El Diario de Tristán

IN FEW corners of the world would a car park squeezed between two arms of an elevated highway be seen as prime real estate. In Toronto, however, a 75-storey condominium is planned for such an awkward site, near the waterfront. The car park next door will become a pair of 70-storey towers too. In total, 173 sky-scrapers are being built in Toronto, the most in North America. New York is second with 96.When the United States saw a vast housing bubble inflate and burst during the 2000s, many Canadians felt smug about the purported prudence of their financial and property markets. During the crash, Canadian house prices fell by just 8%, compared with more than 30% in America. They hit new record highs by 2010. “Canada was not a part of the problem,” Stephen Harper, the prime minister, boasted in 2010.Today the consensus is growing on Bay Street, Toronto’s answer to Wall Street, that Mr Harper may have to eat his words. In response to America’s slow economic recovery and uncertainty in Europe, the Bank of Canada has kept interest rates at record lows. Five-year fixed-rate mortgages now charge interest of just 2.99%. In...

SEEN from the air, much of Puerto Rico’s northern coast is a mosaic of rooftops and treetops dotted with countless baseball diamonds. The island of 4m has sent a total of 234 players to America’s Major League Baseball (MLB)—twice as many as Mexico. Its Baseball Hall of Fame, just outside San Juan, features a salon full of life-size statues of Puerto Rico’s athletic pantheon. It even includes a famous broadcaster seated at his microphone.Today, however, the fields are mostly used for football. Just 2.6% of MLB players are Puerto Rican, down from 4.3% in 2001. The island’s renowned winter baseball league cancelled its season in 2007. A typical game now draws fewer spectators than nearby women’s volleyball matches. Its four teams are on the block for around $750,000 each. No one is buying.Several factors account for this decline. They include better job opportunities outside sports and competition from basketball, reggaetón music, multiplexes and malls. But the biggest was MLB’s inclusion of the island in its amateur draft in 1990....

LYING between Colombia’s coca bushes and Mexico’s cocaine traffickers, Central America is a choke point on the drugs trail. In 2010 the smugglers ensured that Honduras, El Salvador, Belize and Guatemala were among the world’s seven most violent countries. Costa Rica and Panama are richer and safer. But since 2007 their murder rates have respectively risen by a third and nearly doubled.Amid this inferno Nicaragua, the poorest country in mainland Latin America, is remarkably safe. Whereas Honduras’s murder rate in 2010 was 82 per 100,000 people, the world’s highest in over a decade, Nicaragua’s was just 13, unchanged in five years. That means it is now less violent than booming Panama, and may soon be safer than Costa Rica, a tourist haven. What explains the relative peace?Spending is not the answer. With a GDP per head of $1,100, Nicaragua can afford only 18 policemen for every 10,000 people, the lowest ratio in the region. (Panama has 50.) Earning $120 per month, its officers are also the worst-paid. Nor does Nicaragua spend much on prisons: it jails just 120 people per 100,000, compared with 390 in El Salvador. This may work in its favour: El Salvador’s violent mara gangs look for recruits in the country’s packed prisons.Nicaragua’s distaste for its neighbours’ mano dura (“iron fist”) policies grew out of the 1979 revolt...

THE double-decker tour buses leaving the centre of Cuenca, Ecuador’s third city, rarely carry even ten passengers. Yet when Andrés and Rocío Molina held a viewing of their two-bedroom house for interested Americans, some 30 boarded a bus provided by the estate agent.For three straight years this city of 330,000 people has topped International Living magazine’s ranking of retirement spots. American diplomats say some 5,000 expatriates from the United States, mostly over 55, now live in Cuenca, which has enough colonial and 19th-century architecture to qualify as a UNESCO world heritage site.The city offers a packed schedule of events, including an international art biennale and the national hockey tournament. Its private health clinics are well-regarded and cheap: a doctor’s visit runs to $30 and insurance costs $100 a month. Its public spaces, like the El Vado walk on a bluff overlooking the Tomebamba river, are being renovated, and many stately homes have been converted into smart restaurants and boutique hotels. People...

IN APRIL 2010, as part of a scheme to beautify the rundown port near the centre of Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 Olympic games, workers were replacing the drainage system in a shabby square when they found some old cans. The city called in archaeologists, whose excavations unearthed the ruins of Valongo, once Brazil’s main landing stage for African slaves.From 1811 to 1843 around 500,000 slaves arrived there, according to Tânia Andrade Lima, the head archaeologist. Valongo was a complex, including warehouses where slaves were sold and a cemetery. Hundreds of plastic bags, stored in shipping containers parked on a corner of the site, hold personal objects lost or hidden by the slaves, or taken from them. They include delicate bracelets and rings woven from vegetable fibre; lumps of amethyst and stones used in African worship; and cowrie shells, a common currency in Africa.It is a poignant reminder of the scale and duration of the slave trade to Brazil. Of the 10.7m African slaves shipped across the Atlantic between the 16th and 19th centuries, 4.9m landed there....

“THE change has begun. The change has arrived,” declared Otto Pérez Molina as he donned Guatemala’s presidential sash on January 14th. Quoting Mayan astronomers who set the start of a new 5,125-year epoch in 2012, Mr Pérez, a former general, vowed to save the country from its “crisis” of crime and poverty.Guatemala has grave problems and feeble means to combat them. Its murder rate of 39 per 100,000 people, partly spurred by drug gangs, is among the world’s highest. Slow violence is done on a bigger scale by malnutrition, which stalks half the country’s children, the worst rate in the Americas. Government revenues are just over a tenth of GDP, the region’s lowest share.Mr Pérez won the election by pledging an “iron fist” against crime and corruption, which he says have “infected” the state. Supporters hope for army-style efficiency. Critics worry that as head of military intelligence during some of the country’s 36-year civil war, he must have known of the atrocities committed by his side. Mr Pérez’s backers note that he negotiated the 1996 peace accords, which shrunk the army.The president has promised results fast. Mauricio López Bonilla, the interior minister, says he hopes to cut the murder rate to 30-35 per 100,000 by July. He plans to increase the police force’s ranks by 40% and the army’s by 22%. Claudia Paz y Paz, the attorney-general, will stay on, despite pursuing...

