Jorge Castañeda

At long last Mexico has cobbled together tax and electoral reforms—but not the ones the country needed. Indeed the reforms passed by Congress last week might have been worse than none at all, and will likely make it more difficult to improve matters in the future.

As a colony, a protectorate and even now, Cuba is the odd Latin out.

American clout with its neighbors has hit a new low, warns Mexico's ex-foreign minister.

Calderon's drug crusade is winning fans, but can he win the fight?

The U.S. is on the edge of immigration reform—but it must act fast.

The ghosts of Mexican presidents past are haunting its new leader.

Fidel Castro used his reappearance on TV late last month to show that his health has finally improved. But he also carefully staged the event to send a serious message to the world.

Next sunday Hugo Chavez will put his electoral charmed life on the line. Since 1998, when he was elected president of Venezuela in a landslide, he's never lost a national vote.

The summit of nonaligned countries held last week in Havana was an occasion for all sorts of things: speculating on Fidel Castro's health, supporting all the "worthwhile" causes in the world--from Iran's nuclear program to Bolivia's stalled natural-gas nationalization--and predictably, bashing George W.

As always in countries like Cuba, speculation is by definition idle. No one knows whether Fidel Castro is alive and well, dead or dying, recovering or permanently incapacitated.

Mexico's July 2 presidential election has all of a sudden become a tossup. Polls before last week's debate already showed a close race; former front runner Andrés Manuel López Obrador's decision to forego the debate clearly hurt him and confirmed his decline.

In the reams of commentary about newly inaugurated Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, two statements are systematically repeated. The first contrasts the supposedly conservative nature of Chilean society against the fact that Bachelet is the first woman to be elected president of a major Latin American nation.