Ricardo Pascoe Pierce With the telephone call between President Lula and President Biden a few hours after the closing of the polls in the Venezuelan presidential election, it seemed that sanity might prevail in the face of an irrefutable fact that both leaders recognized: the …
Time to rethink retirement When my mom passed away in 2012, my dad started to decline quickly, and my brother and I had to go through my parents’ bills and finances. Both my mom and dad worked great jobs for 50 years, but they were …
Ricardo Pascoe Pierce What does the left have to offer Mexico and the rest of Latin America? In Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, the question is quickly answered: it offers dictatorship and corruption. In Bolivia, Peru, Argentina, Colombia, and Chile, the governing lefts persecute each other, …
Wars, polarization, and uncertainty reign in the immediate future. None of the forecasts at the beginning of the year* alerted us to the outcomes we experienced. The widely anticipated recession didn’t happen; the U.S. economy is growing with low unemployment and decreasing inflation. Growth across …
Ricardo Pascoe Pierce Simplifying what is happening in Latin America in political, economic, and social terms leads to a failure to perceive long-term trends. Instead, analyses tend to start from immediate circumstances to extrapolate long-term trends. A first warning is that simplifying trends into “left” …
Polarization around the world is increasingly present, in some cases even concerning. Politics in some countries are moved by protesting angry citizens fed up with the incompetence of their leaders. Extremists have a fertile ground for their causes, both for left and right. Unlikely candidates …
Ricardo Pascoe Pierce Argentina repudiated Peronism, Kirchnerism, leftism, and the populist rhetoric accompanying those governments for over two decades. During that time, it has received political support from Hugo Chávez, Nicolás Maduro, Lula Da Silva, and Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The economic management has been …
Ricardo Pascoe Pierce Fifty years ago tomorrow, General Pinochet and almost the entire Chilean military broke their constitutional oath and staged a coup d’état against the legally elected government of Salvador Allende. The few military commanders who opposed the coup were eliminated. Thus, Chile aligned …
How much do people trust that their governments are doing the right thing? Trust in the institutions, confidence in the path toward economic prosperity, shifts in trust from authorities to peers, trust in media, transparency and accountability, rule of law, democratic values, polarization, all these …
Ricardo Pascoe Pierce. These three characters, AMLO, Trump, and Bolsonaro, profit from the accusation of electoral fraud, while all three were elected Presidents. All three used extreme social, economic, and political polarization as their privileged instrument to hold on to power. And all three have …