SOON after Barack Obama chose to delay a decision last year on a proposed Alberta-to-Texas oil pipeline called Keystone XL, Stephen Harper, Canada’s prime minister, warned that his country would not be left at the altar. “This does underscore the necessity of Canada making sure that we’re able to access Asian markets for our energy products,” he said. The threat was clear: if the United States did not want oil from Alberta’s dirty tar sands, Canada would build a pipeline to the Pacific and ship the stuff to Asia. There, says Enbridge, the firm behind the project, each barrel might fetch $20 more (counting shipping) than in America. On January 18th Mr Obama rejected Keystone XL. New calls for Canada to look west will surely follow.

Yet the domestic opponents to the Northern Gateway pipeline, linking Edmonton with the port of Kitimat, seem to be copying the campaign against Keystone XL. In 2010, 55 of Canada’s native tribes (called First Nations) signed a declaration rejecting the project. At the first day of the National Energy Board’s (NEB) hearings on the pipeline, held on January 10th, the chiefs of the...

AFTER a fortnight of Christmas fiestas, Mexicans groggily returned to work two weeks ago. Or rather, most of them did. For the 500 deputies and 128 senators of the national Congress, the holidays roll on until February. Mexico’s lawmakers sit for only 195 days a year, the fewest among Latin America’s bigger countries. (Their $11,200-a-month pay, however, is the highest after Brazil’s.) When they do stir themselves to vote, it is more often to block rivals’ bills than to pass reforms.Gridlock in the palace of San Lázaro partly explains why Felipe Calderón’s presidency, which ends in December, now looks like a six-year damp squib. Mr Calderón has identified many of Mexico’s bottlenecks. But most of his big proposals have floundered in Congress. A modest fiscal reform passed in 2007 was eased along only by an electoral law to help the opposition. Last year a competition law tentatively prodded the country’s mighty monopolies. But changes to the backward energy sector in 2008 were diluted beyond recognition. A reform of the political system has been similarly gutted and is yet to pass. And there is still no sign of a...

THERE are not many places in the world these days where Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can count on red-carpet treatment. So his five-day visit this week to Latin America was an opportunity to show that Iran still has some allies, even as Europe and the United States prepare to tighten sanctions against the Islamic Republic (see article). He called on his longstanding friend, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, and joined him at the inauguration of Daniel Ortega for a constitutionally dubious third presidential term in Nicaragua, before flying on to Cuba and Ecuador.It was Mr Ahmadinejad’s fifth trip to the region since 2005, and has inflamed fears in the United States that Iran may be building a terrorist network on its doorstep. There is no clear evidence of that. Indeed, the signs are that Iranian influence in the region is decreasing. His hosts this time are confined to members of Mr Chávez’s anti-American ALBA alliance. In 2009 Mr Ahmadinejad also...

IT HAS taken more than a quarter of a century, but on January 9th for the first time passengers travelled the full length of a 22km (14-mile) elevated railway line from the poor southern suburb of Villa El Salvador to the centre of Lima, Peru’s capital. The metro line is the first in this city of more than 8m people. Its vicissitudes mirror those of the country.The project began in 1986 with a loan deal between Alan García, in his first term as Peru’s president, and Italy’s prime minister Bettino Craxi. It halted again after three years, 9km and more than $200m, amid claims of rake-offs in both countries. Economic depression and political instability meant that for years the line’s unfinished cement pylons served only for graffiti artists.In 2006 Mr García returned to power. With a loan of $300m from the Andean Development Corporation work on the “electric train”, as Peruvians call it, began again. The line has begun operating with just five (Italian) trains, running at 20-minute intervals. Another 19 trains, from France’s Alstom, are due in 2013. Work...

THE streets of Santa Marta, a city of 450,000, were nearly deserted and shops and offices were closed. But it was not a holiday that shut down a swathe of northern Colombia on January 5th and 6th. It was a criminal band called the Urabeños, who declared an “armed strike” in retaliation for the death of their leader, Juan de Dios Usuga (alias “Giovanny”), in a firefight with police on New Year’s Day.In leaflets handed out in six northern departments they declared: “We don’t want to see anyone on the streets, doing any work.” That was enough to shut down transport, commerce and even government offices. In Santa Marta, filled with holidaymakers at this time of year, the mayor called on shopkeepers to avail themselves of police protection to open their doors. “Sure, the police are around today, but the Urabeños are watching and if I open my store, then tomorrow or next week or some day when the police are gone, those guys will come and pam! get back at me,” says Milton, who shut his corner store in a middle-class district. In Santa Marta alone, the strike is estimated to have cost $5m in lost trade.The Urabeños...

OPPOSITE Rio de Janeiro’s best-known shopping mall, just before the tunnel that takes drivers to the beach resorts of Copacabana and Ipanema, stands a gleaming new showroom for JAC Motors, a state-owned Chinese car maker. The prominence of the location is appropriate: imported Chinese cars have suddenly become a visible presence on Brazil’s roads. This has alarmed Brazil’s car industry and President Dilma Rousseff’s government. Last month a 30-percentage-point tax increase on cars with less than 65% local content took effect, taking the tax on some imported models to a punitive 55%—on top of import tariffs.The tax increase is an unusually blatant act of protectionism. It almost certainly violates the rules of the World Trade Organisation, of which Brazil is normally an enthusiastic supporter. It shows how sensitive the government of President Dilma Rousseff is to claims that the country is suffering “de-industrialisation”.Although the latest figure shows industrial production increasing slightly, it has been broadly flat for more than a year. Economic growth has fallen sharply. But consumer demand remains robust...

