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Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Transport Matteo Salvini meets with journalists following the CIPESS decision to approve the construction of the Messina Strait Bridge, Italy, on August 7, 2025.
Hard Numbers: Italy builds bridge over troubled waters, Ghanaian helicopter crash kills two ministers, Portuguese cop stuffs coke in animal skins, & More
13.5 billion: After decades of planning, the Italian government has approved a €13.5 billion ($15.6 billion) project to build the world’s longest suspension bridge, connecting Sicily to mainland Italy. The Ponte Messina will span one of the most seismically active areas in the Mediterranean, but designers say it will be able to withstand earthquakes. The target date for completion is 2033.
8: A helicopter crash in the central Ashanti region of Ghana has killed eight people including two government ministers: Edward Omane Boamah and Ibrahim Murtala Muhammed. The cause of the crash was unclear, but local farmers near the crash site reported foggy conditions as the helicopter flew overhead.
1.5: What’s that smell in Portugal? Oh it’s just some cocaine in rotting animal skins. A police captain and an accomplice are under arrest in Portugal on suspicion of importing 1.5 tons of the drug by hiding it in untanned hides imported from Latin America. The plot thickens: captain was himself involved in a sting operation against a drug ring two years ago.
1 of 3: South African prosecutors have withdrawn charges against one of the three men accused of murdering two Black women last year and feeding their bodies to pigs. The case has exacerbated racial tensions in the country, especially in rural areas. The trial will resume on Oct. 6.
74: Myanmar’s figurehead President Myint Swe died on Thursday at the age of 74. Swe had held the role ever since the military coup of 2021, repeatedly endorsing extensions of the country’s state of emergency to ensure the military junta could hold power.
Spiritual Counsel: Azucar para siempre! Nuyorican pianist and band leader Eddie Palmieri, a giant of Latin jazz and one of the pioneers of the genre that came to be called salsa, died Wednesday at the age of 88. Thank you for all of the music, all of the magic, and all of sugar, Eddie. Que en paz descanses.
Graphic Truth: Mexico and Brazil seek to boost trade ties
Mexico and Brazil are exploring ways to boost their trade ties, and there’s certainly room for improvement: bilateral commerce between Latin America’s two largest economies amounted to just $13.6 billion last year. That’s less than 10% of Brazil’s trade with China, and not even 2% of Mexico’s trade with the US. While the two countries have historically competed for dominance, the Trump administration’s latest tariffs and the election of left-wing leadership in both Brazil and Mexico have motivated closer cooperation.
Here’s a look at where trade between Brazil and Mexico currently stands.
Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador, addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC 2024, at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center.
Small Country Big Story: El Salvador and the appeal of the "world's coolest dictator"
Nayib Bukele, the millennial strongman president of El Salvador, has many admirers. At least 1 million of them now follow an Instagram “fan” account dedicated to him. The account, @Bukele2024, regularly posts videos of Salvadoran gang members in prison, their heads shaven and their faces crawling with tattoos, crouching or cowering half-naked in the cells or yards of El Salvador’s maximum security facilities.
The gushing comments under these videos come largely from Salvadorans, more than 90% of whom currently support Bukele, who is now in his second term.
But many also come from outside the country.
“Excellent, we need a president like that in Argentina [heart],” says one.
“Mexico needs this kind of government!” reads another.
“Congratulations from Brazil!”
Bukele’s popularity at home – and his rising appeal abroad – come from a single, once-unimaginable achievement: Making El Salvador Safe Again.
As countries throughout the region grapple with high crime rates, the example of small El Salvador is having a big impact on Latin American politics.
What did he do? When Bukele took office in 2019, the tiny country of barely 6 million people was overrun by violence. Powerful gangs like MS-13 and The 18th Street Gang – both born in US prisons more than half a century ago – left hundreds of people dead every year as they warred over territory, extorted businesses, intimidated lawmakers, and kidnapped people for ransom.
Since then, the homicide rate has fallen from 36 per 10,000 people to fewer than two. El Salvador was once the most dangerous place on earth. It is now one of the safest.
How did he do it? At first, the gangs did it for him, reaching truces that had already started to bring down the murder rate when he took office. But after those deals collapsed, Bukele ripped off the gloves – he declared a state of emergency and unleashed a crackdown that has jailed more than 80,000 people.
