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Spanish filmmakers, Japanese automotive executives and entrepreneurs from the United States and Latin America arrive practically daily — pursuing dreams, living well and frequently succeeding.

“There is this energy here, this feeling that anything can happen,” said Lesley Téllez, a Californian whose three-year-old business running culinary tours served hundreds of clients here last year. “It’s hard to find that in the U.S.”

more Americans have been added to the population of Mexico over the past few years than Mexicans have been added to the population of the United States, according to government data in both nations.

If the country of 112 million people can harness the energy of foreigners and newly educated Mexicans, become partners with the slew of American firms seeking alternatives to China, and get them to do more than just hire cheap labor, economists and officials say Mexico could finally become a more equal partner for the United States and the first-world country its presidents have promised for decades.

“There’s been an opening to the world in every way — culturally, socially and economically.”

global trends have been breaking Mexico’s way — or as President Enrique Peña Nieto often puts it, “the stars are aligning” — but there are plenty of obstacles threatening to scuttle Mexico’s moment.

The challenge, he said, is making sure that the growing interest in his country benefits all Mexicans, not just newcomers, investors and a privileged few.

Mexico has failed to live up to its economic potential before. “They really blew a moment in 1994 when their currency was at rock bottom and they’d just signed Nafta,”

The number of Americans legally living and working in Mexico grew to more than 70,000 in 2012 from 60,000 in 2009, a number that does not include many students and retirees, those on tourist visas or the roughly 350,000 American children who have arrived since 2005 with their Mexican parents. For DiscussionWhy did you decide to move to Mexico?Please share your story in the comments below.

closer ties with Mexico’s beloved and hated neighbor to the north, through immigration and trade, have made many Mexicans feel less insular. Millions of emigrants send money earned abroad to relatives in Mexico, who then rush out to Costco for more affordable food and electronics.

“Europe feels spiritually dead and so does the United States,” Mr. Quemada-Díez said. “You end up wanting something else.”

“We are now more certain about the value of sharing certain things.”

Some of the growth is appearing in border towns where foreign companies and binational families are common. American retirees are showing up in new developments from San Miguel de Allende to other sunny spots around Cancún and Puerto Vallarta. Government figures show that more Canadians are also joining their ranks.

More and more American consultants helping businesses move production from China are crisscrossing the region from San Luis Potosí to Guadalajara, where Silicon Valley veterans like Andy Kieffer, the founder of Agave Lab, are developing smartphone applications and financing new start-ups. In Guanajuato, Germans are moving in and car-pooling with Mexicans heading to a new Volkswagen factory that opened a year ago, and sushi can now be found at hotel breakfasts because of all the Japanese executives preparing for a new Honda plant opening nearby.

Mr. Pace, bearded and as slim as a Gauloises, said he moved to Mexico in 2011 because college graduates in France were struggling to find work. He has stayed here, he said, because the affordable quality of life beats living in Europe — and because Mexico offers more opportunity for entrepreneurship.

Some Mexicans and foreigners say Europeans are given special treatment because they are perceived to be of a higher class, a legacy of colonialism when lighter skin led to greater privileges. But like many other entrepreneurs from foreign lands, Mr. Pace and his partners are both benefiting from and helping to shape how Mexico works. Mr. Rodríguez, the former Interior Ministry official, Cuban by birth, said that foreigners had helped make Mexico City more socially liberal.

Many immigrants say Mexico is attractive because it feels disorderly, like a work in progress, with the blueprints of success, hierarchy and legality still being drawn. “Not everyone follows the rules here, so if you really want to make something happen you can make it happen,” said Ms. Téllez, 34, whose food business served more than 500 visitors last year. “No one is going to fault you for not following all the rules.”

compared with South Korea, where career options were limited by test scores and universities attended, Mexico allowed for more rapid advancement. As an intern at the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency here, he said he learned up close how Samsung and other Korean exporters worked. “Here,” he said, “the doors are more open for all Koreans.” He added that among his friends back home, learning Spanish was now second only to learning English.

There were 10 times as many Koreans living in Mexico in 2010 as in 2000.