IN THE streets of El Alto, Bolivia’s poorest and fastest-growing city, scarecrow dummies hang grotesquely from lampposts with ropes around their necks as a macabre warning to potential thieves and criminals. The threat is not idle. Residents have little faith in the police or the courts. Instead, they often take justice into their own hands: the lynching and killing of alleged offenders is not infrequent in El Alto, nor elsewhere in Bolivia.The socialist government of President Evo Morales reckons that the way to restore public faith in the judicial system is to replace the judges with elected ones. On January 3rd, with much fanfare, he swore in 56 judges elected in a national ballot last October. They will now compose the country’s four highest courts.For Mr Morales’s supporters, this represents popular justice. The judiciary was “packed by middle-class opportunistic lackeys of the government of the day”, complained Idon Chivi, an official responsible for the reform. The new judges, he says, are more representative: 50% are women and some, for the first time, are Amerindian.The opposition complains that the new judges are in practice handpicked government appointees. It sees the judicial election as intensification of the politicised justice already dispensed under Mr Morales. Many Bolivians heeded an opposition call to register a protest vote in October. Only 40.5% of the...

NOTHING seems to irk Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s president since 1999, more than the rise of a possible rival within the ranks of his Bolivarian revolution. His recent brush with mortality, in the shape of a cancerous tumour excised by Cuban doctors last June, has turned the question of succession into one of more than academic interest. In October, moreover, he will seek a new term in an election that some polls suggest he might lose. Talk in Caracas had begun to focus on Nicolás Maduro, the foreign minister, as the most likely dauphin. But he has suddenly been cut down to size.In announcements over Christmas, Mr Chávez shuffled the pack of his leading aides. The “bourgeoisie”, he said, saw Mr Maduro, a former bus driver and union leader, as a potential successor. But to the president he looks more like a state governor. “It’s a premonition I have,” Mr Chávez declared. “I see him as governor of Carabobo,” a populous and politically important state close to the capital, currently run by the opposition. Similarly sidelined were the vice-president, Elías Jaua (pictured above, to the left of Mr Chávez), and the...

AS IF anyone needed reminding that Haiti is often synonymous with poverty and tragedy, on Christmas Eve more than three dozen emigrants from the country drowned after their overcrowded boat sank off the eastern tip of Cuba. Even before a massive earthquake in January 2010 devastated the capital, Port-au-Prince, Haiti was a stain on the conscience of the Americas. Now Michel Martelly, the new president, wants to change his country’s image from basket case to business opportunity. His officials talk up the tourist potential of 1,700km (1,060 miles) of coastline, and the attraction for investors of a productive workforce and tropical crops like mangoes and coffee. “The Haitian people are not looking for handouts, but for a hand up—for jobs and work that will restore their dignity,” Mr Martelly told a recent investment conference sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank.Aid officials say that Mr Martelly is the most pro-business president since Haiti moved towards democracy in the 1980s. He has pledged to create 500,000 jobs in three years, which would make a significant dent in an unemployment rate of about 40%. A start has already been made. In November officials cut the ribbon on a $257m industrial park near Cap Haïtien, the second city. Anchored by a South Korean clothing manufacturer, the park will create 80,000 jobs directly and indirectly, they say. Another South...

CANADA and the United States started the new year by firing cannons at each other across the Niagara river, which separates the province of Ontario from the state of New York, leaving a whiff of gunpowder and politicking in the air. The guns at Fort George on the Canadian side and Old Fort Niagara on the American shore were replicas of those from the 1812 war between the two countries, and were loaded with blanks.They fired the first salvo in what Canada’s government plans as a noisy 200th anniversary celebration of a largely forgotten war in which British redcoats, colonial militia and Indian allies stopped an American invasion (which Thomas Jefferson mistakenly predicted was “a mere matter of marching”) of what was then a sparsely populated string of colonies. “The heroic efforts of those who fought for our country in the War of 1812 tell the story of the Canada we know today: an independent and free country with a constitutional monarchy and its own distinct parliamentary system,” says James Moore, the minister of Canadian Heritage.That wraps the maple syrup of truth in the waffle of propaganda....

TO HOLD an election on December 29th, sandwiched between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, always seemed odd. But Andrew Holness, Jamaica’s new, young, prime minister, wanted his own mandate after succeeding Bruce Golding as head of the ruling Jamaica Labour Party (JLP). For his whimsy, the voters duly deprived him of his job, after a mere ten weeks. They gave a landslide victory to Portia Simpson Miller, whose People’s National Party (PNP) took 42 of the 63 seats.In office since 2007, the conservative JLP had grappled with Jamaica’s twin scourges of economic stagnation and violent crime. Mr Golding’s government entered a standby agreement with the IMF, but proceeded to miss most of the targets, especially that for trimming the public-sector wage bill. A three-year recession has technically ended, but growth has been mainly in bauxite mining and has been imperceptible to the public. In May 2010, under intense American pressure, Mr Golding sent police and troops into Tivoli Gardens, the stronghold of a leading gangster and JLP...

THE flow of oil from cracks in the seabed off the coast of Rio de Janeiro has long since slowed to a mere trickle. Not so the retribution against Chevron, an American oil company that was drilling in the Frade oilfield on November 7th when a sudden rise in pressure caused a leak.Brazil’s environment agency, IBAMA, has fined the company 50m reais ($28m) for the leak. On December 23rd it levied a further 10m reais for poor contingency planning. The National Petroleum Agency (ANP), the industry regulator, has closed one of Chevron’s Frade wells and suspended the firm’s drilling rights. The Rio de Janeiro state government is suing for 150m reais. A federal prosecutor in Campos, a city in the north of the state, is demanding 20 billion reais in punitive damages and seeking an injunction to halt all operations in Brazil by both Chevron and Transocean, the subcontractor drilling for it in Frade. Federal police, meanwhile, want to bring criminal charges against bosses of both companies.After the 4.9m-barrel spill from the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, oil regulators around the world are in no mood for...

