The Petrobras corruption investigation, known locally as Operation Lava Jato (Carwash), entered a new phase last week, when Rodrigo Janot, Brazil’s general prosecutor, implicated 53 politicians from six different political parties. All but two come from President Dilma Rousseff’s Workers’ Party (PT) congressional coalition. Read more »

During the summer of 2014 tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors surged across the U.S-Mexico border. Over the course of the fiscal year, nearly 70,000—mostly from the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—endured brutal and at times even deadly conditions as they made their way to the United States. While most of these children were between the ages of 13 and 17, the fastest growing group was 6 to 12 years old. Of the many factors that influenced their individual decisions, four stand out. Read more »

The news and statistics from Guatemala are anything but reassuring. More than half the nation’s sixteen million citizens live in poverty. Worse, almost one in two children under five suffer from chronic malnutrition, which affects not just their immediate well-being but also limits their physical and intellectual potential for the rest of their lives. Read more »

Last month, I had the pleasure of joining Charlie Rose on his show along with Jorge Castañeda, Mexico’s former foreign minister, and Francisco Goldman, contributor to The New Yorker, to discuss Mexican President Peña Nieto’s meeting with President Obama last month and US-Mexico relations more broadly. Recently aired, you can watch the interview here.

Yesterday, I had the privilege to testify before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere at a hearing titled “The Strategic Importance of the Western Hemisphere: Defining U.S. Interests in the Region.” Also joining me before the subcommittee were Bonnie Glick, senior vice president at Meridian International Center, Evan Ellis, research professor at the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, and Eric Farnsworth, vice president of Council of the Americas. Read more »

For the twenty years since the start of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the United States failed to fulfill its treaty obligations to open its roads and permit safe cross-border services. As part of the original agreement, Mexican trucks were supposed to be able to operate in four U.S. states—Texas, California, New Mexico, and Arizona—by December 1995, and then throughout the continental United States by January 1, 2000. Almost fifteen years later, the vast majority of Mexican trucks are still not allowed on U.S. roads. Mexico retaliated in kind, blocking the movement of U.S. trucks within its borders. In 2009, Mexico also applied retaliatory tariffs on a yearly rotating basis to a variety of U.S. imports, permitted by a favorable 2001 NAFTA dispute settlement panel ruling. Read more »

The region will hold just two presidential elections this year, choosing new leaders in Guatemala and Argentina. More prevalent will be congressional and local elections. Midterms in Mexico, Venezuela, and Colombia in particular may prove bellwethers for the direction of these three important regional economies. Read more »

December 20 marks the 25^th anniversary of Operation Just Cause, better remembered as the U.S. invasion of Panama. Set off by the death of an off-duty Marine lieutenant by Panamanian security forces, the invasion represented the final step in a deteriorating relationship between the United States and Manuel Noriega—once a CIA informant and close ally, later a defiant dictator, undone by the winding down of the Cold War and his own brazen corruption. The lopsided confrontation ended by early January of 1990, when Noriega surrendered to U.S. authorities. He was then extradited, tried, convicted, and eventually sentenced to twenty years in U.S. federal prison for drug-trafficking, racketeering, and money-laundering. Read more »

Geopolitically, U.S. policymakers generally see high oil prices as bad and low oil prices as good for national interests. In a CFR Working Paper I coauthored with Michael Levi and Alexandra Mahler-Haug we find a sustained drop in oil prices will affect at least one of the United States’ closest trading partners and geopolitical allies negatively: Mexico. Read more »

This is a guest post by Matthew Michaelides, an intern here at the Council on Foreign Relations who works with me in the Latin America program.

This week world leaders meet in Lima, Peru to discuss the framework for a new UN climate change agreement. The big issues for discussion include financing clean energy projects and implementing cap-and-trade policies, building on the release of a new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a landmark climate change accord between the United States and China. Read more »