Latin America

Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro has a new economic plan which he calls “a really impressive magic formula.”[i] Hyperinflation has hit the country hard, and the solutions Maduro proposes include a 3,000% increase in the minimum wage, a new commodity-based cryptocurrency,[ii] cutting any number of zeros from off of the currency,[iii] and magical political rhetoric. The plan has to this point failed as the situation worsens by the day. Inflation has sped up rather than slowing down, and Maduro’s popularity falls by the day. As the nation’s educated middle-class citizens leave by the thousands the economic outlook is worsening, not improving.[iv]

The recent presidential elections in Mexico marked a new wave in Mexican politics, and a turn of administration not unlike that seen in the United States in 2016. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador won a landslide election, being the first president from the leftist National Regeneration Movement Party (Morena) in Mexico’s history. Since Mexico’s last major constitutional reform in 1926, the right-leaning Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) held overwhelming power for the duration of the 20th century, losing in 2000 for two terms of six years, but regained power in 2012 under Enrique Pena Nieto. Mexico’s rampant economic problems, coupled by troubling bouts of violence and corruption (as evidenced by the disappearance and cover-up of the 43 students in Guerrero in 2014), increased the Mexican people’s distrust of government and desire for major institutional change (Noriega, 2018).