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At a recent gathering of Latin American heads of state, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the Brazilian president, commented that his supporters, the workers of Brazil, had waited for decades to influence Brazilian politics. "That's nothing," said Alejandro Toledo, the first Peruvian president of indigenous descent. "My people have been waiting for 500 years!" The wait is now over, and not just in Peru. The political empowerment of indigenous populations has become a global trend.
These days, China is not just exporting toys, electronics and textiles. It is also exporting anxieties.
Business leaders, government officials and military planners fret over China's potential to wreak havoc in the world. Worried about the US trade deficit, John Snow, US Treasury secretary, recently visited Beijing to see if something could be done about the undervalued exchange rate that makes Chinese exports even cheaper than they would otherwise be. His colleagues at the Pentagon worry that China may develop the economic and military wherewithal to challenge US global supremacy. President Vicente Fox complains of China's aggressive tactics in luring light industry away from Mexico, while Germans and Japanese worry that China's cheap exports add to their own deflationary problems.
A "crass buffoon" and "a man of very questionable integrity" is how The Economist describes him. He incarnates "nepotism, corruption and dishonesty" says Denmark's Information, while Aftonbladet, a Swedish daily, dismisses him as "an arrogant clown" and the Berliner Zeitung writes that he is "a shady deal-maker". France's Libération concludes that he is a "threat to liberal democracy". Whereas the Financial Times argues that "he lives in a media-bubble where his public gaffes and gratuitous insults go largely unreported at home at least until he goes abroad".
George W. Bush should be as bold with Brasilia as he was with Baghdad. In Brazil's case, however, instead of regime change his aim should be regime support. And rather than military force, he should wield his country's enormous economic influence.
For more than a year, the deteriorating political relationship between the US and Europe has provided rich fodder for analyses, dire predictions, threats and appeals. Meanwhile, as politicians, diplomats and generals fret over the geopolitical causes and consequences of the worsening health of the transatlantic relationship, the US dollar has been sliding against the euro.
There is murderous anti-Americanism and there is anti-Americanism "light". The first is the anti-Americanism of fanatical terrorists who hate the US - its power, its values and its policies - and are willing to kill and to die in order to hurt it. The second is the anti-Americanism of those who take to the streets and the media to rant against it but do not seek its destruction.
For decades Venezuela was a backwater, uninteresting to the outside world. It could not compete for international attention with nearby countries where superpowers staged proxy wars, or where military juntas "disappeared" thousands of opponents, or where the economy regularly crashed. Venezuela was stable. Its oil fueled an economy that enjoyed the world's highest growth rate from 1950 to 1980 and it boasted a higher per-capita income than Spain from 1928 to 1984. Venezuela was one of the longest-lived democracies in Latin America.
Oil and beauty queens: for decades, those were the only stories from Venezuela to catch the attention of the international media. Now, with its oil industry paralysed, the economy in free fall and President Hugo Chávez stepping up his Bolivarian revolution, Venezuela's disintegration is a story the world can no longer ignore.