The year 2000 was the worst for the U.S. stock market in nearly two decades—but not for weapons makers. The share prices of the two biggest military contractors, Lockheed Martin and Boeing, hit new highs, while the Standard & Poor’s …
The markets were pleased when Vicente Fox won Mexico’s presidential election in July: not because he had done what many still thought impossible—defeat the authoritarian machinery of the longest ruling party in the world—but because there had been no unrest, …
The walls of Maurice Bishop’s prime ministerial office are still blackened from the flames that swept through Butler House during the U.S. invasion in 1983. Some Grenadians say the fire that engulfed the government compound high upon the bluff at …
BEFORE THE Jamaican elections last December I visited Clive Dobson, president of the National Workers Union (NWU), at the union’s modest, two-story office amid the Victorian decay of downtown Kingston. Michael Manley headed this union for nearly twenty years before …
Fidel Velásquez, the ninety-seven-year-old Mexican labor baron, finally expired on a Saturday morning last June. Those Mexicans who owed him the most were in full attendance at his wake: the free-market, ruling-party elite led by the government finance minister, and …
Laredo, Texas, the busiest land port between the United States and Mexico, offers an intimate view of the marriage between illegal narcotics and free trade. Along the Rio Grande, U.S. law enforcement officials refer to the North American Free Trade …
Last October I climbed to the roof of a decrepit apartment building in Managua’s eastern quarter. Originally a roost of the wealthy during the Somoza regime, it was mangled by the 1972 earthquake that leveled much of Nicaragua’s capital. Today, …
Earlier this year I stood atop a massive boulder with El Profe (The Professor) and other leading citizens of Hueycantenango, a timeworn town set on a bluff high in the Southern Sierra Madre. We looked out over hogbacked ridges, thicketed …
