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“We’re emerging from an election that has revealed a rift between economic classes,” said Murillo de Aragão, the president of Arko Advice, a political consulting firm in Brasília. “The level of tension is remarkably high, accentuating a loss of confidence in the president among big economic interests.”

few changes are expected in the popular antipoverty programs that have shielded poorer Brazilians from an economic slowdown, with the unemployment rate remaining low even as the economy went into recession this year.

But Ms. Rousseff has signaled other changes, including the appointment of a new finance minister. That could open the way for a shift away from policies that have created ire in Brazil’s business establishment, like price controls on fuel in a bid to keep inflation from accelerating.

the presidents of Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru met with little fanfare in Cartagena last week to seal an economic pact launched in 2012. They call their project the Pacific Alliance, and it will soon include Costa Rica

The four founding members are the most successful economies in Latin America; they boast the region's highest economic-growth rates and lowest inflation rates. Together, they represent 36 percent of the region's economy, 50 percent of its international trade, and 41 percent of all incoming foreign investment. If the Alliance were a country, it would be the world's eighth-largest economy and seventh-largest exporter. Its members lead the lists of the most competitive economies in Latin America and those where it’s easiest to do business.

the Pacific Alliance has already yielded more results in its 20 months of existence than similar initiatives that have been around for decades. The four countries have eliminated 92 percent of all import tariffs among them. Chile, Colombia, and Peru have linked their stock markets so that a company listed in one of the exchanges can be traded in the other two. Mexico is expected to follow suit this year, meaning this integrated stock market will rival that of Brazil as the largest in Latin America. The four countries have eliminated the need for business and tourist visas for visiting nationals of bloc members. In a break with tradition, the joint communiqués of Alliance presidents tend to be brief and concrete in terms of goals, timelines, and roadmaps.

Uruguayan voters elected Tabaré Vázquez as president on Sunday in a show of support for the leftist coalition that has governed the country over the last decade, presiding over robust economic growth and a pioneering set of socially liberal laws, including a state-controlled marijuana market.

The election came after a stretch in which Uruguay’s president, José Mujica, 79, a former guerrilla, raised the country’s profile with legislation that legalized abortion and same-sex marriage and created the marijuana market. He is set to leave office with high approval ratings.

Dr. Vázquez is more moderate than Mr. Mujica, having vetoed an abortion law during his first term as president. He has also expressed opposition to parts of the marijuana law, a position shared by many Uruguayans as broad skepticism persists over the project. Still, he has said that he would enforce the law.

drugs, when used consistently, constantly, destructively, are all anesthesia from pain. The Mexican drug cartels crave money, but they make that money from the way Yankees across the border crave numbness. They sell unfeeling. We buy it. We spend tens of billions of dollars a year doing so, and by some estimates about a third to a half of that money goes back to Mexico.

We want not to feel what’s happening to us, and then we do stuff that makes worse things happen–to us and others. We pay for it, too, in a million ways, from outright drug-overdose deaths (which now exceed traffic fatalities, and of which the United States has the highest rate of any nation except tiny Iceland, amounting to more than thirty-seven thousand deaths here in 2009 alone) to the violence of drug-dealing on the street, the violence of people on some of those drugs, and the violence inflicted on children who are neglected, abandoned, and abused because of them–and that’s just for starters.  The stuff people do for money when they’re desperate for drugs generates more violence and more crazy greed

Then there’s our futile “war on drugs” that has created so much pain of its own.

it is already cheaper than China for many industries serving the American market.

while Mexico’s economy is far from trouble free, its growth easily outpaced the giants of the hemisphere — the United States, Canada and Brazil — in 2011 and 2012, according to International Monetary Fund data, making the country more attractive to fortune seekers worldwide.

residency requests had grown by 10 percent since November, when a new law meant to streamline the process took effect. And they are coming from nearly everywhere.

Feared as a radical move, the nationalization was in effect a renegotiation of terms with foreign energy companies that have stayed in Bolivia, attracted by the country’s bountiful natural gas reserves. Revenue from oil and natural gas climbed to 13.3 percent of gross domestic product in 2006 from 5 percent in 2004, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.

Feared as a radical move, the nationalization was in effect a renegotiation of terms with foreign energy companies that have stayed in Bolivia, attracted by the country’s bountiful natural gas reserves. Revenue from oil and natural gas climbed to 13.3 percent of gross domestic product in 2006 from 5 percent in 2004, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.

former USTR and deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick wrote an essay proposing that the United States consolidate our trade diplomacy in the region: This year President Bush and the Democratic-led Congress should launch a new Association of American Free Trade Agreements (AAFTA). The AAFTA could shape the future of the Western Hemisphere, while offering a new foreign and economic policy design that combines trade, open societies, development and democracy.