Europe, dying; Mexico, coming to life. The United States, closed and materialistic; Mexico, open and creative. Perceptions are what drive migration worldwide, and in interviews with dozens of new arrivals to Mexico City — including architects, artists and entrepreneurs — it became clear that the country’s attractiveness extended beyond economics.

Artists like Marc Vigil, a well-known Spanish television director who moved to Mexico City in October, said that compared with Spain, Mexico was teeming with life and an eagerness to experiment. Like India in relation to England, Mexico has an audience that is larger and younger than the population of its former colonial overlord.

“In Spain, everything is a problem,” he said. “Here in Mexico, everything is possible. There is more work and in the attitude here, there is more of a spirit of struggle and creativity.”

it was not a country that welcomed outsiders; the Constitution even prohibited non-Mexicans from directly owning land within 31 miles of the coast and 62 miles of the nation’s borders.

He struggled to make sense of Mexico at first. Many foreigners do, complaining that the country is still a place of paradox, delays and promises never fulfilled for reasons never explained — a cultural clash that affects business of all kinds. “In California, there was one layer of subtext,” Mr. Quemada-Díez said. “Here there are 40 layers.”

Mexico has allowed dual nationality for more than a decade, and among the growing group of foreigners moving here are also young men and women born in Mexico to foreign parents, or who grew up abroad as the children of Mexicans. A globalized generation, they could live just about anywhere, but they are increasingly choosing Mexico.

Domingo Delaroiere, an architect whose father is French and mother is Mexican, said Mexico’s appeal — especially in the capital — was becoming harder to miss. When he came back here last year for a visit, after two and a half years in Paris, he said he was surprised. “Art, culture, fashion, architecture, design — the city was filling up with new spaces, things that are interesting, daring,” he said. He soon decided it was time to move. Compared with Mexico, he said, “Nothing is happening in Paris.”

No border divides the pain caused by drugs from the pain brought about in Latin America by the drug business and the narcotraficantes.  It’s one big continent of pain–and in the last several years the narcos have begun selling drugs in earnest in their own countries, creating new cultures of addiction and misery.  

We’ve had movements to get people to stop buying clothes and shoes made in sweatshops, grapes picked by exploited farmworkers, fish species that are endangered, but no one’s thought to start a similar movement to get people to stop consuming the drugs that cause so much destruction abroad.

Many talk about legalizing drugs, and there’s something to be said for changing the economic arrangements. But what about reducing their use by developing and promoting more interesting and productive ways of dealing with suffering? Or even getting directly at the causes of that suffering?

We give you money and guns, lots and lots of money. You give us drugs. The guns destroy. The money destroys. The drugs destroy. The pain migrates, a phantom presence crossing the border the other way from the crossings we hear so much about.The drugs are supposed to numb people out, but that momentary numbing effect causes so much pain elsewhere. There’s a pain economy, a suffering economy, a fear economy, and drugs fuel all of them rather than making them go away.

I have been trying to imagine the export economy of pain. What does it look like? I think it might look like air-conditioning. This is how an air conditioner works: it sucks the heat out of the room and pumps it into the air outside. You could say that air-conditioners don’t really cool things down so much as they relocate the heat. The way the transnational drug economy works is a little like that: people in the U.S. are not reducing the amount of pain in the world; they’re exporting it to Mexico and the rest of Latin America as surely as those places are exporting drugs to us.

Here in the United States, there’s no room for sadness, but there are plenty of drugs for it, and now when people feel sad, even many doctors think they should take drugs. We undergo losses and ordeals and live in circumstances that would make any sane person sad, and then we say: the fault was yours and if you feel sad, you’re crazy or sick and should be medicated. Of course, now ever more Americans are addicted to prescription drugs, and there’s always the old anesthetic of choice, alcohol, but there is one difference: the economics of those substances are not causing mass decapitations in Mexico.

Mexico, I am sorry.  I want to see it all change, for your sake and ours. I want to call pain by name and numbness by name and fear by name. I want people to connect the dots from the junk in their brain to the bullet holes in others’ heads. I want people to find better strategies for responding to pain and sadness. I want them to rebel against those parts of their unhappiness that are political, not metaphysical, and not run in fear from the metaphysical parts either.