El Salvador’s incarceration rate is now the highest in the world. Three out of every 100 Salvadoran men are currently in prisons like the ones shown on @bukele2024.
Human rights groups say his mano dura (strong hand) approach has been a disaster, rife with arbitrary detentions and allegations of torture and deadly abuse. To date, more than 8,000 people have been released after wrongful incarceration – watchdogs say that’s a fraction of those jailed without cause.
Bukele, who describes himself as “the world’s coolest dictator” has also chipped away at democratic checks and balances. In 2020, the army marched into Congress in order to intimidate lawmakers into passing a Bukele-backed stricter crime bill.
A year later, hand-picked justices ruled that he could skirt term limits and run for reelection. Last year, he won by more than 70 points, delivering his New Ideas party a supermajority in Congress to boot.
The region has taken notice. In Ecuador, where cartel violence has soared in recent years, President Daniel Noboa won reelection in a landslide last month after seeing moderate success with a state of emergency modeled on Bukele’s.
In Chile, where crime is a top concern for voters, Bukele is viewed positively by 80% of Chileans surveyed, and nearly half say they want a president like him in their own country. Polls show he is currently the most popular Latin American leader in Colombia and also in Peru where more than half a dozen new parties have named themselves after the Salvadoran president.
Why the love for Bukele? Concern about crime and violence is rising across Latin America. While the causes differ from country to country, the lingering economic dislocations of the pandemic, combined with surging Andean cocaine production and the social tensions generated by the mass exodus of Venezuelans over the past decade, have led to upticks in crime, both real and perceived.
A survey released last year by Latinobarometro showed that a third of people across the region said they or a relative had been the victim of violent crime over the previous year, the highest mark in nearly a decade.
But can Bukelismo really work elsewhere? Experts say El Salvador’s experience is unique and hard to replicate. It is a tiny country where the gangs, despite their ferocity, are nowhere near as powerful, entrenched, widely dispersed or well-armed as the transnational cartels that fuel violence elsewhere in the region, according to Risa Grais-Targow, a Latin America expert at Eurasia Group who travels often to El Salvador. Plus they are much easier to find than narcos.
“They all have tattoos on their faces,” she says, “There’s really no mystery about who these people are.”
Still, even if Bukelismo can’t be replicated in practice, it can be copied in politics. Over the next 18 months, four of the region’s biggest economies are heading into elections. Chile will choose a president later this year, while Brazil, Colombia, and Peru will all follow suit in 2026.
All three are currently governed by left-leaning politicians, but the right is surging ahead of next year’s vote, Risa says, in part because of the perception that their hardline policies will help to deal with crime.
“I think this Bukele message is going to be really popular or really forceful,” says Grais-Targow. “And so we are going to see a lot of Bukele copycats.
- El Salvador’s president gets “super” powers. ›
- The Salvador of El Salvador? ›
- The Graphic Truth: How does El Salvador's prison rate stack up? ›
- El Salvador's president wins big. What does this mean for the country and its neighbors? ›
- El Salvador’s millennial strongman on track to be reelected ›
- Strongman with a strong mandate? El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele ›
Guatemalan migrants walk after arriving at La Aurora Air Force Base on a deportation flight from the U.S., in Guatemala City, Guatemala, December 27, 2024.
Latin America braces for Trump’s deportation blitz
Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s challenge to Donald Trump over deportation flights lasted less than a day. But as the US administration ramps up deportations of undocumented migrants – focusing for now on those convicted of crimes – Latin American leaders are holding an emergency summit this Thursday.
Two key countries to watch in all of this:
First, Venezuela. Since 2015, political and economic crises have driven out nearly 8 million people. At least 270,000 of them live undocumented in the US. Despite long-standing enmity between los Yánquis and the socialist regime of Nicolás Maduro, Caracas has been open to deportation flights.
“He’s been trying to play nice with the new administration,” says Risa Grais-Targow, a regional expert at Eurasia Group. In part, Maduro wants to keep the US from reimposing sanctions on the oil sector, which Washington was technically bound to do after Maduro rigged his reelection last July.
“It’s unclear whether Trump will be moved,” says Grais-Targow. “He’s repeatedly said the US doesn’t need Venezuelan oil.” Without an agreement, the US will have to fly Venezuelans to third countries.
