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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.

If the biggest economic story this century was China’s rise, Brazil was uniquely poised to benefit from it. Rich in iron ore, soybeans and beef, not to mention oil, Brazil was positioned as a supplier of many things China needed. Its annual trade with China, only around $2 billion in 2000, soared to $83 billion in 2013. China supplanted the U.S. as Brazil’s largest trading partner.

Brazil fell under what some economists call the “resource curse,” a theory describing how countries with abundant natural resources sometimes do worse than countries without them. The idea is that the money from commodity sales can lead to overvalued currencies and shortsighted policy-making, leaving such countries badly exposed when the resource boom finally ends.

“Unfortunately, the history is that commodity-dependent economies do not catch up with the U.S.,” said Ruchir Sharma, head of emerging markets at Morgan Stanley Investment Management. “Not just oil producers. More countries end up being poorer, compared with the U.S., after they find a commodity than catch up.” Using data going back to 1800, he said commodity-dependent economies typically grow for a decade, then spend as long as two decades wallowing or slipping back.

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

Billowing black smoke and flames could be seen from a distance after two large tanks holding oil caught fire on Nicaragua’s Pacific coast.

Ortega vs. the Contras: Nicaragua Endures an ’80s Revival

Tyson and his men are contras — yes, like the ones from the 1980s who received stealth funding during the Reagan administration to topple Mr. Ortega’s leftist Sandinista government.

“It is a silent, dirty war that is not recognized,” said Bishop Abelardo Mata, a Roman Catholic leader who has served as something of a mediator between the two sides.

n the international arena, the new president, Dilma Roussef, has pulled back from Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva's many excesses (indifference to human rights abuses, support for Iran and its nuclear program, and rhetorical anti-Americanism) during his last year in office, and may even have a present for Obama.

South America is booming, as India and China swallow up its exports of iron, copper, soybeans, coffee, coal, oil, wheat, poultry, beef, and sugar. Its foreign trade and investment patterns are diversified and dynamic. With a few minor exceptions, migration is internal to the region, and a modus vivendi has been reached with the drug trade, mainly coca leaf and cocaine in Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia. Moreover, relations with the US, while important, are no longer paramount. South American governments can afford to disagree with the US, and often do. They have just elected a new president of the Union of South American Nations (Unasur), whose headquarters are being built in Quito, Ecuador. As its name suggests, Unasur's main raison d'être is to exclude Canada, the US, and Mexico (in contrast to the Organisation of American States).

None of this holds true for Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean islands – mainly the Dominican Republic, but eventually Cuba, too, and, in its own way, Haiti. These are not mineral-rich or bountiful agricultural nations: some coffee and bananas here, a little sugar and beef there, but nothing with which to sustain a boom. While Mexico is America's second-largest supplier of oil, this represents only 9 per cent of its total exports. Instead, these countries export low-value-added manufactured goods (Mexico does more, of course), and live off remittances, tourism, and drug-transshipment profits. All of this is overwhelmingly concentrated on the US: that is where the migrants are, where the towels and pajamas are shipped, where the tourists come from, and where the drugs are bought. For these countries, including Mexico, stable, close, and productive relations with America are essential.

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.

these days Chavez’s influence is waning across the region as Venezuela’s oil-powered economy has gone bust and concerns have been raised about his governing style, which includes the jailing of opponents.

Ever so quietly, some of the Venezuelan populist’s biggest projects have been abandoned or mothballed, or have yet to take flight, including a pipeline from Venezuela to Argentina, a South American development bank, housing, highways and a continental investment fund.

Latinobarometro found in a February report that Latin Americans perceived Venezuela to be less democratic than other countries, assigning a 4.3 rating to Venezuela, with 10 being the most democratic.

Eliezer Álvarez made a simple observation: Venezuelan women were increasingly using plastic surgery to transform their bodies, yet the mannequins in clothing stores did not reflect these new, often extreme proportions.

So he went back to his workshop and created the kind of woman he thought the public wanted — one with a bulging bosom and cantilevered buttocks, a wasp waist and long legs, a fiberglass fantasy, Venezuelan style

Now his mannequins, and others like them, have become the standard in stores across Venezuela, serving as an exaggerated, sometimes polarizing, vision of the female form that calls out from the doorways of tiny shops

“What was life like before the Industrial Revolution?” Hayhoe asked during a keynote address at the Citizens’ Climate Lobby conference in Washington, D.C. “It was short. It was brutal.” A woman’s work was an endless cycle of drudgery. Economies were built on the backs of children and slaves. “So I realized that I am truly and profoundly grateful for the benefits and the blessings that fossil fuels have brought us.”

They were clapping for fossil fuels because it was cathartic to acknowledge that, for all the damage done, coal and gas and oil had been gifts to mankind.

She knows how to speak to oilmen, to Christians, to farmers and ranchers, having lived for years in Lubbock, Tex., with her pastor husband. She is a scientist who thinks that we’ve talked enough about science, that we need to talk more about matters of the heart.