A hundred years ago, your dictatorial president Porfiro Díaz supposedly remarked, “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States,” which nowadays could be revised to, “Painful Mexico, so far from peace and so close to the numbness of the United States.”

President Bush could go a long way toward restoring peace in Nicaragua, and U.S.-Nicaraguan relations, if he proposed to use his influence and support--together with other heads of state, the World Bank and various other international agencies--to help launch a resettlement program, in Nicaragua

Nicaraguans who have sought asylum abroad would be enticed to return home. However, such a project to restore our dignity as Nicaraguans can be possible only if the Sandinista regime takes a sincere decision to adopt democracy.

Marijuana Symposium, which was hosted by the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus

“Politics of Ganja Decriminalisation”

Antigua & Barbuda.

not taking the marijuana discussion seriously.

“The average person disaggregates the issue and they just see a guy smoking a spliff and say he needs to stop

issue of crime when you make something criminal is something that is more academic, more refined.

A sweeping new plan for Honduras, focused more on judicial reform and institution-building, is now being jointly developed by Honduras and the United States. But State Department officials must first reassure Congress that the deaths have been investigated and that new safeguards, like limits on the role of American forces, will be put in place.

the new plan, according to a recent draft shown to The New York Times, is more aspirational than anything aimed at combating drugs and impunity in Mexico, or Colombia before that. It includes not just boats and helicopters, but also broad restructuring: several new investigative entities, an expanded vetting program for the police, more power for prosecutors, and a network of safe houses for witnesses.

The country’s homicide rate is among the highest in the world, and corruption has chewed through government from top to bottom.

The foreign minister, Mr. Corrales, a hulk of a man with a loud laugh and a degree in engineering, said he visited Washington in early 2011 with a request for help in four areas: investigation, impunity, organized crime and corruption.

Members of the Honduran police teams told government investigators that they took their orders from the D.E.A. Americans officials said that the FAST teams, deploying tactics honed in Afghanistan, did not feel confident in the Hondurans’ abilities to take the lead.

there were no detailed rules governing American participation in law enforcement operations. Honduran officials also described cases in which the rules of engagement for the D.E.A. and the police were vague and ad hoc.

the killing — along with the soaring homicide rate and the increased trafficking — sounded alarms in Washington: “It raised for us the specter of Honduras becoming another northern Mexico.”

Representative Howard L. Berman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, wrote to Mrs. Clinton, “Unfortunately, this is not the first time the United States has come perilously close to an overmilitarized strategy toward a country too small and institutionally weak for its citizens to challenge the policy.”

Mr. Brownfield, the assistant secretary, said it was impossible to “offer a zero risk program for interdicting drugs in Central America.” He noted that the shootings during interdiction raids happened in the middle of the night, in remote locations that were hard for investigators to reach. Despite these challenges, he said that investigations were conducted and that he was “basically satisfied” that he knew what had happened.

From the moment the Honduran pilot departed in his aging Tucano turboprop, just before midnight, he was in radio contact with Colombian authorities, who regularly receive radar intelligence from the American military’s Southern Command.

Mr. Corrales, the foreign minister, and some American officials have concluded that the downed planes amounted to misapplied military justice, urged on by societal anger and the broader weaknesses of Honduras’s institutions.

Creating a stronger system is at the core of what some officials are now calling Anvil II. A draft of the plan provided by Mr. Corrales shows a major shift toward shoring up judicial institutions with new entities focused on organized and financial crime.

The D.E.A.’s role will also probably change. A

“It’s a tragedy; there is no confidence in the state,” she said, wearing black in her university office. The old game of cocaine cat-and-mouse tends to look like a quicker fix, she said, with its obvious targets and clear victories measured in tons seized.

“This moment presents us with an opportunity for institutional reform,” Dr. Castellanos said. But that will depend on whether the new effort goes after more than just drugs and uproots the criminal networks that have already burrowed into Honduran society.

