I used last week's World Politics Review column to call for a regional response to Ecuador's security crisis. ICG asks about the impact of a war on crime. InSight Crime provides a map of the criminal landscape. Across many of the things I've read, there is a common theme that a mano dura approach is bound to fail. I think I agree, though I've been reassessing it a bit in recent weeks. Among the questions I have: What are the other options? I'm all in favor of an approach that goes after root causes and an approach that demands rethinking the "drug war" logic. However, neither of those two opt ..read more

The point of shock therapy is to "rip the band-aid off." Cause a lot of pain quickly so that the country can get past the worst of the economic situation and move on to recovery.  That's why this chart from Bloomberg about Argentina's inflation rate looks the way it does. Subsidies have been removed and the peso is free-floating, causing all sorts of pricing difficulties and an inflation surge. It's worse now than it was at the end of the Fernandez administration. Javier Milei is engaging in shock therapy and some of the same people who helped Carlos Menem at the beginning of his admini ..read more

 Will Freeman makes two big arguments that I agree with in his column in Time Magazine. 1. The surge of immigration is caused by push rather than pull factors and there isn't much that can be done in terms of border security to halt it. 2. Efforts to block the US-Mexico border or block migrants along the route are generating incentives for organized crime to become more involved in the whole process. It's profitable. Part of the solution needs to be reducing the push factors, but there is no quick win on that front. Another part of the solution is that the US should be putting appropriate ..read more

I started writing today's newsletter about Ecuador last night. Continued early this morning. But then I had things to do and didn't get around to finishing it around 3pm. And as I wrote, more news broke. Gunmen stormed a television station. Gangs took over a university. The president issued what amounts to a declaration of war. Instead of trying to keep up with events, I tried to provide some strategic framework. My goal was to highlight: The fact numerous gangs are fighting each other makes the situation more complicated than if this was simply the government taking on one bad actor. The gan ..read more

There is little doubt that Argentina's new president is engaged in economic "shock therapy." I'm having a hard time managing any sort of easy summary of all the measures that have been issued in recent weeks, but the three issues from this week that seem most important are the proposed debt swap, the labor reform that has been halted by the courts, and the potential for an IMF deal.  Looking forward, this becomes about Milei's clashes with four groups: Congress Courts Protesters Public Milei will get a congressional coalition together to support some of his policies, but there will be a ..read more

 Experimenting with some formats for sharing info. Here are some notes from today's news sweep. AMLO will run a large deficit in the final year of his administration in the hopes of boosting the economy and his party's election chances. To do so, Mexico issued $7.5 billion in bonds. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-02/mexico-taps-debt-markets-kicking-off-latin-america-s-2024-sales The Zapatistas marked 30 years of not winning with a march that had 1,500 members. One point is that they are facing challenges given the encroachment of criminal groups into Chiapas. My other co ..read more

Today's Substack newsletter has ten predictions for 2024. Today's World Politics Review column considers three incumbents who will win in the current regional anti-incumbent environment and the challenges to democracy they present. The two articles combined set out my views for how 2024 will go. One question I asked myself before publishing the Substack was "what if I get all these wrong?" I was trying to imagine a scenario where things in the hemisphere go so off the rails that everything we think we know as conventional wisdom gets turned upside down. I don't think I have that scenario, but ..read more

Good morning from Vienna, Virginia. After 13 years overseas (3 years each in Managua, Mexico City, Montreal, and then 4 years in Bogota), we moved back to the US in July. I’m now based in the DC area for the foreseeable future. I’m hopeful to travel to Latin America two or three times this year. I’m still running Hxagon, providing political risk analysis and bespoke research for clients. I also have the substack newsletter and a weekly column at World Politics Review. I’m a Superforecaster with Good Judgment and a global fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center. That’s a lot of things. And they alm ..read more

Testing the old blog. See you all in 2024 ..read more

Still in Bogota. Christmas time has great weather and relatively light traffic. Omicron wave is just starting to hit here, which I imagine means January will be disrupted. I came close to my 2021 goals. I wrote a lot on the substack site, but not as much on this blog.  I played a lot of chess (over 1,400 games, most quick blitz games). I didn't quite hit my goals in terms of ELO, but I think I understand the game far better now than I did a year ago. I fell just short of the 10,000 pushup mark and also about 15 miles short of running 1,000 miles, though that running distance was never my ..read more