Moisés Naím / Bloomberg Businessweek
Even before his death, Hugo Chávez had joined Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara in the pantheon of Latin American leaders who enjoy instant global recognition. And, like Castro and Guevara, Chávez is more than controversial. He is the subject of deep admiration that easily morphs into passionate worship, and antagonism that often mutates into equally intense hatred. Chávez, 58, died Tuesday, after two years of cancer treatments, according to Venezuelan Vice President Nicolás Maduro.
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Moisés Naím / The Washington Post
In 2009, during his first address before a joint session of Congress, President Obama championed a budget that would serve as a blueprint for the country’s future through ambitious investments in energy, health care and education. “This is America,” the new president proclaimed. “We don’t do what’s easy.”
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Moisés Naím / Bloomberg Businessweek
If you want to understand the shifting balance of power in the world economy, it helps to know the names Jorge Paulo Lemann, Carlos Brito, and Frederico Curado. Lemann, Brazil’s richest man and the dealmaker behind the $52 billion InBev-Anheuser-Busch merger and the $3.3 billion purchase of Burger King (BKW), has just teamed up with Warren Buffett to acquire yet another major American company, H.J. Heinz (HNZ), for $23 billion. Brito, the Brazilian chief executive officer of Anheuser-Busch InBev (BUD), has launched a $20 billion takeover bid for Mexico’s Grupo Modelo (GPMCY)—the maker of Corona beer—and in the process prompted a U.S. antitrust suit. (AB InBev already sells almost one in five beers in the world.) And Curado, the CEO of Embraer (ERJ), the world’s third-largest commercial planemaker, recently inked a $4 billion deal to supply American Airlines with regional jets.
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Moisés Naím / El País
What do the European economic crisis, the war in Syria and global warming all have in common? Nobody seems to have the power to stop them.
This is partly due to the fact that all three belong to a dangerous class of challenges now facing the world: problems whose solution depends on the action of several countries acting together. Such problems are not new, of course. But now they are proliferating, becoming more pernicious and complicated to solve while the capacity of countries to coordinate their efforts is declining.
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Moisés Naím / Financial Times
What do Europe’s economic crisis, Syria’s civil war and global warming have in common? No one seems to have the power to stop them.
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Moisés Naím / El País
The word “sanction” is an unpleasant one. It implies the punishment that someone with power (parent, teacher, boss, judge) inflicts on someone less powerful who is forced to submit. In international relations, sanctions have a well-earned bad reputation. The more powerful nations tend to use them to force policy shifts — or even changes in leadership — in other countries. They seldom work. Instead, they tend to penalize the already-suffering population of the sanctioned country, more than the tyrants who misgovern it. The irrational and counterproductive US embargo on Cuba is a good example. The embargo, which began in 1960, has served only to give the Castro brothers half a century of excuses to justify the island’s bankruptcy. One rare and contrasting example is that of the successful sanctions on South Africa in the mid-1980s. The US Congress imposed severe economic sanctions on the country until it abolished apartheid and freed Nelson Mandela, among other conditions. Europe and Japan joined in. The embargo wreaked havoc in the South African economy, leading its government to eventually reform the segregationist laws and free Mandela. But the list of sanctions that have accomplished their stated goals is very short.
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Moisés Naím / Financial Times
In most of Latin America, February means carnival, and carnival means costumes and dancing in the streets. Venezuela is no exception, save for the fact that carnival also means a devaluation of the currency is highly possible. Since 1983, the country has suffered 10 massive devaluations. Seven were announced during the carnival holidays. It happened again last week, when the government announced a devaluation of more than 30 per cent against the US dollar. This means that during Hugo Chávez’s presidency, the bolivar has been devalued by 992 per cent.
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Moisés Naím / El País
Angela Merkel is surely one of the world's most powerful people. Rupert Murdoch, the owner of News Corporation, one of the world’s largest media conglomerates, is also quite powerful. Of course, their respective sources of power are very different, as are the ways in which they use the influence they have, and the objectives and interests that guide their conduct. Merkel is the leader of an important nation while Murdoch leads a large multinational corporation. Moreover, Murdoch maintains that he does not use the power of his media to pressure governments or influence politics. His critics reject this claim, and insist that Murdoch and his media properties are influential political actors. In the United States, his detractors accuse Fox News of being closely aligned with the Republican Party, and more recently a main supporter of the Tea Party.
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Moisés Naím / New York Times
Last month, Jorge Botti, the head of Fedecámaras, Venezuela's business federation, explained that unless the government supplies more dollars to pay for imports, shortages -- from food to medicine -- would be inevitable. "What we will give Fedecámaras is not more dollars but more headaches," replied acting president Nicolas Maduro, the heir apparent to the Chavista regime (and Hugo Chávez's vice president).
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