In June, the pro-Ortega Supreme Court ousted the opposition’s likely presidential candidate, Eduardo Montealegre, from his own party in favor of a pro-Ortega opponent who had sued for control

Mr. Ortega’s allies in the National Assembly expelled 16 lawmakers (and 12 alternates) from Mr. Montealegre’s party who refused to accept the court-imposed new party leader.

Nicaragua’s backsliding, after a brief period of relatively transparent politics in the 1990s, has proceeded with nothing but mild verbal opposition from Washington

the State Department has also pronounced itself “gravely concerned” by the crushing of the political opposition.

At the time of the groundbreaking in December 2014, the Chinese government said it was not involved with the project. This and Mr. Wang’s recent setbacks — he has reportedly lost about 80 percent of his $10 billion fortune — make some experts say the deal is probably dead.

Some question whether the canal would even be commercially viable. Few supertankers and massive container ships now afloat will not be able to pass through the expanded Panama Canal set to open soon. And few ports are big enough to welcome those megaships. In the short term, some experts say, the combination of the Panama and Nicaragua canals would lead to overcapacity and price wars.

That aspect has prompted protests from farmers, some of which have turned violent. Experts say Mr. Wang will have to pay only the assessed value, or about 5 percent of the market value, for any lands he takes. But many farmers would not be entitled to even that. In a country that is short of adequate roads and government offices, many do not have formal title to the fields they have cultivated for generations.

But the plan is much broader than just a canal. Mr. Wang’s vision includes new airports, new ports on both ends of the canal, new lakes in the mountains to make sure the canal has enough water, and new islands in Lake Nicaragua to dispose of excavated sediment and rock. Advertisement Continue reading the main story A 1,100-page study of the project, conducted by the British consulting firm ERM and issued five months ago, reinforced the notion of how much is at stake. It recommended further studies in many areas before going forward and noted that a wide range of mitigation efforts would be needed, like reforestation and job training.Some see hope in those efforts. Jeffrey McCrary, an American fish biologist who lives in Nicaragua and worked on the study, supports the project, saying Mr. Wang’s company will have to provide money to clean up environmental damage already caused by deforestation, poor land management, crop fumigation and general dumping into Lake Nicaragua.

milo Lara, a member of the Nicaragua Canal Commission, a group appointed by the government to oversee the project, said many critics of the project were political opportunists. Mr. Lara said the canal plan had been adjusted to deal with problem issues, like potential earthquakes, tsunamis and environmental concerns. And people who might be displaced by it, he said, could be moved to small cities with new schools and services they never had before.

In the meantime, speculating about the canal has become a national pastime, though polls show that Nicaraguans grow less inclined to believe that it will be built.“We used to talk about it every day,” said Carlos Fernando Chamorro, the editor of Confidencial, an investigative magazine. “Now we only talk about it every two days.”Some still hope it will lift this country out of poverty.But in Brito and the nearby city of Rivas, those who expect to be displaced are angry. Teresa de Jesus Henriquez Delgado, 31, is one of the residents who used a stencil to paint “Go Away Chinese!” on the outside of her house. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “I will resist with all of my strength when the bulldozers come to tear down my house,” she said. “I will fight until I die. I have to for my children. They can’t take this land from my family.”

He told the diplomat Friday that there was a need to work together in regional, hemispheric and international fora to ensure that the impediments to the development of small states would be addressed.

Ambassador Jaentschke said that Nicaragua, which is chair of SICA for the next six months, had declared itself a Caribbean country through a constitutional amendment last September.

Why, Mexicans ask, don’t Americans tighten their gun laws? Doing so, they say, would stanch the violence both in the United States and in Mexico, where criminal groups wreak havoc with military-grade weapons smuggled in from the United States.

The 1917 Constitution written after Mexico’s bloody revolution, for example, says that the right to carry arms excludes those weapons forbidden by law or reserved for use by the military, and it also states that “they may not carry arms within inhabited places without complying with police regulations.”

the largest weapons in Mexico’s single gun store — including semiautomatic rifles like the one used in the Aurora attack — can be bought only by members of the police or the military. Handgun permits for home protection allow only for the purchase of calibers no greater than .38, so the most exotic option in the pistol case here consisted of a Smith & Wesson revolver selling for $803.05.

