Economist, North America

ÔÇ£THE BOLIVIAN people wonÔÇÖt accept seeing those who have the privilege of directing our collective destiny using their power and the resources of state institutions...to change the rules of democracy and benefit themselves.ÔÇØ So wrote Samuel Doria Medina, a businessman and politician, in a newspaper column on January 26th. He was referring to Jeanine ├ü├▒ez, a previously obscure opposition senator who in November became BoliviaÔÇÖs caretaker president. Evo Morales, a leftist strongman, was overthrown that month by protests over electoral fraud. To the dismay of many outsiders, Ms ├ü├▒ez decided to stand herself in the re-run election, to be held on May 3rd. Her attempt ÔÇ£should be bannedÔÇØ, wrote Mr Doria.

A few days later Mr Doria became Ms ├ü├▒ezÔÇÖs running-mate. The priority, he said, was unity to prevent the return of Mr MoralesÔÇÖs Movement to Socialism (MAS) and Ms ├ü├▒ez was the candidate best placed to achieve that. This shows that pragmatism is trumping principle among Mr MoralesÔÇÖs opponents. But if Ms ├ü├▒ez triumphs, it may provide additional ammunition to those who claim that Mr Morales was the victim of a coup. And that may presage further instability in Bolivia.

Mr Morales, who was the first elected president of indigenous descent, used natural-gas revenues to build schools, roads and clinics in poor areas. He spoke up for...

LIDIA FLORENCIO GUERRERO keeps a candlelit shrine to her daughter, Diana, who in 2017 was raped and murdered in Chimalhuac├ín, a Mexican town. She has a file documenting how police bungled the investigation. They failed to cordon off the crime scene or wear gloves while handling DianaÔÇÖs body. Her clothes went missing. Photos of the corpse were sloppily taken, says DianaÔÇÖs sister, Laura. Ms Guerrero cannot look. She uses the word ÔÇ£femicideÔÇØ to describe her daughterÔÇÖs death.

The word is centuries old but has recently taken on a particular meaning: the murder of a female because of her sex. In Latin America femicide has a legal meaning, too. Since 2007 15 countries have recognised it as a distinct category of killing. The proportion of murders of women that are recognised as femicide varies widely. In Mexico, where the criteria include ÔÇ£degradingÔÇØ injuries or sexual violence inflicted on the victim and a ÔÇ£sentimental relationshipÔÇØ between her and the killer, the share is about a quarter. Countries in other regions, such as France, are debating whether to adopt femicide laws.

The concept of femicide raises public awareness of violence against women, says Martha Cecilia Reyes, head of the womenÔÇÖs institute of Nuevo Le├│n, a state in northern Mexico. It is supposed to help bring perpetrators to justice. In many countries jail...

MEXICANS HAVE been outraged this month by two brutal murders: one of a woman whose body was mutilated by her partner, the other of a seven-year-old girl who was kidnapped and seemingly tortured. Needless to say, neither of these cases was the fault of MexicoÔÇÖs president, Andr├®s Manuel L├│pez Obrador (known as AMLO). But he is the man in charge. When questioned at his early-morning press conferences about the wave of violence against women in his country, his first response was to blame a ÔÇ£progressive degradation [in Mexican society] which had to do with the neoliberal modelÔÇØ that he accuses his predecessors of adopting. He then claimed that feminist groups, who blame the violence on patriarchy and lawlessness, had been infiltrated by conservatives, and tried to change the subject.

This episode conforms to the pattern of AMLOÔÇÖs 15 months in the presidency. If the motto of Porfirio D├¡az, MexicoÔÇÖs dictator from 1877 to 1911, was ÔÇ£little politics, much administrationÔÇØ, AMLOÔÇÖs guiding formula seems to be almost the opposite. He inherited three big problems: rampant crime, including violence against women; slow economic growth; and corruption. On the first two issues, Mexico is at best treading water.

A 12-year war with drug gangs drove the murder rate up and helped spread insecurity across the country. AMLO promised to stop...

THUNDERSTORMS OFTEN show up uninvited to Carnival in Brazil. The authorities in Rio de Janeiro used to share meteorological data with a group of spiritual mediums who claimed to have rain-dispelling powers. That ended with the election of an evangelical mayor in 2016. 