U.S. global strategy must have a hemispheric foundation. Successful and sustainable international strategies must be constructed across administrations. Ronald Reagan called for free trade throughout the Americas, opened U.S. markets to our Caribbean neighbors, and completed an FTA with Canada. George H.W. Bush completed negotiations for a North American FTA, offered trade preferences to the Andean countries, negotiated peace in Central America, and freed Panama. Bill Clinton secured the passage of Nafta, launched work on a Free Trade Area of the Americas, and backed Plan Colombia. George W. Bush enacted FTAs with Chile, the five states of Central America and the Dominican Republic. He also completed FTAs with Colombia, Peru and Panama. If Congress passes these agreements, the U.S. will finally have an unbroken line of free trade partners stretching from Alaska to the tip of South America. Not counting the U.S., this free trade assembly would comprise two-thirds of both the population and GDP of the Americas. The AAFTA would draw together these 13 partners to build on the gains of free trade. It could also include the island states of the Caribbean Basin Trade Partnership Act. Starting with a small secretariat, perhaps in Miami, the AAFTA should advance hemispheric economic integration; link development and democracy with trade and aid; improve working and environmental conditions; and continue to pursue the goal of free trade throughout the hemisphere. It might even foster cooperation in the WTO's global trade negotiations. The AAFTA might be connected to an academic center, which could combine research and practice through an association among universities in the Americas.... The U.S. cannot afford to lose interest in its own neighborhood.

in many ways, Zoellick is simply proposing a political trade with our FTA partners -- deeper economic integration in return for adding on stringent labor and environmental standards.

As we look to the future, population growth, economic development, and technological change are likely to increase the demand for natural resources, while environmental degradation and previous exploitation of these resources will decrease the supply. Furthermore, climate change will act as a threat multiplier, exacerbating current vulnerabilities and adding to levels of uncertainty. These trends enhance the potential for natural resources to contribute to conflict in the future and highlight the growing importance of environmental diplomacy as an integrated part of conflict prevention, mediation and peacebuilding.

o what do you do if you are the president of the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and you’re facing the worst drought since 1976? Why, you buy Russian fighter jets at $30 million a pop, and work out a secretive deal to trade private land and the patrimony of your citizens to a Chinese canal-building company, of course.

When I worked for the Bush administration, I met the newly-elected Ortega in Granada, Nicaragua, at an event he surely had mixed feelings about. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) had helped the government of Nicaragua design and implement a land reform program that put property titles into the hands of Nicaraguan citizens. Nicaraguans loved it,

Ortega is now serving his second term.

The peso plunged 15 percent on Jan. 22 and 23, from around 6.9 pesos to the dollar to 8 pesos, according to Bloomberg News, and has since stablized. It closed on Friday at 8 pesos to the dollar. It weakened by a total of 19 percent in January.

Generous social spending after the economic collapse, like freezing household electricity rates, has widened Argentina’s budget deficit, encouraged energy consumption and increased the country’s dependence on energy imports, eroding the central bank’s hard currency reserves. Inflation is so high that it has become a heated political issue, with economists saying it exceeded 28 percent in 2013 and officials insisting it was 10.9 percent.

things have gotten worse for Batista. Hit by mounting debt, a series of project delays and a crisis of confidence, his six publicly listed companies have suffered one of the most spectacular corporate meltdowns in recent history.

He pumped billions into the group's companies even as share prices plunged by as much as 90 percent.

His own fortune - the world's seventh-biggest last year, according to Forbes - has declined by more than $25 billion over the past 18 months.

The Venezuelan authorities on Saturday released an American journalist who had been detained and questioned by military intelligence officials.

Jim Wyss, is the Andes region bureau chief for The Miami Herald. He was detained Thursday near Venezuela’s western border with Colombia while on a reporting trip.

Mr. Wyss said the authorities who had questioned him never explained to him why he had been detained. He said that he had been treated well and that he would be allowed to remain in Venezuela and continue his work as a journalist.

“happiness is, in the end, a much more complicated concept than income. Yet it is also a laudable and much more ambitious policy objective.”

it’s a challenge to set criteria for measuring happiness. However, in a conversation, she told me she did not see it as an insurmountable one: “It doesn’t have to be perfect; after all, it took us decades to agree upon what to include in G.D.P. and it is still far from a perfect metric.”

there remains the issue of being No. 1. Many of us have lived our lives in a country that has thought itself the world’s most powerful and successful. But with the United States economy in a frustrating stall as China rises, it seems that period is coming to an end. We are suffering a national identity crisis, and politicians are competing with one another to win favor by assuring a return to old familiar ways.

The news that Brazil has overtaken Britain to become the world's sixth largest economic power is being touted as a sign that that the longtime "country of the future" has finally arrived.

In the past 20 years, Brazil has become well known for turning crisis situations into geopolitical opportunities, becoming a leading voice in international forums devoted to AIDS, poverty, and even the environment. And now, it is doing it again with a challenge that Brazilians understand all too well: a debt crisis.

The IMF contributions stem from Rousseff's intention to maintain a tradition that began under her predecessor, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, of using foreign assistance as a means to strengthen Brazil's international reputation and influence. Yet another example is Brazil's annual contributions to the World Bank, which have averaged $253 million from 2004 to 2009. Brazil was the first nation to contribute -- $ 55 million -- to the World Bank's Haitian Reconstruction Fund. From 2003-2007, Brazil also gave approximately $340 million to fund the U.N.'s operations. Lula also increased Brazil's contribution to the U.N.'s World Food Program from $ 1 million in 2009 to $ 27 million in 2011.

The question haunting the Latin American hard left, which Chávez has dominated in the last decade, is who will take his place.

In explaining the rise of the political left in Latin America over the past decade, Chávez's persona looms large. Politicians like Evo Morales, Rafael Correa, and Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Chávez for laying the groundwork toward a renewed form of populism, Latin America's version of socialism.

Chávez's charisma and ruthless political genius fail to explain why he has been able to achieve such regional clout. Through a canny use of petrodollars, subsidies to political allies, and well-timed investments, Chávez has underwritten his Bolivarian revolution with cash -- and lots of it. But that effective constellation of money and charisma has now come out of alignmen