LUISA FRANSUA was born in 1959 in the Dominican Republic (DR), has never left her country and her social-security card reads “Nationality: Dominican”. But she has not been able to get a licence to practise as an educational psychologist, nor renew her passport in order to visit her daughter in Germany. The government says she is a foreigner because her parents were Haitian.For 75 years the Dominican Republic’s constitution granted citizenship to almost everyone born in the country. But since 2007 the government has sought to deny the citizenship of people whose parents were illegal migrants, a policy incorporated in an amended constitution in 2010. Up to 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian origin may be affected. Almost 500 of them have complained to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) that they have been left stateless. The IACHR has condemned the new policy. But on December 1st the DR’s Supreme Court endorsed the new rule by rejecting a Dominican-born man’s request for a birth certificate.Relations between the two countries that share the island of Hispaniola have often been tense. Haiti occupied the DR for part of the 19th century. Rafael Trujillo, a Dominican dictator, ordered the murder of thousands of Haitian migrants in 1937. Ties have improved of late: Leonel Fernández, the DR’s president, was quick to send aid after Haiti’s earthquake in 2010. But anti-...

IT IS becoming a familiar ritual: each time a significant anniversary of Argentina’s 1982 war with Britain over the Falkland Islands looms, its government starts rattling sabres. In 2007 Néstor Kirchner, the country’s then-president, cancelled an oil-and-gas agreement with Britain and banned energy companies active in the islands, which Argentina calls the Malvinas, from operating on the mainland. With the war’s 30th anniversary falling in April, the tradition has been upheld by Cristina Fernández, Mr Kirchner’s widow and successor, who is due to step aside for 20 days on January 4th 2012 in order to receive treatment for thyroid cancer. On December 20th she got Argentina’s partners in the Mercosur trade block—Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay—to declare that they would ban civilian ships flying the Falklands’ flag from entering their ports.Although up to $300m in maritime trade to and from the Falklands passes through Uruguay each year, this decision may have little practical effect. Most of the 30 or so vessels hoisting the Falklands’ flag—a British red ensign with a coat-of-arms featuring a ram and tussock...

OLLANTA HUMALA narrowly won a presidential election last June by promising a “great transformation”. Yet the most startling transformation in Peru continues to be in Mr Humala himself. A retired army lieutenant-colonel, in 2006 he ran as a far-left candidate in the mould of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. This year he claimed to have moderated; then, to win a run-off ballot, he junked his leftist programme for a centrist “road map”. Now he has taken another big step in his long march to the right: just four and a half months into his term, he has abruptly shaken up his government, appointing a retired army officer as prime minister, dumping his leftist ministers and replacing them with solidly centrist technocrats.The pretext for the shake-up was the increasingly disorderly protests against Minas Conga, a $4.8 billion gold- and copper-mining project in the northern department of Cajamarca. Ministers and presidential advisers had been publicly at odds about how to handle the dispute. Salomón Lerner, the outgoing prime minister who had been Mr Humala’s campaign manager, had patiently tried to negotiate with the protesters. But after his efforts failed, the president declared a state of emergency and dispatched troops to restore order.President Humala promptly replaced Mr Lerner with his interior minister, Oscar Valdés. A fellow retired lieutenant-colonel who became a businessman, Mr...

UNDER successive Liberal and Conservative governments, Canada has failed to do much to curb its carbon emissions, which rose by 20.4% between 1990 and 2009. That has disheartened environmentalists. It has also put the country in breach of a promise to cut its emissions by 6% from their 1990 level in accordance with the Kyoto protocol, an international treaty. On December 12th Peter Kent, the environment minister, announced that Canada was pulling out of the protocol, becoming the first country to do so.This came hours after he had returned from a UN climate conference in Durban that had renewed Kyoto (which requires emissions-cuts only by rich-country signatories) while also agreeing to start talks on a new global pact that will have legal force (see article). Mr Kent’s announcement dismayed Christiana Figueres, the UN’s climate negotiator. It also attracted criticism from China, which in Durban had for the first time seemed to accept that developing countries...

SHE owed her crushing victory in a presidential election in October to the economy’s vigorous growth and to public sympathy over the sudden death last year of her husband and predecessor, Néstor Kirchner. Cristina Fernández inaugurated her second term as president on December 10th still dressed in widow’s black and glorifying her husband’s name almost as of a deity. Her message was triumphalist. Contrasting Argentina with Europe and the United States, she crowed: “They govern with growth targets for the financial sector …and we govern with growth targets for work and employment.”Those words may come back to haunt her. Ms Fernández is starting her second term in very different circumstances from the first, back in 2007. Argentina’s hectic growth was built on a weak currency (a legacy of default and devaluation in 2002), booming world demand for its agricultural commodities, strong growth in neighbouring Brazil, and a huge increase in government spending.

SINCE he took office as president in July, Ollanta Humala has proffered few words to Peruvians, giving only one press conference and few interviews. He was characteristically laconic on December 4th when he declared a state of emergency in the northern department of Cajamarca, dispatching the army to quash weeks of protests against Minas Conga, a giant mining project. His television address announcing the measure lasted less than three minutes. But it could come to define his five-year presidential term.As a leftist candidate in the past two presidential elections, Mr Humala railed against foreign mining companies and courted the social movements that oppose them. But he knows that as president his standing will depend mainly on whether he can maintain Peru’s recent rapid economic growth. Growth is now slowing, as in the rest of the world, although it will still be over 6% this year. Matching or beating that rate in future will turn on how much of the $50 billion in mining and hydrocarbons investment planned for the next five years actually goes ahead.Minas...