This yearÔÇÖs attempt to sway the skies took place in S├úo Paulo as part of a publicity stunt by the partyÔÇÖs official sponsor, Skol, a Brazilian beer brand. ÔÇ£The fun stops when it rains,ÔÇØ says Pedro Adamy, SkolÔÇÖs marketing director. So do beer sales. 

Enter a company called ModClima. A ModClima aeroplane painted with SkolÔÇÖs logo spritzed water droplets into cumulus clouds to make rain fall before the clouds reached the city. According to a zippy YouTube video that has been viewed 12m times, ÔÇ£Giro na ChuvaÔÇØ (roughly, Reverse the Rain) is a ÔÇ£mission worthy of science fictionÔÇØ.

Whether itÔÇÖs science or fiction is up for debate. The use of cloud-seeding to increase rainfall dates back to the 1940s. But the United States government stopped funding it in the 1980s due to a lack of ÔÇ£scientific proof of the efficacy of intentional weather modificationÔÇØ, according to the National Research Council. A new paper based on experiments in Idaho found that seeding clouds with silver iodide increased snowfall on three occasions, but the authors say that more...

AT ELECTION TIME, it is easy to tell which ethnic group dominates each of the villages strung out along GuyanaÔÇÖs Atlantic coast even without looking at the people. Where Afro-Guyanese are the main group, the green-and-yellow banners of the ruling coalition flutter. In Indo-Guyanese villages, itÔÇÖs the red, gold and black of the opposition PeopleÔÇÖs Progressive Party (PPP). Voting in GuyanaÔÇÖs general election, due to be held on March 2nd, is likely to follow ethnic lines, as it has done for decades. This year the stakes are unusually high. That is because Guyana, South AmericaÔÇÖs third-poorest country, is about to be transformed by the petroleum that has begun to flow from vast offshore reservoirs.

Oil could change Guyana as radically as did sugar, which brought African slaves in the 18th century and indentured labourers from India in the 19th. By 2024 it could lift income per person from $5,000 to $19,000, nearly the same as in Poland. The IMF expects the economy to grow by 85% this year. By 2030 the governmentÔÇÖs share of earnings from oil could reach $10bn in real terms, more than double last yearÔÇÖs GDP. This could ÔÇ£change us once and for all into a Singapore kind of country,ÔÇØ says the finance minister, Winston Jordan. Whichever party takes charge of the bounty could govern for decades. Mr Jordan calls the vote ÔÇ£the mother of all...

ÔÇ£STOP THE INVASION! No pipelines on stolen native land!ÔÇØ So chanted dozens of protesters on a chilly afternoon this week in Vancouver. With placards in hand, they blocked traffic on a busy thoroughfare, doing their part to ÔÇ£shut down CanadaÔÇØ. That has become the rallying cry against the Coastal GasLink pipeline, a C$6.6bn ($5bn) project which will transport natural gas 670km (420 miles) across British Columbia to the Pacific coast, where a liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant is under construction.

The pipeline is an ÔÇ£invasionÔÇØ, detractors say, because about a quarter of its route passes through land traditionally belonging to the WetÔÇÖsuwetÔÇÖen, a First Nations people. Since early February, when police broke up a blockade (with an injunction to do so) local disputes have escalated to national unrest. Allies of the WetÔÇÖsuwetÔÇÖen have organised copycat demonstrations far away from the pipeline itself.

None of this has scuppered the plans, but it has disrupted the economy and embarrassed the Liberal government. Canadian National Railway (CN) shut down lines in the east of the country and temporarily laid off about 450 workers; Via Rail, a passenger service, is doing the same to nearly 1,000. Food, heating fuel, farm exports and commodities are gridlocked. Cars and ships have been unable to get through bridges, ports and the...

