South america

Monday

Dave Seminara

Escaping the city in Argentina

Planning a foreign trip is a bit like watching a trailer for a film. The research is a preview of coming attractions. I almost never made it to San Antonio de Areco, a charming country town about seventy miles northwest of Buenos Aires, because it seemed extravagantly expensive and complicated to visit. But trailers can be misleading, perseverance is a virtue, and Areco, as the locals call it, turned out to be the highlight of my visit to Argentina last summer. With just a week to spend in the world’s eighth largest country by land area, my plan was to spend four days in Buenos Aires and three in a small town, a place I hoped would give us an idea of what the country’s gaucho heartland is about.

argentina

Wednesday

John Pietro

The Paraguay predicament over Taiwan

On April 30, Paraguayans will go to the polls to select a new president. Though elections in the landlocked South American nation do not typically make headlines around the world, this vote carries outsized geopolitical importance: it could mean Taiwan loses yet another country to China. Opposition candidate Efraín Alegre of the Authentic Radical Liberal Party, or PLRA, has said that, should he win, he will retract Paraguay’s recognition of Taiwan as a country. At present, Paraguay is the largest of just fourteen countries to have formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan and the only one in South America. Paraguay first recognized Taipei in 1957 while under the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner.

paraguay

Thursday

Ben Kew

The Pink Tide returns to Latin America

As the dust settled on Jair Bolsonaro’s seismic victory in Brazil back in 2018, one might have spared a thought for those dedicated to the cause of international socialism. Having bathed in the glory of the so-called "Pink Tide" and the commodities boom of the early 2000s that allowed socialist governments such as Hugo Chávez's Venezuela to seemingly prosper, any hopes that Latin America would forever unify in the cause of left-wing anti-imperialism seemed well and truly dashed. In many of the continent’s wealthiest countries, right-of-center politicians had swept to power with a view to restoring their nation’s former glory. These included Bolsonaro in Brazil, Sebastian Piñera in Chile, Ivan Duque in Colombia, and Mauricio Macri in Argentina, among others.

Thursday

Benjamin Fogel

Bogotá in full bloom

Everyone comes to Bogotá looking for something. It’s always been that way. A thousand years ago, indigenous traders traveled to the markets in the Bogotá savanna to barter with the Muisca and exchange gold, emeralds, salt and cotton. The Spaniards arrived five centuries later in search of the treasures of conquest and the mythical city of gold that now lends its name to the international airport: El Dorado. The great revolutionary Simón Bolívar came in search of the capital of his South America republic Gran Colombia and to liberate the continent from Spanish rule. I didn’t know what I was looking for when I first arrived in Bogotá.

Bogotá