that he won’t run, Massa “barely hides the excitement at the possibility of becoming president”, said Fontevecchia.

Who is Cristina Fernández de Kirchner?

CFK is a “powerful and divisive figure” in Argentina, said The Guardian. She was first lady from 2003 to 2007 alongside her husband, President Néstor Kirchner.

In 2007, she became the country’s first elected female president, part of the so-called “pink tide” of populist, left-wing Latin American leaders in the 2000s.

CFK and her husband “gave rise to Kirchnerism”, said The New York Times, “one of the most powerful political forces in Argentina”.

CFK, 70, served two terms until 2015. When she was elected vice-president in 2019 she was “seen by many as more powerful than even the president”, added the paper.

While she is loved by Peronistas, supporters of former president Juan Perón’s legacy, Argentina’s right wing “has long made her its top target”, the paper said.

In 2018, she became embroiled in charges of corruption relating to her time as president, all of which she denied. The charges sparked a wave of protests, and at the time of the alleged attempted assassination last September she was preparing to face trial.

Levels of “verbal violence” had increased significantly, said The Guardian, with some Argentinian politicians calling for the death sentence to be reintroduced for the vice-president.

In December, CFK was found guilty of “fraudulent administration” and sentenced to six years in jail, suspended while she finishes her term “in a case that has shaken the country”, said BBC News.

Prosecutors said she had “created a kickback scheme which steered lucrative public work contracts towards a friend of hers in return for bribes”, added the broadcaster. CFK said the charges against her were politically motivated, speaking after the verdict, and described herself as the victim of a “judicial mafia”, the Associated Press news agency reported. She is expected to appeal.

What happened during the ‘attempted assassination’?

On 1 September 2022, CFK was greeting people outside her flat in Buenos Aires, after hundreds gathered to show support ahead of the corruption trial.

TV cameras covering the demonstrations filmed Fernando Montiel, 35, pushing through the crowd and raising a semi-automatic weapon to CFK’s face. A witness said she heard “the sound of the trigger being pulled”, according to the Associated Press.

Fernández de Kirchner “only survived” because the semi-automatic .32-calibre Bersa jammed, said The Daily Telegraph.

Police immediately arrested Montiel. His girlfriend, Brenda Uliarte, 23, also at the scene, was arrested a few hours later. Both have been charged with attempted murder, which they deny, and are awaiting trial.

A semi-automatic pistol was found with its serial number partially removed, reported La Nación. The gun was loaded with five bullets, but there was no bullet in the firing chamber.

“Imagine how nervous I was,” Montiel told television news channel C5N, while in pre-trial detention. “I pulled the trigger and the shot didn’t go off.”

In a national broadcast, President Fernández called it “the most serious incident since we recovered democracy” in 1983. “They wanted to kill her,” tweeted Argentina’s foreign minister, Santiago Cafiero.

A US-backed campaign between Panama and Colombia aims to stop migrants crossing the Darién Gap from South into Central America, as UN groups warn that the number of people attempting the journey could rise to a record 400,000 this year.

More than 100,000 people have already crossed the 66-mile stretch of jungle between Colombia and Panama this year, the UN High Commission for Refugees and International Organization for Migration (IOM) said in a joint statement on 14 April: six times more than in the same period in 2022, according to Panamanian government data.

By the current trajectory, the number will reach 400,000 people this year, compared with last year when 250,000 migrants and refugees “risked their lives crossing the Darién”, the organisations said.

What is the Darién Gap?

The tapón del Darién (plug of Darién) is a break in the Pan-American Highway, the network of roads that spans the continents of the Americas, from Alaska down to the southernmost point of Argentina.

The only overland route connecting South and Central America, it is the world’s longest motorable road, according to the Guinness World Records – but it is not all technically drivable, as there is a break of about 106km (66 miles), across the border between northwest Colombia and southeast Panama. The name derives from Panama’s region of Darién.

Attempts to complete construction in the 1970s failed, and further plans have been halted by environmental concerns, as well as exceptionally difficult terrain in what is one of the world’s rainiest areas, where the governments of Colombia and Panama have little control.

The “remote, roadless, mountainous rainforest” is a “minefield of lethal snakes, slimy rock and erratic riverbeds, that challenges most adults”, said CNN, which sent a team of journalists to hike the gap in February, who encountered dead bodies along the way.

The Colombian cartel controlling the route “is making millions off a highly organised smuggling business”, the report said, charging at least $400 per person to enter the pass.

The stories from people who survived “attest to the horrors of this journey”, said Giuseppe Loprete, the IOM’s chief of mission in Panama. “Many have lost their lives or gone missing, while others come out of it with significant health issues.”

According to the IOM’s Missing Migrants Project, 36 people died in the gap last year, although “anecdotal reports” indicate that many deaths go unreported, “so this figure presents only a small fraction of the true number of lives lost”.

Why are numbers increasing?

The number of people entering Panama via the gap last year was almost double that of 2021, said the IOM, and roughly 20 times the annual average from 2010 to 2020.

There has been a seven-fold increase in the number of children crossing, said a Unicef report in March, with 9,700 minors arriving in Panama so far this year. “Children now represent one in five migrants walking through the Darién jungle”, it said. The previous report last year said that half the children crossing were under five years old.

Deteriorating conditions in several Latin American countries, especially Venezuela, have contributed to the record numbers. More than half of those who crossed last year (150,327) were Venezuelan nationals, a 50-fold increase since 2021.

The socioeconomic crisis in the country was exacerbated by the pandemic and US sanctions against President Nicolás Maduro, contributing to extreme rates of hunger, poverty and violence.

In October, the US blocked Venezuelans from entering the US “without authorisation” under a pandemic-era restriction called Title 42, which suspended the right to claim asylum at the US-Mexico border. Title 42 is set to expire on 11 May, which the US fears will increase the surge in migration.