EVER since an unsuccessful attempt by the United States to conquer Canada in the war of 1812, Canadians have worried that Americans harbour ambitions to control, if not to own, their territory. This means that bilateral accords, of which there are some 698 on file, are jealously examined for their impact on Canadian sovereignty. The latest deal, called Beyond the Border and announced by Stephen Harper, Canada’s prime minister, and President Barack Obama in Washington on December 7th, will attract particular scrutiny, because it involves not just trade but the sensitive issue of shared security.Mr Harper’s aim in seeking the deal was to dismantle at least some of the restrictions that have piled up at the border in the name of security since the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001. The United States has agreed to do so if Canada meets its security concerns by providing more information on travellers, adopting US methods of baggage screening and exit controls, and harmonising a host of other security measures. A separate deal on regulations commits the two countries to work toward common standards on...

TINY fingers wiggle through the holes in the pages of “A Moverse” (“Let’s Get Moving”), a children’s picture-book that lets readers pretend their digit is a cat’s tail or penguin’s beak. While managers in suits talk print-runs and profits in one hall of the Guadalajara International Book Fair, the world’s biggest Spanish-language literary get-together, shrieks of excitement can be heard from young customers in the children’s area next door.Illiteracy and poverty once denied the pleasure of reading to many Latin Americans. That should no longer be the case: a quarter of Mexicans born before 1950 are officially classed illiterate but only 2% of those under 30. And less than a third of Latin Americans now live below the poverty line, compared with half in 1990.The newspaper business has taken note. Paid-for daily newspaper circulation in Latin America rose by 5% (21% in Brazil and 16% in Mexico) between 2005 and 2009, according to Larry Kilman of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers. Newspapers have won over young readers, says Mr Kilman. Argentina’s Clarín group, for instance, markets different...

IN THE fictional Colombian town of Macondo, in Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, it rains ceaselessly for four years, 11 months and two days. Sadly, in Colombia life has recently been imitating art. Torrential rains have battered the country for much of the past two years, destroying roads, unleashing mudslides, flooding houses and farmland and leaving millions homeless.The rains have been bolstered by what Juan Manuel Santos, Colombia’s president called “that damned Niña” (referring to a disruption in weather patterns associated with unusually low surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific). They have caused 114 deaths in the three months to December 2nd, according to the Red Cross. Another 21 people are missing. Seven women died when a mudslide buried a house in Tolima on December 5th. Rather than guerrillas, violent crime or the economy, it is the floods that are “the worst problem” he has had to face since taking power in August 2010, Mr Santos has said.Many rivers have burst their banks. In Córdoba cattle are stranded on high ground, surrounded by pastures flooded by the San...

THE crime rate in Canada fell last year to its lowest level since the early 1970s, and the murder rate is back where it was in the mid-1960s. Despite rises in some offences, such as those involving child pornography and drugs, the overall volume and severity of crime reported to the police has been falling steadily. Some politicians would celebrate, and move on to more pressing problems. Not Stephen Harper, Canada’s Conservative prime minister. Having made law and order a central plank of his campaign, his government is using the majority it won in May’s general election to enact an omnibus crime bill that bundles together nine pieces of legislation that did not make it through parliament during Mr Harper’s two preceding minority administrations.The Safe Streets and Communities Act, which will probably be approved by the House of Commons this week, has been lambasted by its critics as a backwards step that puts punishment and retribution before the rehabilitation of prisoners. Foremost among the bill’s opponents is the provincial government in Quebec, which complains that the measure will undermine its successful efforts to keep young offenders out of jail. It also says that the cost of sending more people to jail for longer will fall disproportionately on the provinces, which share responsibility for prisons with the federal government.Rob Nicholson, the federal justice...

THE state of Pará occupies a vast and woefully lawless swathe of the Amazon, forming the eastern curve of the “arc of deforestation”. On December 11th its 4.8m voters will decide whether to split Pará into three, creating two new states. Carajás, with a quarter of the territory and the world’s biggest iron-ore mine, would have in Marabá potentially Brazil’s most violent state capital with 130 murders a year per 100,000 people. Tapajós, occupying three-fifths of the current state, would be 90% forest, with just 1.2m people; it could become a loggers’ paradise, or, with luck, a state-sized national park. The rump of Pará would be limited to the area around Belém, with two-thirds of the population and most of the economic activity.Proponents of the change argue that Pará is too big to be run from Belém. Célio Costa, an economist, says that the extra federal money the split would bring is fair reward, since so much of Pará is federal forest which Brasília should be paying to manage. He also points to two pairs of states that split previously (by government fiat, not a vote). The resulting four all saw above-average economic growth....

DRIVE out of Porto Velho, the capital of the Amazonian state of Rondônia, and you see the trouble the world’s largest forest is in. Lorry after lorry trundles by laden with logs; more logs lie by the road, to be collected by smugglers who dumped them on the rumour of a (rare) roadcheck. Charred tree-stumps show where ranchers burned what the loggers left behind; a few cattle roam sparsely through the scrubby fields. In places the acid subsoil shows through, sandy and bone-pale. Seen from above, the roads look like hatchet blows, with dirt tracks radiating outward like thinner wounds. The picture is reproduced across the Amazon’s “arc of deforestation” (see map). The Brazilian Amazon is now home to 24m people, many of them settlers who trekked those roads in the 1960s and 1970s, lured by a government promise that those who farmed “unproductive” land could...

POVERTY may be rising in Europe and the United States, places that thought they had conquered it, but in Latin America it continues to fall. In its annual estimate released this week, the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) reckons that 30.4% of the region’s population is living below national poverty lines. This not only maintains a steady fall (from a peak of 48.4% in 1990), but is the lowest figure since more or less reliable statistics began to be collected in the 1970s—and probably ever (see chart).True, population growth means that in absolute terms the numbers in poverty have not fallen as far: 174m in 2011, down from 225m in 2002 but up from 136m in 1980. But ECLAC also confirms another positive trend detected by other researchers: although Latin American remains the world’s most unequal place, income inequality in the region has begun to decline, too. Of the 18 countries for which there are data, only in the Dominican Republic (DR) and (especially) Guatemala did inequality widen between 2002 and 2008; since 2008, only in the DR, Ecuador and Paraguay has it...

