Representatives of the 33 countries that will comprise the Latin American and Caribbean Summit (CALC) met in Caracas today to finalize the group’s agenda, settling on twelve main issues that the new political coalition will tackle when it launches in July 2011. In addition to addressing political, social, and environmental problems in the region, CALC aims to form a new economic bloc in the Americas that would exclude the U.S. and Canada.

Argentine politics can be sometimes hard to understand, and reading the news is often confusing if you don’t know how the system works. The following should make things clearer and help you to better understand Argentine politics. How does democracy work in Argentina? In Argentina, the president is both head of the state and head [...]

On 30th May Colombians go to the polls to choose their first new president for eight years as incumbent, Álvaro Uribe, steps down after serving his maximum two terms in office. Just six months ago it had appeared that Uribe might stand again after he sought a constitutional amendment to allow him an unprecedented third term in order to protect his legacy of ‘democratic security’ in which the Colombian government has curbed the violence and weakened the FARC insurgency that had bedevilled the country.

In Europe or in the US, if we took a poll to find out what the biggest concern was, many people would immediately reply: the credit crunch. But the response would be slightly different in Latin America and especially in Argentina where the economy has not been hit quite so hard. One question remains: why has the country escaped the worst of the financial crisis?