Word: dictatorships
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...wonders of the world." Ever since, the Maldives has enchanted shipwrecked sailors, Hollywood celebrities and Russian oligarchs fortunate enough to wash up by its shores. Yet beneath this outsiders' vision of paradise lurks a more troubled reality - one shaped by 30 years of a suffocating dictatorship that ended only last year...
...ongoing Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories has also helped fuel the rise of Islamic extremism, especially in countries that have unpopular peace agreements with Israel. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, the main opposition to the American-backed Mubarak dictatorship, waged a small-scale terror campaign against both the government and the country's Coptic Christians during the 1990s. Since then, in an effort to derail the Islamist movement, the secular Mubarak regime has embraced some of its opponents' religiosity, and perhaps some of their anti-Coptic prejudice. Last month, in a supposed measure to prevent the spread...
...regimes like those in Syria, Iran and North Korea are fundamentally different from al-Qaeda. They are different because their goals are national or regional, not global. The Baathists want to run Iraq again; the Taliban wants to reclaim power in Afghanistan; the Iranians want to perpetuate their dictatorship and wield influence across the Middle East. Those goals may be unacceptable, but we've decided that they bear enough relationship to reality to be worth talking about...
That would be bad news for Mexico, and bad news for the U.S. The PRI came to power in 1929 by reestablishing order after the bloody chaos of the Mexican Revolution. It set up an elective dictatorship, one of the world's most corrupt, infamous for ballot-box fraud and notorious for blaming all its epic failings on Washington. The party was also as soulless as its massive, East German-style headquarters in Mexico City. It stood for little more than the cynical acquisition of power and its spoils - the manifestation of Octavio Paz's premise that Mexico...
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...