The question is not so much about his results but his methods. He has a reputation for being merciless and brutal, and as the accolades have stacked up, he has cracked down on his own people and covertly supported murderous rebel groups in neighboring Congo

In some areas of the country, there are rules, enforced by village commissars, banning people from dressing in dirty clothes or sharing straws when drinking from a traditional pot of beer, even in their own homes, because the government considers it unhygienic. Many Rwandans told me that they feel as if their president is personally watching them. “It’s like there’s an invisible eye everywhere,” said Alice Muhirwa, a member of an opposition political party. “Kagame’s eye.”

why has the West — and the United States in particular — been so eager to embrace Kagame, despite his authoritarian tendencies?

Kagame has become a rare symbol of progress on a continent that has an abundance of failed states and a record of paralyzing corruption. Kagame was burnishing the image of the entire billion-dollar aid industry. “You put your money in, and you get results out,” said the diplomat, who insisted he could not talk candidly if he was identified. Yes, Kagame was “utterly ruthless,” the diplomat said, but there was a mutual interest in supporting him, because Kagame was proving that aid to Africa was not a hopeless waste and that poor and broken countries could be fixed with the right leadership.

Though Rwanda has made tremendous strides, the country is still a demographic time bomb. It’s already one of the most densely populated in Africa — its 11 million people squeezed into a space smaller than Maryland — and despite a recent free vasectomy program, Rwanda still has an alarmingly high birthrate. Most Rwandans are peasants, their lives inexorably yoked to the land, and just about every inch of that land, from the papyrus swamps to the cloud-shrouded mountaintops, is spoken for.

much has improved under his stewardship. Rwandan life expectancy, for instance, has increased to 56 years, from 36 in 1994. Malaria used to be a huge killer, but Kagame’s government has embarked on a wide-scale spraying campaign and has distributed millions of nets to protect people when they are sleeping — malarial mosquitoes tend to feed at night — and malaria-related deaths plummeted 85 percent between 2005 and 2011.

Kagame hopes to make more money from coffee, tea and gorillas — Rwanda is home to some of the last remaining mountain gorillas, and each year throngs of Western tourists pay thousands of dollars to see them.

aid flows to Rwanda because Kagame is a celebrated manager. He’s a hands-on chief executive who is less interested in ideology than in making things work. He loves new technology — he’s an avid tweeter — and is very good at breaking sprawling, ambitious projects into manageable chunks. Rwanda jumped to 52nd last year, from 158th in 2005, on the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business annual rating, precisely because Kagame set up a special unit within his government, which broke down the World Bank’s ratings system, category by category, and figured out exactly what was needed to improve on each criterion.

His empire also fell victim to the sudden end of both the global commodities boom and a wild exuberance for emerging markets - two forces that attracted investors to Batista's vision.

A former Brazilian finance minister, a former energy minister and a former chief justice of Brazil's supreme court joined the OGX board, bolstering the credibility of the polyglot, European-educated "Brazilianaire".

When Batista raised $4.11 billion in OGX's initial public offering in June 2008, interest in Brazil was feverish. Petrobras had just made giant offshore oil discoveries and Brazil was expected to become one of the world's top five oil producers by 2020.

Record demand from China drove up the price of Brazilian soybeans, iron ore, coffee, sugar and other commodities. Oil rose to an all-time high. EBX had also just sold most of its first listed company, iron ore producer MMX Mineração e Metálicos SA, to Anglo American Plc for $6.65 billion, enriching Batista and his investors.

A lot of the people who invested with Batista were not fools, and his rise and fall has followed that of Brazil.

DeGolyer & MacNaughton (D&G), a Dallas-based certification company, estimated OGX's potential resources at 10.8 billion barrels of oil and natural gas equivalent. That would have been enough - if OGX could figure out how to get it out of the ground - to supply all U.S. oil needs for more than a year and a half.