AT HIS campaign headquarters on Artigas Boulevard, named after UruguayÔÇÖs founding hero, the man who hopes to be its next one was energised. Luis Lacalle Pou, the countryÔÇÖs conservative president-elect, is 46 years old but looks younger, with floppy brown hair, no jacket and sleeves rolled up. Days ahead of his swearing-in on March 1st, in an interview with The Economist, Mr Lacalle Pou set out a wide range of plans, from relaxing immigration rules to cutting public spending. But what obsessed him most of all was tackling a recent surge in crime (see chart). He lamented that just down the road were ÔÇ£no-go areasÔÇØ overrun with violence. ÔÇ£ItÔÇÖs time to take back the streets,ÔÇØ he said, ÔÇ£by force if need be.ÔÇØ

The first step was to take back power. Last November, in a run-off, Mr Lacalle Pou narrowly defeated Daniel Mart├¡nez, the candidate of the Broad Front, a leftist coalition that had ruled Uruguay for 15 years. (The last president from Mr Lacalle PouÔÇÖs National Party was his father, in the 1990s.) The Broad Front had maintained economic and constitutional stability, and liberalised marijuana use and same-sex marriage. But it also presided over sharp rises in public employment, the fiscal deficit and violent crime. The homicide rate in Uruguay, a traditionally safe country of about 3.5m, shot up by 46% in 2018, to...

ON FEBRUARY 3RD ArgentinaÔÇÖs new Peronist president, Alberto Fern├índez, joined Angela Merkel for dinner at the German chancellery in Berlin. According to press reports, Mrs Merkel asked her guest a question: ÔÇ£What is Peronism? I donÔÇÖt understand. Are you on the left or the right?ÔÇØ Bello imagines a conversation that might have followed.

Mr Fern├índez laughed. He was used to foreigners not knowing much about Argentina besides Evita, tango and hyperinflation. But something about Mrs Merkel suggested that she was only feigning ignorance. ÔÇ£Let me explain,ÔÇØ said Mr Fern├índez cautiously. ÔÇ£First of all, weÔÇÖre not populists. That was an invention of Mauricio Macri, my neo-liberal predecessor. We donÔÇÖt just stir up the masses.ÔÇØ

ÔÇ£Really?ÔÇØ asked Mrs Merkel, sounding unconvinced.

ÔÇ£Really. IÔÇÖm a social democrat,ÔÇØ the president insisted. ÔÇ£The base of Peronism is the trade unions and the poor, whom we always look after. But we also have the industrialists behind us. They liked General Juan Per├│nÔÇÖs protectionism 75 years ago and they like it today. And we have the pope.ÔÇØ

ÔÇ£As always, Per├│n himself put it best,ÔÇØ Mr Fern├índez continued. ÔÇ£In 1972 he told a journalist: ÔÇÿLook, in Argentina, 30% are RadicalsÔǪ30% are conservatives and a similar amount Socialists.ÔÇÖ ÔÇÿSo where are the Peronists?ÔÇÖ asked the journalist. ÔÇÿAh,ÔÇÖ replied...

NAYIB BUKELE, the president of El Salvador, draws notice outside his country for his youth, his jet-black beard and his mastery of social media. Now his authoritarianism is a trending topic. The sight of Mr Bukele entering the National Assembly on February 9th, alongside soldiers toting machine guns, shocked onlookers at home and abroad. He plonked himself in the empty chair reserved for the president of congress. ÔÇ£I liked seeing those empty seats,ÔÇØ he tweeted. ÔÇ£It made it easier for me to imagine them full of honest people who work for the people.ÔÇØ

Congress accused the president of staging an ÔÇ£attempted coupÔÇØ. The Constitutional Court rebuked Mr Bukele. El Faro, a Salvadorean news website, called his stunt ÔÇ£the lowest moment that Salvadorean democracy has lived in three decadesÔÇØ. He retorted, not very reassuringly, ÔÇ£If I were a dictator, I would have taken control of everything.ÔÇØ

Eight months into his presidency Mr Bukele, who at 38 is the worldÔÇÖs second-youngest head of state, has an approval rating of 90%. But his left-leaning New Ideas party, founded in 2018, has not had a chance to win seats in congress. The legislature is dominated by two parties: the left-wing FMLN, the successor to a guerrilla movement that fought a decade-long civil war in the 1980s, and the right-wing Arena party, which...

IN JULY Bernie Sanders hopped on a bus in Detroit with some Americans who have diabetes. They rode across the Canadian border to buy insulin at a tenth of the price they would pay at home. For Mr Sanders, who won the New Hampshire primary on February 11th, joining an ÔÇ£insulin caravanÔÇØ had obvious appeal. He promises ÔÇ£Medicare for allÔÇØ, suggesting that every American should enjoy the lavish public health spending that the elderly receive. He praises Canada for its tough negotiations with drug firms. ÔÇ£We should be doing what the Canadians do,ÔÇØ he declared.