Chinese citizens are also making the journey, with Panamanian data recording 913 arrivals in January this year, according to The Guardian: the fourth-largest national group.

Migrants told the paper that increasing repression had pushed people into “runology”, or runxue, taking advantage of the relaxation of border controls in December to flee China.

What is the new plan?

People attempting the five-day hike face dangerous terrain, deadly animals, disease, exploitation and violence. Most come from Venezuela, Ecuador and Haiti, and continue through Central America to the US, the agencies said.

The 60-day plan hopes to “prevent the risk to human life, disrupt transnational criminal organisations, and preserve the vital rainforest”, said the statement from Colombia, Panama and the US on 12 April. The countries will offer “new lawful and flexible pathways”, but did not explain what those would be.

The plan “will likely fail”, migration experts told The Guardian, and push “desperate people further into the hands of merciless people-trafficking”.

1. The Johnson factor

Mujtaba Rahman for Politico Europe

on future relations

“The relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union was never going to be easy after Brexit – and so far, it sure hasn’t been,” says Mujtaba Rahman at Politico. Disagreements over the Northern Ireland Protocol and Anglo-French relations have “marred” the past year, and whether the next 12 months “will be better or worse really depends upon one question: the fate of the Prime Minister Boris Johnson”. The PM is currently “embroiled in his deepest crisis since assuming the top job”, and faces “mounting pressure on multiple fronts”. The UK’s “rapidly darkening domestic backdrop… has reduced Johnson’s stomach for a fight with Brussels even further”, says Rahman. If Johnson “doesn’t make it”, Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss could take his place. Sunak “would likely adopt a more pragmatic approach”, while the foreign secretary “would likely stick to Johnson’s hardball approach”. It’s clear that relations between the UK and EU “aren’t going to get better” with Johnson in charge, but “his departure doesn’t guarantee that they wouldn’t get worse”.

Read more

2. Burnt-out and underpaid social workers can’t be blamed for every Arthur and Star Hobson

Vince Peart for the Daily Mirror

on protection and responsibility

Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson were “two innocent and defenceless children who died at the hands of those who should have loved them most”, writes Vince Peart at The Mirror. The child protection practitioner and independent social worker says that their “tragically short lives will have turned the public’s stomach sick with grief and anger”. And “as questions are rightly asked” about how their deaths could have happened, that both children were involved with social services “will be brought to the forefront of the debate”. There can be “no shying away from the fact” that in both these children’s cases “there were indeed missed opportunities for intervention”. But “social workers did not murder these children, and the blame cannot be laid solely at the feet of professionals”. The issues, says Peart, “are systematic and societal”, and as such “require systematic and societal responses”. If lessons are truly to be learnt, “then we must start by building up the social work profession instead of knocking it down”.

Read more

3. The Tory grassroots will never forgive Boris

Madeline Grant for The Telegraph

on missed opportunities

“Since her departure Theresa May has enjoyed a post-No 10 rehabilitation of sorts,” says Madeline Grant at The Telegraph. She’s gone from “weak, unpopular Calamity Jane to unofficial Queen of the backbenches”, and “has been an articulate, effective thorn in the Government’s side” on “everything from lockdown to Afghanistan”. One can imagine May in the future “swanning about future Tory conferences as grande dame”. Grant asks: “when the time comes, will the Tory grassroots be so forgiving of Bozza?” The pandemic has certainly “dealt the PM a particularly terrible hand”. Even so, “he is arguably the first PM since Thatcher to have a meaningful chance to define his own form of Conservatism, yet ‘Johnsonism’ remains amorphous”. No other Tory leader in recent years has had “such a unique opportunity to implement vital reform or make conservatism palatable to future generations”. And equally, “none has squandered it quite so quickly”.

Read more

4. The truth will come out on the Jan. 6 insurrection

Scot Lehigh for The Boston Globe

on ignoring messages

“The truth is dripping out about the events of the 6 January US Capitol insurrection,” says Scot Lehigh at The Boston Globe. For Donald Trump and his son, “and his Fox News sycophants, the drops are as corrosive as acid”. Text messages sent to and from former chief of staff Mark Meadows “help untangle the truth” of what was happening in the White House that day. “Meadows received frantic messages” from members of his administration and congress, calling for the president “to do something to stop the mayhem”. Even Donald Trump Jr, “not necessarily the most perspicacious observer abroad in the land, realised this was disaster”. Meadows’s own texts reveal he agreed with the president’s son “and was pushing Trump hard to do something”. It is now apparent that “Trump was aware of the violence and was being urged... to condemn it forcefully”. It should be obvious “why most of Trumpworld is stonewalling the 6 January committee: the truth is lethal to the former president”.

Read more

5. The ‘West Side Story’ remake we didn’t need

Yarimar Bonilla for The New York Times

on the same old story

Yarimar Bonilla confesses that she never saw the original West Side Story. But writing in The New York Times, she recognises that for first- and second-generation Puerto Ricans living in the US at the time, the 1961 film “offered a recognition of the Puerto Rican presence” in America, despite “the dearth of actual Latino actors, the mishmash of Caribbean and Spanish culture and the deep stereotypes it trafficked in”. The filmmakers behind Steven Spielberg’s 2021 remake of the classic musical “stressed that this one would be different”, and there are many details that the film “gets right”. But even though the two-and-a-half-hour remake “is littered with symbols of Puerto Rico’s nationalist movements”, says Bonilla, “there is no recognition of how people who embraced these symbols have long been surveilled and criminalised by the federal and Puerto Rican governments”. If the director and his team are “truly committed to authentic Latino stories, they would do well to move away from trying to make old representations more palatable to a contemporary public”, and instead “focus on nurturing and supporting” Latino talent.

Read more