OGX estimated it would produce 1.4 million barrels a day by 2019, equivalent to 70 percent of Brazil's output, or about half of the output of Venezuela, a founding member of OPEC.

Already Brazil's richest man, Batista bragged he would surpass Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Mexico's Carlos Slim to become the world's wealthiest person. Today he does not even make Forbes' top 100 list.

The consequences of Tubarão Azul's failure quickly spread because of the close links between EBX Group companies. EBX shipbuilder OSX Brazil SA was formed to build and lease a fleet of offshore oil vessels for OGX. Power producer MPX Energia SA is developing gas fields with OGX in Brazil's northeast. Port operator LLX Logística SA is home to OSX's shipyard, a place to store and process OGX oil and to ship Anglo American's iron ore.

Batista may also have been hurt by Brazil's efforts to help his and other companies weather the 2008 U.S. financial crisis and the world economic slowdown that followed. As Brazilian stocks, currency and bonds plunged, EBX stocks briefly fell to levels that were only broken this year.

EBX was one of the main beneficiaries of cheap capital that Brazil's government pumped into the economy to fight the downturn.

In Batista, the government was pursuing its then-fashionable strategy of creating "national champions" while making up for delays in its own infrastructure projects. It encouraged Batista to speed up just as Brazil's boom was about to end.

Batista and Brazil, though, have struggled since. As China slows, commodity prices are falling. In the last year Brazil's Bovespa stock index was the worst performer among the world's 28 largest indexes and the only one to fall in the period.

uled as an illiberal democracy, meaning that the constitution, laws, property rights, and free speech are curtailed whenever it suits the rulers.

First, he has signed a deal with a Caribbean-based Hong Kong company to dig a canal to rival the Panama Canal. It is unclear to what degree the Chinese government is party to the deal, but state-owned enterprises are involved. That means the government is involved, so of course we should expect Ortega and his cronies to benefit. Read the piece linked above for more details about the questions being raised over the dubious cost calculations ($40 billion? $50 billion? More?), impact on the environment, impact on private land ownership, and the forceful tactics of the authorities against citizens trying to get information about the project, or simply trying to protect their homes from intrusion by officials escorting Chinese researchers and contractors into their villages.

Ortega is once again trying to build up his military for no good reason.

If Ortega’s efforts to strengthen ties with Russia and China were simply about commerce and improving his economy, it would make sense. Poor countries regularly try to do such things.

Still, the total number of Internet users in Nicaragua is unknown, in part due to government secrecy. The last government figures on Internet connectivity are from 2006, before the Sandinistas returned to power.

In global terms, however, the Internet is gaining considerable ground in Nicaragua.

Prior to the elections last year, the presidential couple’s ruling party created more than 340 Facebook accounts to echo campaign slogans and Sandinista propaganda, the CINCO report found.

recognizes the efforts made by both the Antigua and Barbuda Electoral Commission and the Supervisor of Elections in the preparation of this election, enabling them to overcome several of the problems experienced in 2009.

collaborating to ensure a peaceful voting process.

the question has to be asked whether the observation missions mounted by three organisations: the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), the Commonwealth and the Organisation of American States (OAS), are capable of making any real difference to this kind of situation in Antigua and Barbuda or any other country.

CARICOM issued a 400-word statement that was essentially devoid of any meaningful observations or recommendations – or indeed anything worth publishing.

do these electoral observation missions have any real teeth or are they just for the purpose of paying lip service to the concept of free and fair elections?

They think there are another 8,500 civilians who make up the Farc's support network.

Inspired by the Cuban revolution in the 1950s, they demanded more rights and control over the land.

No, Colombia went through a 10-year civil war before the Farc were even founded.

The man who would later become the top leader of the Farc, Manuel "Sureshot" Marulanda, had fought in La Violencia.

Most of their fighters are from poor, rural communities and include both men and women of all ages.

Colombia is one of the main producers of cocaine and the rebels get a large part of their income from drug trafficking or levying "taxes" on those who do.

likewise the 5.5 in Antigua may be outrageous somewhere else.

work to make our islands truly great places to live and not get carried away with stats.