Canadians have their doubts. CanadaÔÇÖs pharmaceutical prices are 25% higher than the average in the OECD, a club of 36 mainly rich countries. American prices are higher still, largely because the United States has powerful drug firms, no price-setting regulator and lots of citizens who receive health insurance through their employers and have little idea how much it costs. Unlike Canada, the United States also lets drugmakers advertise directly to consumers. As a share of GDP, CanadaÔÇÖs pharmaceutical spending is the fifth-highest in the OECD (see chart).

It is the only country with publicly financed universal health care that does not provide universal coverage for prescription drugs. A fifth of Canadians have no drug insurance. Nearly 1m say they spend less on food or...

IT IS ECUADORÔÇÖS trial of the century. On February 10th the countryÔÇÖs top court is expected to open criminal proceedings against Rafael Correa, president from 2007 to 2017, and 20 other people. They are charged with taking and giving bribes, which they deny. Mr Correa, who moved to Belgium shortly after leaving office, hopes to play a big role in the presidential and legislative elections due in February next year. His trial may determine whether he can.

EcuadorÔÇÖs current president, Len├¡n Moreno, has spent nearly three years trying to undo Mr CorreaÔÇÖs legacy. He had been Mr CorreaÔÇÖs vice-president and was seen as his heir. Once in office, Mr Moreno turned on his patron. He went after corrupt members of Mr CorreaÔÇÖs administration and took steps to restore independence to the judiciary and the press, which Mr Correa had curbed. The new president replaced his predecessorÔÇÖs incontinent spending with a programme of austerity, backed with a $4.2bn loan from the IMF. He expelled Julian Assange, a co-founder of WikiLeaks, from EcuadorÔÇÖs embassy in London, where Mr Correa had offered refuge.

But the undoing project has run into trouble. Mr MorenoÔÇÖs attempt to end fuel subsidies provoked massive protests in October, which forced him to retreat. His approval rating is less than 20%. Mr Moreno says that he does not plan to run for re-...

SOME WONDERED if the bosses of VenezuelaÔÇÖs oldest rum company had been sampling too much of their product. In January, with Venezuela in one of the deepest recessions in modern world history, Ron Santa Teresa launched the countryÔÇÖs first public share issue in more than a decade. The new equity was priced in bol├¡vares, the worldÔÇÖs worst performing currency. Others speculated that the rum-maker, which cheekily notes on its website that its distillery in the Aragua valley near Caracas has survived ÔÇ£wars, revolutions, invasions, even dictatorsÔÇØ, had decided that change was afoot.

Evidence of the latter interpretation is that the latest dictator, Nicol├ís Maduro, has recently become a capitalist, sort of. The disciple of Hugo Ch├ívez (whose ÔÇ£21st-century socialismÔÇØ set Venezuela on its road to ruin) has quietly lifted price controls and restrictions on dollar transactions. He now says firms can issue securities in hard currencies. He is thought to be contemplating a sale to foreign investors of a stake in PDVSA, the decrepit state oil company.

Ron Santa TeresaÔÇÖs president, Alberto Vollmer, a fifth-generation rum-maker, says the company, whose shares were already listed, needs the money to buy barrels and build warehouses. It signed an international-distribution deal with Bacardi in 2016. Mr MaduroÔÇÖs tentative...

COLOMBIANS PAY more for wine than most Latin Americans. The price shoots up as soon as a case reaches shore. Each time a shipment arrives, importers must submit at least eight forms to as many agencies. Officials can take up to 15 days to clear it. In the meantime, importers store their bottles in climate-controlled warehouses. When a permit finally comes, bad roads and high trucking charges mean that merchants pay among the highest freight bills in the world to ship the wine to Bogotá, the capital, where most customers are. By the time it reaches a dinner table a bottle of wine costs eight times more than in its country of origin. Its costly journey is the rule, not the exception, for products imported by Colombia.

It used to be easier. The government liberalised the economy in the early 1990s after decades of protectionism. At that time Colombia depended on exports of coffee, the price of which was plummeting. In an effort to diversify the economy and make it more productive, the government reduced tariffs and eliminated lists of items whose import was prohibited.

