Americas-MOAS

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.

in the joint announcement by Brazil and the United States, the two nations committed to increasing the use of wind, solar and geothermal energy to make up 20 percent of each country’s electricity production by 2030, which would double power generation from renewable sources in Brazil and triple it in the United States. Brazil also pledged to restore about 30 million acres of Amazon rain forest, an area about the size of Pennsylvania.

Money is another major obstacle. In 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton pledged that by 2020, developed economies would send $100 billion annually, from both public and private sources, to developing economies to help them adapt to the ravages of climate change. This year, the United Nations has sought to establish a $10 billion “Green Climate Fund” to help begin that fund-raising effort.Although Mr. Obama has pledged $3 billion — more than any other nation has offered — Republicans in Congress have blocked efforts to appropriate the money.Climate policy experts say that without the money from rich countries, developing economies will not be able to follow through on their pledges.

“I have lots of clients that come here and say, ‘I want to look like that mannequin,’ ” Ms. Molina said. “I tell them, ‘O.K., then get an operation.’ ”

Ms. Corro, the co-owner, explained the changes in the mannequins over just a few years: bigger breasts, bigger buttocks, svelte waists. Until recently, “the mannequins were natural, just like the women were natural,” she said. “The transformation has been both of the woman and of the mannequin.”

While Ms. Corro’s mannequins took a quantum leap in body shape several years ago, Ms. Mieles said that the busts and buttocks of her family’s mannequins had grown gradually to keep up with the trends in plastic surgery.

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

After years of watching his influence in Latin America slip away, Mr. Obama suddenly turned the tables this week by declaring a sweeping détente with Cuba, opening the way for a major repositioning of the United States in the region.

Washington’s isolation of Cuba has long been a defining fixture of Latin American politics, something that has united governments across the region, regardless of their ideologies. Even some of Washington’s close allies in the Americas have rallied to Cuba’s side.

“We never thought we would see this moment,” said Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, a former Marxist guerrilla who chided the Obama administration last year over the National Security Agency’s surveillance of her and her top aides. She called the deal with Cuba “a moment which marks a change in civilization.”

“What has been proposed as solutions are like treating cancer with an aspirin,” said Juan Pardinas, a political analyst at the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness, a research group based here. “There is a kind of deafness on their part without recognizing the huge opportunity to change things in Mexico as a result of this crisis.”

“It is a historic breach here,” said Mauricio Merino, an analyst at CIDE, a Mexico City policy institute, and one of 80 intellectuals and representatives of watchdog groups who called on political leaders this week to jettison the proposal for a single special prosecutor and instead create an independent body to fight corruption at the highest levels. “The political class has the power, and they are trying to keep it.”

“The federal government has shown a very limited and inappropriate capability to react, and it hasn’t found a rhetoric and narrative that fits this moment of crisis,” he said. “It will be very hard for him to find it, since every discovery and confirmation of the students’ death only fuels the movement and empowers people to mobilize.”

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.

The authorities in Venezuela charged a leading opposition politician on Wednesday with taking part in a plot to assassinate President Nicolás Maduro. The politician, María Corina Machado, was informed of the charge in a meeting with prosecutors but was not detained. The national prosecutor’s office said in a statement on its website that Ms. Machado was charged with conspiracy and that, if found guilty, she could be sentenced to eight to 16 years in prison.

Ms. Machado, who denies taking part in a plot, was a vocal supporter of widespread antigovernment protests this year. Another politician who supported the protests, Leopoldo López, was charged with promoting violence and has been imprisoned.

The State Department in Washington issued a statement saying, “We are deeply concerned by what appears to be the Venezuelan government’s continuing effort to intimidate its political opponents through abuse of the legal process.”

President Enrique Peña Nieto said Wednesday that he would disclose details of his assets, a day after his wife promised to give up an opulent new home in one of this city’s most expensive neighborhoods.

On Tuesday night, Mexico’s first lady, Angélica Rivera, a former soap opera star, attempted to put to rest suspicions about how she had financed the purchase of her sumptuous home. She said she earned $10 million in 2010, the year her contract with the Mexican television network Televisa ended — more than enough to pay for the property.

Ms. Rivera failed to address a possible conflict of interest at the center of the criticism. She signed a contract to buy the 15,000-square-foot house from a subsidiary of a company that won multimillion-dollar contracts from the State of Mexico, the populous state surrounding the capital, while Mr. Peña Nieto was its governor.

Some of his proposals never made it out of Congress under predecessors, including putting local police under state authority. Yet he has had success pushing through other broad changes designed to improve the economy, and as much as anything he aimed to restore the public’s flagging faith in his governance.

The case has pushed Mexico’s chronic problems with organized crime, impunity and lawlessness back to the forefront and forced Mr. Peña Nieto, who had tried to prioritize the economy, to act.

“This shows a change from a government that thought that economics will fix security issues, to one that acknowledges that security — and rule of law — is needed to allow economic growth to happen,”

According to a recent poll by Datafolha, more Brazilians identify with right-wing ideas, like looser gun restrictions, than they did last year. Although 58 percent of Brazilians believe that poverty relates to a lack of opportunities, 37 percent insist that laziness is the main cause of it. This was a major point of debate during the election: One side argued for meritocracy and less government aid; the other, for more public spending to reduce inequality.

Corruption is not what the right wing fears most. Just as in the ’60s, the Brazilian middle and upper classes are intensely afraid of the Communist threat.

The truth is that Ms. Rousseff’s Workers Party has been in power for more than 11 years and has so far failed to establish even a hint of the dreaded dictatorship of the proletariat. On the contrary: The once radical party has come to look increasingly centrist, adopting many of the practices of its neoliberal rivals. It has employed orthodox economic policies in order to maintain market stability; it hasn’t nationalized any assets but rather favored the privatization of ports, highways and airports; and Ms. Rousseff’s new ministers include an ally of agribusiness and nemesis of environmentalists, Katia Abreu, as agriculture minister, and a fiscally conservative banker, Joaquim Levy, as finance minister. This year, the profits of Brazilian private banks increased 26.9 percent. According to the “Top 1,000 World Banks” survey, Brazil is ranked seventh in banking profits.