Second, Honduras: Nearly 300,000 Hondurans are at immediate risk of deportation. Honduras has been readying a support network for them but also, spicily, signaling that excessive US pressure could push the tiny country even closer to China.
The big question: Will a more aggressive US increase opportunities for a commercially active China to act as a counterbalance in the region more broadly?
What do Donald Trump, Bad Bunny, and the Panama Canal have in common?
Donald Trump wants to take back the Panama Canal, and Bad Bunny’s new album "DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS" is the most streamed record in the world right now. What do these two things have to do with each other?
More than you’d think. That’s because reggaetón, the genre Bad Bunny is best known for, actually has its origins on the the banks of the Panama Canal, and American foreign policy played a key role in that story.
How so? When the Americans built the canal in the years before World War I, they brought in thousands of workers from across the West Indies, but especially Jamaica, to do the hard labor. Afterward, they were permitted to live and work in the Canal Zone, a strip of US sovereign territory inside Panama that flanked the canal, ensuring US control over the waterway.
The Panamanians didn’t love this arrangement. Many felt the original canal treaties were illegitimate, and resentment at the US presence grew. In 1964, when the US stopped students from flying a Panamanian flag in the Canal Zone, a mass riot left four American soldiers and 22 Panamanian police officers dead. The Soviet Union blasted Washington’s “colonizing policy.” Fidel Castro decried “Yankee imperialism.”
In 1977, US President Jimmy Carter decided to give the canal to Panama. Carter thought this would improve America’s relations with Latin America, and avoid a more costly crisis around the Canal itself.
“Fairness, not force, should lie at the heart of our dealings with the rest of the world,” he said at the time.
Carter’s plan was unpopular at home. The stiffest opposition came from a telegenic young California governor named Ronald Reagan. But Carter’s dogged lobbying – and some help from John Wayne, whose first wife was Panamanian – helped to win narrow passage of the handover treaties. The canal itself wouldn't be given to Panama until 1999, but the controversial canal zone was dissolved almost immediately, in 1979.
And that’s where the music comes back into the story. Many of the Jamaicans and West Indians living in the Canal Zone moved to nearby Panama City. And when they did, they brought with them the popular new sound coming out of Jamaica at the time – “dancehall,” a rawer, streetier, more club-oriented successor to the reggae of the 1970s.
It wasn’t long before dancehall was reinterpreted in Spanish, becoming a new genre called Reggae en Español, a unique mashup made by the West Indians of the Canal Zone and Panama’s own Afro-Panamanian communities.
But we still aren’t in Puerto Rico yet! Right. We’re getting there.
In 1985, one of the pioneers of the Panamanian scene, known as El General, moved to New York. There he introduced the sound to the city’s huge Puerto Rican diaspora, who helped popularize it back on the island where, in turn, local artists brought hip-hop and Puerto Rican traditional styles into a musical mix that would soon go from the streets of Panama and Puerto Rico to the whole globe.
The first documented use of the term reggaeton dates from this period, when a young Daddy Yankee (whose song “Gasolina” would become the first global reggaeton hit in 2004) used it in a freestyle on an early 1990s mixtape. And just a few years after that, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio was born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico.
You now know young Benito as "Bad Bunny."
So why does Trump want the canal back anyway? He thinks it was a “mistake” to give up a canal that handles more than 5% of global trade. As Trump sees it, the US is locked in a zero-sum economic competition with China, and controlling that canal is critical, whether the Panamanians like it or not.
This is the inverse of Carter’s formulation – Trump's world is one where force is squarely at the center of America’s dealings with both friends and foes.
Trump's view echoes older ideas about America’s natural right to expand and dominate the Western Hemisphere. His America will, he says, be one that “expands our territory ... and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons,” as he pledged in his inaugural address.
But do you know what the last major US territorial expansion in Latin America was? It was the takeover, in 1898, of Puerto Rico, as a result of the Spanish-American war. The island has been, in effect, a colony of the US ever since.
And to come full circle here, the negative impacts of that 127-year relationship – political repression, exploitative neglect, mass emigration, and creeping gentrification – are all major themes of … Bad Bunny’s new album.
If you want to learn more about this story – including the complicated issues of class, gender, and race that are part of reggaeton’s evolution – check out the podcast “LOUD,” a history narrated by Ivy Queen, one of the pioneering women of the genre.
