After being besieged relentlessly throughout his 16 months in office, Pedro Castillo was removed from the presidency on December 7 by Peru’s national Congress after he announced a gutting of the institutional order. Castillo’s attempt to dissolve Congress was followed just hours later by the move to “vacate” him, the third attempt during his term, and the first successful one.
Two major developments can be inferred from the results of the November 8, 2022 mid-term elections in the United States. First, the voters did not punish Joe Biden after his first two years as president as the pre-election polls had predicted they would. Consequently, Donald Trump’s political standing has diminished along with the legitimacy of his leadership role in the Republican Party.
The IX Summit of the Americas was on the wrong path from the very beginning. For the first time since its creation in 1994, this meeting in which all the leaders of the Americas meet triennially, was held a year late.
As Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine moves through its second month, its unconcealable economic impact continues to grow at the global level.
The conversations in Mexico between the opposition Unitary Plataform of Venezuela and the Maduro government, with the intermediation of Norway, represent the failure of the US interventionist strategy and the end of the Lima Group.
Two recent events have activated the possibility of relaunching Latin American and Caribbean cooperation and coordination, so neglected during the last five years: Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s (AMLO) speech during the meeting of Foreign Ministers during the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and that of the newly appointed Foreign Minister of Peru, Héctor Béjar, during his inauguration at the Torre Tagle Palace in Lima, who recently made a 180-degree turn in Peru’s foreign policy.
Fujimori and her lawyers know they have lost the elections. What they are trying to do is to delay the process to generate chaos, uncertainty and terrorize the people.
The May 15th and 16th elections in Chile, which encompassed concurrently the vote for the 155 delegates to the Constituent Assembly as well as the vote for municipal officials and regional governors, has exposed the dismal failure of the government and rightwing parties while sanctioning the triumph of the independent candidates.
The situation in Latin America is serious. Only enough doses are available to vaccinate 5% of the population during a period of high infection rates and a rising death toll that have forced many countries in the region to reimpose confinement orders in the face of a collapse of its hospital services capabilities.
Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica and Mexico proposed suspending the election for president of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), scheduled for September until March 2021, to prevent Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser for Latin America, the Cuban-American Mauricio Claver-Carone, from taking over the powerful regional post.
