Lying on a hospital bed, hours after surviving three gunshot wounds, Nadia Beller, a Bolivian lawyer and political analyst, said she knew who ordered the hit. “I’ve summoned the presence of DTV to make a live declaration,” Beller said on camera last month in a wobbly voice. Source link
Simón Bolivar, the great liberator of South America, famously observed, “The United States appear to be destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty.” For 200 years, U.S. leaders have never proved him wrong. In the early 1800s, Bolivar led what is now Venezuela and five other countries to independence from the Spanish Empire. But the United States still refuses to recognize the independence of other countries in the region. Wannabe emperor Donald Trump even refers to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney as a “governor,” as if Canada was merely another U.S. state. The U.S.-backed despots replacing democratic and socialist governments across Latin America today are indeed doing so in the name of liberty, as Bolivar warned. But in practice this largely means the liberty of traditional ruling classes to exploit, impoverish and kill their less privileged neighbors, formerly as conquistadors and compradors for the Spanish Empire and now as agents of the U.S. government and transnational corporations. Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy vowed to “restore American preeminence in the …
Here’s a hot take: South by Southwest is a Latin music festival. When the De Los team headed to Austin, Texas, in 2024 to cover the event for the first time, approximately 60 acts that fell under the expansive Latin music genre umbrella had been invited to perform. Two years later, that number has more than doubled, with more than 150 Latin music acts featured at the iconic festival, now in its 40th year. “Latin music has seen incredible growth at SXSW in recent years, reflecting its rise across the global music industry,” said Evelyn Gómez Rivera, associate programmer for Latin music. “2026 is shaping up to be our biggest year for the genre in over a decade, with several major labels showcasing their newest and most exciting Latin talent here.” Ahead of the festival, which kicks off Thursday, the De Los team has assembled a list of acts that have caught our attention. And before you blow up our inboxes asking why the big acts (Fuerza Regida and Junior H are also slated to …
Most introductory philosophy of science courses begin by presenting the traditional positivist view of science as objective, descriptive, and value-free, usually as a historical position that will later be critically examined. Science and Culture in Latin America is likewise a philosophy of science course, taught as an upper-level class at the University of Utah, but it is one that reorients this familiar starting point by foregrounding the philosophical significance of science’s embeddedness with culture, power, and values. Although the course is interdisciplinary (it was cross-listed as a Spanish course and a History and Philosophy of Science course), its central questions remain philosophical: What counts as scientific knowledge? How do values shape inquiry? How should we understand scientific practices embedded in colonial and Indigenous contexts? In contrast to standard syllabi that assume students already inhabit a positivist framework, this course begins by challenging that assumption and situating science within broader cultural and political worlds. We begin with familiar debates concerning the nature of science and how we tell its history: we discuss Galileo Galilei, Thomas Kuhn, and …
In the long history of direct and indirect US interventions in Latin America – historians have counted at least 70 – the current president Donald Trump has accomplished something unprecedented. For the first time, the United States launched a military attack against a South American state, Venezuela. In the past, invasions had targeted the US’s immediate neighborhood: Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean; the most recent of which was in Panama in 1989, marked by the abduction of the ruling general, Manuel Noriega. A few troops had also been sent in the 19th century to more distant countries, mainly to protect US citizens. This time, with the January 3 abduction of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, “a threshold has been crossed, and the consequences are unpredictable,” said Jorge Heine, former Chilean minister and diplomat, in Responsible Statecraft, a publication of the Quincy Institute, a think tank based in Washington. According to him, the official justification for the operation – that Venezuela was exporting large quantities of fentanyl to the US – …
Performing at a recent Interscope Records party in L.A. — among the American label’s rising Mexican stars — is a far cry from how Mexican singer-songwriter Macario Martínez started his 2025. The 24-year-old singer-songwriter had been working as a street sweeper in Mexico City, but with the aspirations of becoming a professional musician. In January, he decided to share his song “Sueña Lindo, Corazón” and a bit of his background in a TikTok video. “Life asks a lot from you, and I am only a street sweeper who wants you to listen to his music,” he wrote in text that played over a video of him driving around Mexico City, doing his then-job. And the people listened. A lot of people, in fact. Within a few days, the video had been viewed over 5 million times on TikTok alone. It now counts over 49 million views. Martínez’s folksy croon, vulnerable in the way it quakes, helped create a lovable persona for the musician. In an internet landscape where hate and division often prevail — perhaps …