BY NOW Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, must be finding the script wearily familiar. First come the corruption allegations, then the indignant denials, more evidence, equivocation and retractions—and finally another of her ministers has to walk. Since June Ms Rousseff has lost her chief of staff and the ministers of transport, agriculture, tourism and sport, variously accused of influence-peddling, bribe-taking, signing fraudulent deals with shell companies and diverting public funds into party coffers or their own pockets. Now Carlos Lupi, the labour minister, has become the latest to look as if he is heading for the exit.He is accused of presiding over a department that charged kickbacks for government contracts, of personally accepting free flights from one of those contractors and of siphoning off public money to semi-phantom non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Mr Lupi’s response was pugnacious. He did not know the man in question and had never flown with him, he said. The only way to get him out of his ministry, Mr Lupi added, would be to shoot him (“and it would have to be a big bullet, because I’m a...

FIVE years ago next week, Felipe Calderón took office as Mexico’s president and launched a crackdown against organised crime. Since then there has been a horrible predictability about the country’s drug war: each year the number of deaths has risen, most of them concentrated in a handful of cities. But this year both those tendencies look as if they have started to change. The annual death toll seems to have plateaued at around 12,000. Hotspots have cooled, only for violence to invade places previously considered safe.Ciudad Juárez, in Chihuahua state and on the border with Texas, is the most striking example of this. For several years it has been the most dangerous place in Mexico and, by most counts, the world. A city of 1.3m, it saw more than 3,000 murders last year. Yet this year the number of mafia-related killings in Chihuahua has fallen by about a third, according to a tally by Reforma, a newspaper, as have kidnappings and car thefts. (The government has not released murder statistics in almost a year.) So far this year, Chihuahua state accounts for only around 15% of such murders in Mexico, down from a peak of 32%.The turnaround is the fruit of better co-operation between the municipal, state and federal branches of government, according to Héctor Murguía, Juárez’s mayor. Such co-operation is not easy in Mexico, where policing is still...

BACK in 1994, when he was a newly elected member of Parliament for the Reform Party and keen to change the way politics was done in Ottawa, Stephen Harper argued that Canadians were among the most over-represented people in the world and that the number of seats in the House of Commons should be reduced. As prime minister of a Conservative government with majorities in both houses of Parliament, he seems to have changed his mind. The Fair Representation bill, which the government introduced last month and is pushing to get through Parliament before Christmas, will add 30 MPs to the tally of 308.The western provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, where the population is rising fast, will each get six extra seats. But Ontario will get another 15 and Quebec three. Tim Uppal, the junior minister piloting the measure, said that it will move Canada closer to the elusive goal of representation by population, last met a century ago. Just redistributing the existing number of seats to reflect the westward population shift, as the opposition Liberals propose, cannot be done because it would create winners and losers, Mr Uppal candidly conceded.Mr Harper’s is hardly the first federal government that for the sake of peace with the provinces wants only winners to emerge from the redistricting, which takes place every ten years following a national census. Its room for manoeuvre is...

IT WILL, says Hugo Chávez (pictured), be “the most important political event to have occurred in our America in 100 years or more.” Well hardly. But the inaugural get-together of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, a 33-country outfit known as CELAC from its initials in Spanish, to be held in Caracas on December 2nd and 3rd, does reveal how Latin America is changing.For a start the influence of the United States is declining in a region it once called its “backyard”. The new body includes all the countries of the Americas except the United States and Canada. Meanwhile, the Organisation of American States (OAS), which includes them, is in such disarray that it may not survive. Brazil, Venezuela and Republicans in the US Congress have all either withheld, or have threatened to cut, funding for the OAS, for differing reasons. The clout of Spain, once seen as a model by Latin America’s restored democracies, is also receding: only half the heads of state bothered to turn up last month at an Ibero-American summit, a Spanish-inspired annual event.Yet, the proliferation of regional bodies does...

DURING his successful presidential campaign this year, Ollanta Humala promised to walk the finest line in Peruvian politics: maintaining the flow of mining and gas investment while placating the social movements that oppose such industries. Nearly four months into his term, the new president is finding that keeping both parties happy at once may be impossible.Mr Humala has tried to appease his leftist base. He has set up a ministry of “development and social inclusion”, required that native groups be consulted on extractive projects and raised mining taxes. In early October his government cancelled a hearing on an environmental study for an $800m expansion of the Southern Copper Corporation’s Toquepala mine, forcing the firm to redraft its plans. And he backed the overturning of a law promoting hydroelectric plants on northern jungle rivers.

Nonetheless, the highland department of Cajamarca is getting restless. It is the place where, in 1532, the Spanish found the last Inca emperor and killed him after he had paid a ransom of gold and silver. Today it houses Yanacocha, the world’s second-biggest gold mine....

ON A quiet street in central Mexico City is a bright-yellow building claiming to be the headquarters of the “Legitimate Government of Mexico”. This curious outfit is run by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a charismatic leftist who narrowly lost the presidential election of 2006, which he believes was fraudulent. In the weeks after the election his followers brought the capital to a standstill with a protest that inspired millions of Mexicans and infuriated millions more. Mr López Obrador, known to friends and foes alike as AMLO, is still a polarising figure. His party’s decision on November 15th to select him again as its candidate in next year’s presidential race added uncertainty to the contest and to the party’s own future.Mr López Obrador began the 2006 campaign as the favourite. This time, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), under whose banner he will run again, languishes a distant third. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled Mexico for 71 years until 2000, leads the pack and looks set to return under the slick candidacy of Enrique Peña Nieto, a former governor of Mexico’s most...