That openness lasted just a few years. Owners of factories and sugar mills, dairy farmers, rice growers and regional governments, which own distillers of aguardiente, a local tipple, were hurt by competition. They lobbied to restore...

UNDER THE banner of ÔÇ£religion and traditional (ecclesiastical) privilegesÔÇØ, in 1858 Mexican Conservatives rose in arms against a Liberal constitution which declared freedom of worship and ended a rule preventing Catholic church property from being transferred to anyone else. After a three-year war, the liberal principles of religious toleration and the separation of church and state triumphed. In the following decades they spread across Latin America. Now, it seems, this 19th-century political battle has to be fought all over again.

The new blurring of the divide between spiritual and temporal realms owes much to the rise of evangelical Protestantism. Although 69% of Latin Americans were still Catholics in 2014, 19% were Protestants (26% in Brazil and more than 40% in three Central American countries), says a Pew poll. The number of Protestants is likely to have risen since then. Most are Pentecostals.

They emphasise a literal reading of the Bible and a direct personal relationship with God through baptism with the Holy Spirit. Many want their beliefs to shape public policy. Their concern is mainly, but not solely, to oppose gay rights and abortion. In some cases they dismiss science and have intervened in foreign policy. Some question the separation of church and state.

Jair Bolsonaro, BrazilÔÇÖs populist...

SAN ANDR├®S DE TUPICOCHA starts every year by swearing in new leaders, like many small towns in Peru. Instead of giving the office-holders a sash or medal it gives them a quipu, a coloured skein of knotted cords.

Quipus, or khipu, which means knots or talking knots in Quechua, were used to administer the vast empire of the Incas, which lasted for about a century until 1533. No one alive knows just how. San Andr├®s, in the highlands near Lima, is the last place in Peru where quipus have an official role, and that is ceremonial. ÔÇ£They represent who we are,ÔÇØ says Tito Rojas, president of one of the townÔÇÖs ten communities. In December PeruÔÇÖs government declared its ritual of bestowing them on community leaders like Mr Rojas to be part of the countryÔÇÖs cultural heritage.

The townÔÇÖs quipus are thought to date from after PeruÔÇÖs independence from Spain in 1821. They were used until the mid-20th century to record attendance at meetings, says Roy Vilcayauri, a former mayor. But the last person who could read that set died in 1990.

Scholars have been trying to puzzle out what messages are encoded in the knotted tally cords, which are usually made from dyed alpaca wool (they can also contain fibres from llamas, vicu├▒as and cotton). The type of knot, their number and their spacing...

LAST YEAR Nat├ília Ribeiro sent her five-year-old daughter to live with relatives because she could not afford to feed her. She had tried to sign up for Bolsa Fam├¡lia (Family Fund), a conditional cash-transfer programme that supports millions of poor Brazilians. That includes 80% of families in Bel├ígua, a town of 7,000 people in Maranh├úo, the poorest state. Ms Ribeiro should have been a shoo-in. She has no income. Her three children get regular health check-ups and will go to school, she promises. That is a precondition for receiving the monthly benefits, which start at 89 reais ($21). She has been waiting since May. ÔÇ£I want a better life for my little ones,ÔÇØ says the 24-year-old, who has long eyelashes like the baby in her lap and the toddler playing with a piece of wood on the floor. 

In June last year BrazilÔÇÖs populist government, which had taken office five months before, slowed the acceptance of new beneficiaries and started cancelling payments to existing ones. The number of families admitted to Bolsa Fam├¡lia has dropped from 275,000 a month to fewer than 2,500. The number receiving benefits has fallen by 1m. The government says that 700,000 are on the waiting list, which may be an underestimate.

To critics of Jair Bolsonaro, BrazilÔÇÖs president, this is evidence of his indifference to poverty. Mr Bolsonaro...

IT WAS THE most popular thing any Peruvian president has done in a long time. Facing a serially obstructive congress widely seen as defending corrupt interests, in September Mart├¡n Vizcarra decreed its dissolution. This was constitutionally questionable and set a worrying precedent. But in political terms, the outcome of an election held on January 26th to replace the dissolved congress vindicated Mr Vizcarra. It also highlighted the weaknesses of PeruÔÇÖs political system, and has not made his project of institutional reform any easier.

