Posts:
By Mark Stevenson President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office in 2018 hoping to recover Mexico’s old reputation as the diplomatic leader of Latin America, but what he’s managed to do is get several of his country’s ambassadors kicked out of countries in the...
By Ray Horsley A recent article in CuencaHighLife made the claim that Boomer parents are to blame for their millennial kids not being responsible. It mostly addressed financial responsibility but also blamed these parents in a vague way for not preparing their...
By Surita Sandosham The Covid-19 pandemic, protests by indigenous groups and El Niño flooding have landed devastating blows to poor Ecuadorians who live in precarious situations. Add to these, the disruptions of recent drug gang violence affecting some areas of the...
By Garry Vatcher When I was just a little boy, a long, long time ago, my mother was really worried about a loan payment that was due. My father worked away from home and he called to say he had to work overtime and it would be a few days before he would be back with...
By Erika Mouynes The US presidential campaigns this year are expected to see more than $10bn spent on advertisements, and the main issue will almost certainly be immigration. A popular social media hashtag related to Latin America in the US has been #securetheborder....
By Garry Vatcher An article posted on this site earlier in the week has stirred up a lot of questions about tax filing requirements in Ecuador. The article was based on the advice of a Cuenca accountant but, as many of us have learned, if you ask five professionals...
By Gabriela Barzallo “In a’ingae, my native language, the words oil, contamination, and cancer did not exist until Texaco arrived on our lands,” says Don Arturo, an elder among the A’i Kofán Siangoé people, one of Ecuador’s 11 Amazonian communities. The A’i Kofán...
By Matthew Bristow and Stephan Kueffner It’s the kind of opportunity most leaders can hardly fathom: voters rallying behind a government that is raising taxes, clearing the way for more oil drilling and planning to slash fuel subsidies. Ecuador’s 36-year-old President...
By Shannon O’Neil When policymakers consider national security, they tend to think first of military capabilities: the weaponry and ammunition a country possesses, the state of its armed forces, its border defenses, its surveillance and cybersecurity. Since 2020,...
By James Kirchick Fourteen years ago, at a human rights conference in Oslo, I met Julian Assange. From the moment I encountered the wraithlike WikiLeaks founder, I sensed that he might be a morally dubious character. My suspicions were confirmed upon witnessing his...
By Brian Winter When masked criminals in Ecuador invaded a TV station, took prison guards and police hostage and paralyzed the business capital of Guayaquil in early January, the prevailing reaction across the Americas was: Oh no, here we go again. Another country...
By Kashmir Hill This time of year, everyone asks what you like least about your life, but they phrase it as, “What’s your New Year’s resolution?” My biggest regret of 2023 was my relationship to my smartphone, or my “tech appendage” as I’ve named it in my iPhone...
By Samir Tounsi and David Salazar As Ecuador wages war against criminal gangs, experts warn that similar security crackdowns have produced mixed results elsewhere in Latin America -- and sometimes even led to worse violence. President Daniel Noboa has deployed more...
By Kyle Smith Say, kids, did you know “Blazing Saddles” is “an overt and audacious spoof on classic Westerns”? Well, now you do, thanks to the trigger warning that has just been slapped on the movie by HBO Max, which hired University of Chicago professor Jacqueline...
By Carolina Mella President Daniel Noboa made a campaign promise to purchase prison ships to house the leaders of the gangs that operate in the country’s penitentiaries 80 miles off Ecuador’s Pacific coast. Delivering on that promise, he now says that he has seen...
By Roger Livingston Several months ago I attended the Japan Day fair at the city museum on Benigno Malo and talked to one of the Japanese-Ecuadorian vendors. He told me about all the support the Japanese government offers its citizens living overseas. He explained...
By Edward Gibson About 20 per cent of the United States population (65 million out of 330 million people) are non-native speakers of English. Speaking multiple languages has advantages – for example, you get to talk to people from different cultures. But being a...
By Kyle Harper At some time or another, every historian of Rome has been asked to say where we are, today, on Rome’s cycle of decline. Historians might squirm at such attempts to use the past but, even if history does not repeat itself, nor come packaged into moral...
By John Raby When those of us of a certain age were in school, we learned that the Monroe Doctrine committed the United States to protect the independence of Latin American nations, which had just freed themselves from Spanish and Portuguese rule. While it granted...
By Carolina Mella When Guillermo Lasso stepped down as president on Thursday, he had been in office for 913 days. During this period, Ecuador gradually collapsed politically, socially and economically. The state of affairs has become so extreme and rapid that for the...