DILMA ROUSSEFF was tortured; Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was jailed; Fernando Henrique Cardoso was forced into exile. Brazil’s president and her two most recent predecessors all suffered under the country’s 1964-85 military regime. Yet only now is the country planning a closer look at the crimes committed in those years. By November 23rd Ms Rousseff is expected to sign a law setting up a truth commission, passed by Congress in late October. Its seven members will have two years to examine murder, torture and “disappearances” perpetrated by both the government and the resistance between 1946 and 1988.A law on freedom of information will strengthen this shift towards openness. First proposed in 2003, it was given a shove in September, when Ms Rousseff agreed to lead an international “open government initiative” with Barack Obama. Brazil’s constitution is strong on the right to information. But it had no legislation to flesh out the details, making winkling out facts a matter of persistence and luck. Documents can remain secret indefinitely.In October Congress passed laws to make the constitution’s promise a reality. Soon the secrecy of sensitive documents will be limited to 25 years, renewable once. Those to do with human-rights abuses will have to be released immediately, and most material will have to be handed over within 30 days of a request, barring a valid reason for...

WHEN Romeo Saganash, a member of the Cree First Nation in northern Quebec, decided to run for Parliament as a member of the New Democratic Party (NDP) in last May’s federal election, the incumbent expected to do even better than usual because of popular resistance to an aboriginal candidate. The timing of the vote also hurt Mr Saganash, since it fell during goose-hunting season, meaning many Cree were off in the bush. Yet Mr Saganash, who was already the first Cree to have become a lawyer in Quebec, won easily. That made him the first aborigine to represent a sprawling riding that covers the northern half of the province. He has since added another first: first aborigine to run for the leadership of a national Canadian political party. The NDP will vote in March.Mr Saganash exemplifies the increasing involvement in politics of aboriginal Canadians—who, counting First Nations, Inuit and mixed-ancestry Métis, make up almost 4% of the population. The groups have historically been under-represented, sometimes by choice but often because of prejudice. First Nations living on a reserve could not vote in federal...

STANDING beside Belarusian tractors and Chinese machine parts at Havana’s annual trade fair last month, Rodrigo Malmierca, Cuba’s foreign trade minister, said the presence of 3,000 executives from over 60 countries proved the appeal of joint commercial ventures with the Cuban government. Many in the audience saw the speech as an attempt at reassurance. Since July Cuba has arrested several foreign managers, and closed three such ventures.Most recently, on October 11th, Amado Fakhre, a British citizen and the head of Coral Capital, an investment fund, was woken at dawn and taken for questioning by state security agents. He has been held without charge ever since. His company owns Havana’s poshest hotel in partnership with the government, and hoped to win a $400m contract to build homes around a golf course. Its Havana office has been closed and declared a crime scene.Two Canadian executives, Sarkis Yacoubian and Cy Tokmakjian, have met a similar fate. Their questioning has gone on for months, again without charge. Their companies imported cars (including the president’s fleet of BMWs) and machine parts destined for nickel mining.Cuba’s official media have not published details of the cases. But rumours of the allegations—which range from overpaying local staff to offering kickbacks for contracts—highlight the difficulties for foreign investors posed by President Raúl Castro’s...

COLOMBIAN officials have sometimes exaggerated their successes over the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). But there was no room to quibble when Juan Manuel Santos, the president, called the killing of the guerrillas’ leader on November 4th “the most resounding blow against the organisation in its entire history.” Following two air strikes on his camp in the south-western province of Cauca, Guillermo León Saenz, whose nom de guerre was Alfonso Cano, tried to hide in the surrounding jungle. But troops flooded the area and found his glasses, wallet and false teeth. A soldier then spotted him trying to escape and shot him dead. He had shaved his signature beard and moustache. It is the first time in the FARC’s 47 years that their chief has fallen.Mr Cano, once a middle-class anthropology student, spent 33 years as a guerrilla. He took over the FARC in 2008 after Pedro Antonio Marín (known as Manuel Marulanda or “Sureshot”), their founder, died of a heart attack. He was known as an intractable Marxist who advocated taking power by force. “Our struggle is to do away with the state as now it exists in...

ISRAEL ARZATE was walking to his home in Ciudad Juárez in February 2010 when a truck pulled up. Two men forced him into the back seat. When they got out, he says, they blindfolded him, made him strip, and applied electric shocks before suffocating him with a plastic bag. He finally broke when they told him that without his co-operation, his wife would be found “dumped and raped in an empty lot”.Gangsters rich on drug profits have brought hell to Juárez, a dusty border city full of such grim tales. Yet Mr Arzate’s alleged torturers were not criminals but soldiers. As part of a crackdown on organised crime, Felipe Calderón, the president, has sent 50,000 troops to police the streets of Mexico. They have helped to kill or capture some of the country’s most wanted kingpins. But poorly trained and under pressure to get results, some have resorted to the same tactics as the criminals.Complaints against the army have soared. In the four years to 2006, the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) received 691 such accusations. In the next four years,...

In our briefing on Brazil's oil ("Filling up the future", November 5th 2011) we said Brazil has a trade deficit. We meant it has a current-account deficit. Its trade surplus, however, was shrinking until recently.

SPORTING sunglasses and military fatigues, Daniel Ortega’s portrait graced thousands of student-bedroom walls in the 1980s. His Sandinista guerrillas overthrew Anastasio Somoza, whose family had run Nicaragua as a private fief for four decades until 1979, and inspired even more support when the United States began an unsuccessful covert war to remove them. Mr Ortega lost power in the country’s first-ever free election in 1990, but was voted back into office in 2006. On November 6th he is likely to win another five-year term.The world’s romance with his Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) has soured. Whereas Mr Ortega was once a symbol of victory over tyranny, he is now a cheat. Local elections in 2008 saw vast fraud, with the FSLN wrongly awarded some 40 mayoralties. Foreign donors suspended over $100m in protest. This year the signs are ominous. Voting cards have not been delivered in some areas, and accreditation of opposition parties’ agents has been slow. The government has admitted a few EU election monitors, but no independent domestic observers.Even Mr Ortega’s presence on the ballot is disputed....

