Category: Democracies

Brazil’s Elections-What’s at Stake?

October 21, 2022

The results of the first round of the general elections in Brazil surprising everyone, given the numbers in the polls on voters’ intentions carried out by various institutes in the weeks prior to election day. In the Oct. 2 vote, former president Luis Inácio Lula da Silva almost made the 50% cut to win without a run-off, garnering 48.4% of the valid votes (57 million votes), but the surprise was that current president Jair Bolsonaro obtained 43, 2% of valid votes (51 million votes), a figure that far exceeded the projections in the polls up until the eve of the elections and demonstrated a degree of resilience and social penetration of the Brazilian extreme right that the progressive camp did not imagine existed.

Irrelevance and clashes at the Summit of the Americas

August 10, 2022

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.

Native leadership, key to open climate justice door

April 18, 2022

With the release in April of the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the time is ripe to celebrate a breakthrough by Indigenous Peoples in participation on the scientific advisory board that guides global warming policy for 195 U.N. countries. Opinion leaders should push the envelope for more of the same.

Latin America, the Caribbean, and the War in Ukraine

April 13, 2022

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.

Senate Investigation on COVID handling bad news for Bolsonaro re-election bid

January 12, 2022

The Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (CPI) that investigated president Jair Bolsonaro’s handling of the Covid 19 pandemic presented its report in October 2021. The conclusions of the investigation are bad news for the Brazilian president. The Covid CPI calls for the indictment of the president for at least nine crimes, among them crimes against humanity.

Indigenous Peoples in Latin America, between States’ criminalization and the violence of armed groups

December 20, 2021

Indigenous Peoples in Latin America are facing a profoundly grave situation. They are on the losing end in the gap between the development of national and international normative standards for the protection of their rights and their lack of implementation on the ground. They not only face the State’s force, imposing “development” projects and dispossessing them from their lands; but also illegal armed groups that dispute their territories with deadly force.