Word: lites
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...frozen to halt panicked runs, and an enraged middle class took to the streets. The country went through five Presidents in just two weeks. Wall Street feared that the crisis, one of the worst in South America's history, would spread next door to giant Brazil--where the élite predicted financial ruin if Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, head of the left-wing Workers' Party, was elected President that year--and even to stable Chile, where executives groused over glasses of Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon that the U.S. Congress might block Santiago's free-trade pact with Washington...
...panic over Zuma? South Africa's élite suspect he's a wannabe strongman in the mold of the rulers in much of postcolonial Africa to the north. Many senior ANC figures regard Zuma with open disdain. Defense Minister Mosiuoa Lekota, an Mbeki supporter, recently warned that anyone who still sang Mshini wami was "not right in the head." Zuma, a heavyset man with an easy charm and ready laugh, dismisses his critics as out of touch with ordinary South Africans. "The majority in this country have not seen anything wrong with Zuma," he told TIME earlier this year...
...unhappy with what they claim is the government's pursuit of economic growth over equality: millions of South Africans still live in the same tin-roof townships to which they were confined under apartheid. A target of particular outrage has been the emergence of a moneyed black élite around the party leadership--people like Sexwale and Ramaphosa...
Lehman insists that the Ariases, members of Panama's rabiblancos, or white élite, are just being greedy. They deny it, though they won't say how much of the money they would give to charity if they won. But Lehman says this tropical probate drama tests whether Panama's notoriously corrupt judicial system can be trusted to uphold the surge of legal contracts coming its way as the canal expands and Americans continue to move to Panama for cheaper living. "It's important that the poor children get this money and equally important that our legal system stop tarnishing...
Even if the Ariases win, they risk becoming another symbol of Latin America's gaping chasm between a hyperwealthy élite and the abject poor. Panama and its reformist President, Martín Torrijos, may have a good business plan for the future, but the nation's near 40% poverty rate is a legacy of decades of banana-republic rule and dismal social spending. Hilda declined to speak to TIME on the record because the case is still pending, but her granddaughter Madelaine Urrutia, who sits on the board of a children's charity, insists, "We are a family with...