Word: authoritarianism
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...year 2000 - when Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was toppled after 71 consecutive and authoritarian years in power - is considered the moment democracy arrived south of the border. But the process started 15 years before, after a horrendous 1985 earthquake that left 10,000 dead in Mexico City. The PRI's response to that tragedy was appalling, and it sowed the opposition anger that proliferated as the jaded ruling party kept making blunders, including a disastrous 1994 peso crash. In the next presidential election, six years later, Mexico's Berlin Wall finally fell...
Hitting a Hornet's Nest Mexico's drug plague is a product of both its authoritarian past and its new democratic present. When it ruled Mexico as an elective dictatorship, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) accommodated but regulated the drug cartels. But after the PRI lost the presidency in 2000 and its quasi-control of the cartels broke down, those groups split into more vicious gangs like the Zetas, a band of former army commandos who now head the Gulf Cartel. Cities from Nuevo Laredo to Cancún were soon reeling from turf battles. The Juárez Cartel, once Mexico...
...pressure from commodities-hungry China by allowing the mining project to go forward. Bloggers are whipping up fears that the influx of Chinese workers is part of Beijing's long-term strategy to occupy their country. Banned pro-democracy groups, which are happy for any opportunity to criticize the authoritarian government, call the mining venture an "ill-begotten scheme." Earlier this month, a dissident Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Do, said that strip mining will destroy the way of life of the region's ethnic minorities. He added that the project created "an illustration of Vietnam's dependence on China." There...
...however, will need to make changes as well. In years past, say his critics, he could get away with some of his more authoritarian impulses because Bush was getting away with so many of his own. But Bush's exit may throw a brighter international spotlight on measures like the new Caracas government law - which to many observers makes Chávez look as if he's nullifying a democratic election to spite his opponents. In recent weeks the Venezuelan President has moved to wrest control of ports and other infrastructure from opposition governors and mayors, declaring corruption charges against...
...opposition insists Morales wants to create an authoritarian socialist state in Bolivia. At the same time, anti-indigenous racism is widespread in Bolivia's east. Right-wing opposition groups were responsible for violent attacks on indigenous citizens last year before January's constitutional referendum, which gave Bolivia's majority indigenous more political power but had many worried that Santa Cruz and other resource-rich eastern provinces might try to secede from the poorer highlands, where the capital, La Paz, is located. Morales himself went on a five-day hunger strike last week to get Bolivia's Congress to pass...