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Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado greets supporters at a protest ahead of the Friday inauguration of President Nicolas Maduro for his third term, in Caracas, Venezuela January 9, 2025.
Venezuela briefly arrests opposition leader just ahead of Maduro inauguration
Regime forces violently detained Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado as she left a rally in Caracas on Thursday, just one day before strongman President Nicolás Maduro was set to begin his third term. She was released hours later.
Machado had been in hiding for over 100 days but came out to galvanize protesters risking their lives to demonstrate against the illegitimate, autocratic government. Despite soldiers loyal to the regime manning checkpoints across the capital, thousands of citizens marched in response to the opposition’s calls for resistance. Moments before her motorcycle convoy came under gunfire, Machado led a crowd of supporters chanting, “We are not afraid!”
Her short detention could lead to further protests, but Maduro is determined to retain power for another six-year term and is set to be sworn in today. He has met past unrest with brutal violence, and we are watching for more clashes between authorities and protesters, though the government has detained many activists and opposition politicians in recent days. The government says it will also arrest Edmundo González, the man who independent audits show actually won last year’s election, if he attempts to return from exile in the Dominican Republic — which he has sworn to do today.
Ian Explains: What's so radical about Argentina's new president (besides his cloned dogs)?
Argentina's new libertarian president, Javier Milei, is not like other Argentine presidents. He's not like anyone else, for that matter. But it's not his penchant for dressing up as a superhero and singing about fiscal policy that sets him apart. Nor is it his cloned dogs or bombastic approach to politics. Six months into his first year in office, it's his radical plan to save Argentina's economy that's truly radical. And here's the thing...so far it seems to be working.
Despite living in one of the largest and most resource-rich nations in Latin America, the average Argentine has endured one economic calamity after another. Milei has vowed to put an end to what he refers to as "100 years of decadence. But can he pull it off?
The self-proclaimed tantric sex guru with a mop of unruly black hair that he claims the invisible hand of the free market keeps in place campaigned for president last year by promising to take a chainsaw literally to government spending and to eliminate Argentina's Central Bank. He also derided climate change as a socialist conspiracy. He called the Argentine compatriot Pope Francis a "leftist S.O.B." He's known universally in Argentina as El Loco or the madman. And then back in November, he won the election in a landslide.
When he won, many experts expected that Milei's self-styled, anarcho-capitalism would be the death knell for an economy already in free fall. But after taking office in December, Argentina's 300% annual inflation slowed for five months in a row. His government did this by turning the 5.5% budget deficit that it inherited into the country's first surplus in over a decade. And all without destabilizing their currency and their financial markets.
But while Milei's shock therapy has been successful at balancing the budget and slowing inflation, the fiscal and monetary austerity has caused a deep recession, with economic activity shrinking almost 10% year-on-year back in March, unemployment rising, real salaries in Argentina hitting their lowest points since 2003. Mass protests against budget cuts to public universities back in June drew more than 400,000 people to the streets.
Can Milei save Argentina's economy before he destroys it?
Watch Ian's exclusive interview with Javier Milei on the full episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, the award-winning weekly global affairs series, airing nationwide on US public television stations (check local listings).
New digital episodes of GZERO World are released every Monday on YouTube. Don''t miss an episode: Subscribe to GZERO's YouTube channel and turn on notifications (🔔).
Argentina's Milei shares strong views on China and Israel
In an exclusive interview with Ian Bremmer for the latest episode of GZERO World, Milei defines his approach to foreign policy as one of democracies vs autocracies. And he makes clear that Argentina will always side with democracies. But how does he square that vow with the reality that Chinese trade is a critical part of Argentina's (not to mention Latin America's) economy? He answers by pointing to his staunch libertarian beliefs, and his desire to stay out of the free market's way. "If I were to limit that trade, which is free, would Argentines be better off or worse off?"
Milei also makes clear that his staunch support for Israel is a defining aspect of his foreign policy approach. When Bremmer asks him about the Gaza war, his answer is simple and unwavering. "I will continue to support Israel right to the end."
Watch the full interview on GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, the award-winning weekly global affairs series, airing nationwide on US public television stations (check local listings).
New digital episodes of GZERO World are released every Monday on YouTube and on our website. Don’t miss an episode: subscribe to GZERO's YouTube channel and turn on notifications (🔔).