INFLATION and capital flight have steadily weakened Argentina’s peso since Cristina Fernández became president in 2007. Back then one peso bought $0.32; today it buys just $0.24, despite recent support from the central bank (see chart). Long accustomed to currency crises, Argentines price homes and cars in dollars, and race into greenbacks at the first sign of economic trouble. Fresh from re-election, Ms Fernández is now pre-emptively stopping them from trying.On October 31st the government began requiring bureaux de change and banks, who could previously conduct transactions with little oversight, to submit clients’ tax-identification numbers online to the tax agency for approval. It sent 4,400 inspectors to money-changers nationwide to enforce the rule.Officially, the restriction targets money-laundering. “People above board should remain calm,” said Amado Boudou, the economy minister. “Those in the black economy should be very nervous.”But in practice it is ensnaring everyone. Some operators closed their doors, saying they had to process the new rules. Those that did open drew queues up to two hours long...

ON OCTOBER 29th Brazilians learnt that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, their former president, had been diagnosed with cancer. The tumour on his larynx was probably caused by smoking: though high blood pressure prompted the 66-year-old to quit last year, he started as a teenager and liked cigarillos (unfiltered small cigars). Two days later he started chemotherapy at the Sírio-Libanês Hospital in São Paulo, where his successor, Dilma Rousseff, was treated for lymphoma in 2009. He expects to undergo radiotherapy as well, and has cancelled all travel plans for three months.Lula’s openness about his illness stood in marked contrast to the secrecy regarding the health of Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez. Brazilians learnt of Lula’s cancer the same day that he did; Venezuelans only found out weeks after Mr Chávez was treated for a “pelvic abscess” in Cuba that a cancerous tumour had been removed. Details of his condition are still unknown. Lula told his doctors to release bulletins on his progress; Mr Chávez’s medical team has still not said a word.The Brazilian press responded to Lula’s frankness in kind. Will Lula have to stay off the booze, journalists asked? (Definitely). Will he lose his hair? (Perhaps, and his beard.) His voice? (For a while, probably, though chemotherapy and radiotherapy were chosen over surgery partly to protect his growly delivery...

DESPITE mounting evidence of unsavoury links between the Mafia, construction companies and politicians in Quebec, for more than two years Jean Charest, the Liberal premier of the province, resisted calls for a judicial inquiry. Instead, he ordered a police probe and created a permanent anti-corruption unit. But after the leaking in September of an explosive report from this unit detailing cost overruns totalling hundreds of millions of dollars, kickbacks and illegal donations to political parties, Mr Charest relented.On October 19th he said that he had asked France Charbonneau, a superior-court judge, to probe financial ties between construction firms and political parties dating back 15 years. Judge Charbonneau is a tough former prosecutor. She will report to the premier; if she needs to, she can subpoena witnesses, a power Mr Charest initially denied her.Media claims of corruption have coincided with the crumbling of Quebec’s roads. The collapse of a highway flyover in 2006 crushed five people. A 15-metre-long slab of concrete fell from the roof of a road tunnel in July 2011; miraculously, no commuters were hurt. Engineering reports suggest a bridge carrying 60m cars a year between the island of Montreal and suburbs on the south shore is in danger of collapsing. There may be other factors: much building was done hastily to prepare Montreal for the 1976 Olympic games, and...

LATIN Americans are demanding more of their democracies, their institutions and governments; they worry about crime almost as much as about economic problems; and fewer of them think that their country is progressing. Those are some of the findings of the latest Latinobarómetro poll, taken in 18 countries and published exclusively by The Economist. Because the poll has been taken regularly since 1995, it does a good job showing how attitudes in the region are changing. Despite Latin America’s strong recovery from the recession of 2008-09, this year’s poll, which was taken in July and August, reveals some diffuse discontents. It suggests that little over half of Latin Americans are convinced democrats, a fall of three points since last year (see table and chart 1). Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico all saw a sharp slump in support for democracy,...

IT WAS back in May, in the southern-hemisphere autumn, when Chile’s students and many schoolchildren began taking to the streets to demand wholesale reform of the education system. Now spring has come, but there is no sign of settling what has turned into the most serious political conflict for two decades in Latin America’s most successful country. Talks between the students and the government began in August, but broke down on October 5th. Chile is paying an increasingly high price for the deadlock.Pupils have occupied hundreds of schools since May, locking out their teachers and depriving tens of thousands of children of their education. Many university students have not been to classes for months. Most weeks they stage marches, often unauthorised, in Santiago, the capital. With depressing predictability these end in clashes between a minority of violent youths and the police. Many residents now avoid the city centre on protest days to escape the bricks, bottles, water cannon and tear gas. Some 1,800 protesters have been arrested since May and over 500 police injured. The damage runs into millions of dollars....

FOR much of the last century inflation was as prominent a feature of Brazilian life as football. It was finally tamed, first by the Real Plan of 1994 involving a new currency and fiscal measures, and then from 1999 by requiring the Central Bank, which was granted operational independence, to set interest rates to meet an inflation target. Since 2005 that target has been 4.5%, plus or minus two percentage points. So the Central Bank surprised everyone in August when it cut its benchmark rate by half a point (to 12%) even though inflation was then at 6.9%. On October 19th, the bank did the same again. So is the government of President Dilma Rousseff, in office since January, giving priority to other goals, such as sustaining growth and preventing the overvaluation of the currency, rather than keeping inflation low? And has the Central Bank lost its independence?No, say officials, who cite two sets of reasons for the rate cuts. First, having overheated last year, the economy stalled in the third quarter, partly as a result of earlier interest-rate rises and modest fiscal tightening. The consensus forecast is...