Word: america
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Obama got off to a good start in Latin America, engaging leaders and promising a new attitude from Washington. The problem with the shift on coups is that Latin America now expects action to back it up. Honduras is Obama's first hemispheric crisis. There are obviously higher White House priorities right now, and Obama insists he's diligently working for a negotiated solution. But diplomats from Brasília to Mexico City say they fear he's only half-heartedly pressuring Honduras' new government to let Zelaya back in to finish his term, a perception that could squander...
Obama is stuck in the New World's new paradox. Latin America today is less dependent on Washington, and less tolerant of its interventionism, than it has been for decades, thanks to the counterweight of rising star Brazil and the anti-U.S. gospel of Venezuela's oil-rich leftist President, Hugo Chávez. Yet for all that newfound self-reliance, Latin America still looks to the U.S.'s superpower leadership to put the squeeze on rogues like the Honduran coupsters. No other force in the western hemisphere, not Brazil, and certainly not the Organization of American States, wields...
...Obama's part could sour his start and make it harder to engage the region on matters Washington cares about, like drugs and trade. Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, who tacitly backed a failed coup attempt against Chávez in 2002, promised a new relationship with Latin America, but saw his free-trade plan for the hemisphere die and drug production soar. Now even moderate Latin leaders are decrying Washington's quiet efforts to use military bases in Colombia for U.S. antidrug operations; their pique will increase if they decide Honduras' military chiefs are getting a pass from...
...that the region "continues to view armed forces as the final arbiter of social conflicts." For all the progress Latin Americans have made in electing their Presidents, they often fall back on old habits when removing them - whether it's oligarchies bidding soldiers do the job in Central America or populists galvanizing street mobs in the Andes. Allowing the Honduran putsch to prevail won't exactly strengthen a caudillo-prone continent's democracies...
...excellent adman. When his firm does a public-image campaign for the company about to raze New York City landmark Penn Station, he lays out a pitch that could be his personal creed. "If you don't like what is being said, change the conversation," he advises. What distinguishes America, he says, is its ability to erase the past: "Change is neither good or bad. It simply...