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Venezuela Can’t Confront Covid-19 Without a Political Truce. Will Washington Help?

Feliciano Reyna, Temir Porras, Verónica Zubillaga ˙ ˙ Voces

Maduro speaking in the Palacio Miraflores Credit: Gobierno Bolivariano de Venezuela
Perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives—inside Venezuela and across its borders—now depend on whether our leaders can put aside their battle for control, engage politically in good faith, and momentarily put the wellbeing of citizens first by taking the urgent steps needed to combat the virus crisis and its consequences.Read more +

Colombia: To Frack or Not to Frack?

Lisa Viscidi, Sarah Phillips ˙ ˙ Voces

March against fracking in San Martín, Cesar. Esperanza Proxima/Flickr/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
For over a decade Colombians have been debating whether or not to allow oil companies to use hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to produce oil and gas from shale rock, a technique that has been controversial in many countries. The high court’s decision last week to uphold a moratorium on fracking suggests the increasingly polarized debate is far from over.Read more +

Can Colombia Make Peace with the JEP?

Tamar Ziff, Julia Searby ˙ ˙ Voces

Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz / Facebook
President Duque must confront a new test of his leadership rather than put the JEP controversy behind him. Duque has remained silent on the referendum thus far, but now must decide whether to accept the judgment of the Colombian Congress and Constitutional Court and allow the transitional justice process to move forward, or join his mentor Uribe’s continuing efforts to undermine the JEP. Read more +

Peru’s Slow Unwinding

Tamar Ziff, Ben Raderstorf ˙ ˙ Voces

Cesar Jose Honostroza Pariachi / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Peru’s inclination to growth over institutionalization could be seen as a sort of libertarian experiment—getting the state out of the way in a country where economic mismanagement has more than once led to disaster. But, while in the short term Peru has defied research that shows that institutional factors—such as corruption, bureaucratic inefficiency, and lack of trust and satisfaction in government—are consistent structural obstacles to prosperity, cracks are beginning to show. Read more +

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