Mr Vizcarra, who was elected as vice-president in 2016, took over the top job almost two years ago when Pedro Pablo Kuczynski resigned over conflicts of interest. He inherited a battle with congress, dominated by the opposition led by Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of a former president. When leaked phone calls revealed apparent collusion among some judges and opposition lawmakers, Mr Vizcarra successfully appealed for public support in a referendum on reforms of the judiciary and politics.

That gave him the initiative, but only for a while. To break the deadlock Mr Vizcarra proposed calling an early general election. Ignoring this, the fujimoristas went ahead with a rushed vote to appoint new justices to the constitutional tribunal. The president claimed that this...

LAST JUNE the Intercept, a news site, published hacked messages that showed improper collaboration between Brazilian prosecutors and judges conducting the anti-corruption investigation known as Lava Jato (Car Wash). The leaks tarnished the image of Sergio Moro, the justice minister, who had been the judge in charge. They enraged BrazilÔÇÖs nationalist president, Jair Bolsonaro, whose election in 2018 owed much to anger about corruption.

On January 21st prosecutors filed charges against Glenn Greenwald (pictured), a co-founder of the Intercept. They accused him of belonging to a ÔÇ£criminal organisationÔÇØ that hacked the mobile phones of members of the Lava Jato task-force. The judge overseeing the case may throw out the charges. Even so, they raise questions about how free the press will be in Mr BolsonaroÔÇÖs Brazil and whether prosecutors will act independently.

Mr Greenwald, an American, became famous by helping publish Edward SnowdenÔÇÖs leaks of information from the United StatesÔÇÖ National Security Agency. In July Mr Bolsonaro suggested that Mr Greenwald might ÔÇ£do jail timeÔÇØ for his Lava Jato revelations, and accused him of marrying his Brazilian husband to avoid deportation. That month, after a rumour surfaced that investigators were scrutinising Mr GreenwaldÔÇÖs bank accounts, a supreme-court judge barred the authorities...

IN 1939 CARLOS DENEGRI, a young reporter, investigated a murder by gunmen working for Maximino ├üvila Camacho, the governor of the state of Puebla and brother of the next president of Mexico. Denegri delivered a detailed account of ├üvilaÔÇÖs crimes to the editor of Exc├®lsior, the countryÔÇÖs most important newspaper. The editor did not publish it, explaining that the governor was a source of much paid advertising. ÔÇ£In this business we donÔÇÖt only sell information and advertising space: above all, we sell silence,ÔÇØ he went on. Denegri quickly lost his idealism, and accepted a monthly stipend from the governor ÔÇ£for publicity and information servicesÔÇØ.

These imagined words provide Enrique Serna, a Mexican writer, with the title of his new novel, El vendedor de silencio (ÔÇ£The Merchant of SilenceÔÇØ), a semi-fictionalised biography of Denegri, the countryÔÇÖs most prominent journalist from the 1940s to the 1960s and once named by the Associated Press as one of the ten most influential reporters in the world. Mr Serna offers a rich account of the incestuous relationship between politics and the media and the machismo and impunity that lay at the heart of the authoritarian rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which governed for seven decades...

ON A RECENT afternoon, workmen were repairing the wall around the Senkata gas plant in El Alto, a working-class city in the mountains above La Paz, BoliviaÔÇÖs administrative capital. Backers of Evo Morales, the left-wing president who quit on November 10th, had blocked lorries from leaving the plant and knocked down the wall. On November 19th soldiers opened fire, killing ten people. Fresh paint now covers much of the rebuilt wall, but one mural remains from the chaotic presidential campaign that preceded Mr MoralesÔÇÖs resignation: his face and the word estabilidad (stability) in big capital letters. Restoring that to Bolivia will involve much more than fixing the wall. ÔÇ£The country is coming out of shock,ÔÇØ says Milenka Garc├¡a, a vice-president of El AltoÔÇÖs neighbourhood association (Fejuve) who represents District 8, an area of cinder-block homes and dusty streets that includes the gas plant.

The crisis began on October 20th, when Mr Morales, who became BoliviaÔÇÖs first indigenous president in 2006, tried to rig his re-election, sparking protests across the country. He fled to Mexico after losing the support of the police and the army, saying he had been toppled in a coup. His supporters set fire to buses and the homes of politicians and journalists who had criticised him. Opposition protesters burned the...